Stockholm syndrome -the tories

Nah Lefty, not having that. I did look and there isn't really a political iq comparison site. That leaves it as a matter of opinion. We are probably equally as dumb or as intelligent politically as any other democratic nation, we are just closer to our mistakes.

It is because we are closer to our mistakes that we adopt a better reasoning process. When it comes to politics, we simply do not apply the same safeguards against our biases. In fact we often embrace our biases.

This is a great subject and goes to the heart of Brexit in my opinion. If you'd care to discuss it on a thread of it's own sometime...?
 
It is because we are closer to our mistakes that we adopt a better reasoning process. When it comes to politics, we simply do not apply the same safeguards against our biases. In fact we often embrace our biases.

This is a great subject and goes to the heart of Brexit in my opinion. If you'd care to discuss it on a thread of it's own sometime...?
It's very opinion based though. I suspect there is a lot of truth in bias look at the USA. I would imagine every country has the same problem though. I voted to leave the EU for very specific reasons, was bias involved, yes absolutely. That bias led to 2 realizations. I never considered the ni problem and it never occurred to me that Johnson would get into no 10. Had I been thinking more clearly I would have considered those possibilities. But, and here's the rub, the same bias was evident in remain voters, the same bias exists in the left v right debate. Its a characteristic of our brain. Its largely unavoidable and probably used via social media to manipulate us.
 
Well traditionally they protect the interests of their wealthy ageing Mail/Express readers who don't care about anything other than preserving their own little world, and equally don't really care who suffers (and they fully buy into the notion that those on benefits, visiting food banks etc have brought it upon themselves).

The red wall loyalty is a whole new beast
Well actually they couldn't give a rats about the wealthy aging mail/express readers either but they do recognise they need to keep them onside they don't even come up with policies specifically for them either they use said media outlets to scare the living daylights out of them into believing that those nasty socialists are coming to take their wealth off them & give it all away to the work shy feckless unwashed on benefits.
While at the same time protecting & letting the billionaires & businesses that fund them get away with paying the tax they should be.
Can anyone remember an election campaign from the Tories where they fought it with policies all I've ever seen is the Tories along with the media tell people how nasty the other party is & how horrifying it would be if they ever got elected they even had media publishing how to stop labour from taking your money if they get elected.
You hope one day people would wake up but unfortunately they are more interested in love island & getting angry over Harry n Meghan to see what this government is actually doing.
 
The remedy for that was putting the decision makers on trial, not at the ballot box, especially since the opposition didn't oppose the Iraq War, but a significant number on the Labour backbenches did.
The fact that the opposition didn’t oppose Iraq doesn’t alter the fact that a Labour government got into bed with Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney and set in train the biggest foreign policy disaster for generations. The electorate can’t put these people on trial and withdrawing support for them at the ballot box is entirely up to the man in the street and his conscience.
 
The remedy for that was putting the decision makers on trial, not at the ballot box, especially since the opposition didn't oppose the Iraq War, but a significant number on the Labour backbenches did.
exactly it's a pretty lazy trope to claim that Blair is responsible for 1mill dead Iraqi's, it's a pretty significant stretch from the facts also. But the red tops and internet meme's certainly pushed it to discredit a very good period of governance on home soil. This is the story that the right had to tell because it was so much better than the pre and post Blair years. They fear the public recognising this and appointing another soft left leader as PM.

Maggie chose to go into the first Iraq war and also go into war in the falklands, she also was friends with dictators and protected one from prosecution for the deaths of 10s of thousands of people at a minimum. Yet she is glorified for war.

I'd love to know what period in our memory people think the UK was fairer, more economically productive, more jobs and opportunity than those Blair years.
 
exactly it's a pretty lazy trope to claim that Blair is responsible for 1mill dead Iraqi's, it's a pretty significant stretch from the facts also. But the red tops and internet meme's certainly pushed it to discredit a very good period of governance on home soil. This is the story that the right had to tell because it was so much better than the pre and post Blair years. They fear the public recognising this and appointing another soft left leader as PM.

Maggie chose to go into the first Iraq war and also go into war in the falklands, she also was friends with dictators and protected one from prosecution for the deaths of 10s of thousands of people at a minimum. Yet she is glorified for war.

I'd love to know what period in our memory people think the UK was fairer, more economically productive, more jobs and opportunity than those Blair years.
The Falklands conflict saved Thatcher as I am led to believe, the country was in a shocking state and she was clinging on to power.

Dont forget it went so much against the grain for most of the media to have a successful country being run be a labour government, I think there was even a point whereby HIGNFY even struggled to ridicule them (although Robin Cook and John Prescott offered some salvation for them from time to time).

The Iraq conflict is something that continues to divide opinion and the media continue to stoke that divide as it plays right in to the hands of keeping the tories in power and will continue to do so for a long time.
 
Our servicemen and women deployed there would not have died had we not got involved.
That's a fair point but if you're gonna bring up the lives of iraqi's then are our servicemen worth more than the many multiples of lives of people that didn't get murdered and oppressed by Saddam, once he was deposed.

It's far more complicated than you are playing it out to be, and you are highlighting exactly the issue I pointed to.

The Blair years, domestically were the best years we have had by any measurements....but the public have been poisoned against it on one key issue....an issue that the Tories themselves started by joining in the first Iraq War, voted for the second one, and would have happened anyway even if Blair had refused to join in. So keep your eye on the ball, and the challenge still exists, name a better time in our lifetimes for most Brits...
 
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It's very opinion based though. I suspect there is a lot of truth in bias look at the USA. I would imagine every country has the same problem though. I voted to leave the EU for very specific reasons, was bias involved, yes absolutely. That bias led to 2 realizations. I never considered the ni problem and it never occurred to me that Johnson would get into no 10. Had I been thinking more clearly I would have considered those possibilities. But, and here's the rub, the same bias was evident in remain voters, the same bias exists in the left v right debate. Its a characteristic of our brain. Its largely unavoidable and probably used via social media to manipulate us.

There is a thought process we can go through and usually do when it matters, that is designed to weed out biases, because we know we have these biases and that these biases can cloud our judgement. That is not to say that our feelings on a subject are not important. They are and they should be part of the equation, but they should enter the equation at the right place in the process.

I'll give you an example.

Some people passionately believe in the death penalty, some are passionately against it. Some think the death penalty should be applied for only certain types of crime eg child murderers, treason or the murder of a Police Officer. Some think the death penalty should be introduced because it acts as a deterrent, some because it would save money on prison fees, some because they simply feel this is an appropriate level of retribution, an eye for an eye as it were. Now, people might think they have good reasons for wanting the death penalty, but if evidence showed that it did not act as a deterrent, or save money, then they might change their opinion.

Most importantly, there is a process that most would agree we should go through before the death penalty is applied. Most would say that people should not be executed merely for being suspected or accused of treason or child murder and yet sometimes mobs have strung up or beaten to death outsiders suspected of crimes. Wrongly. Hence we go through a well thought out process. We do not let family members or close friends and collegaues lead the investigations, or sit in judgement. We let disinterested professionals investigate and bring charges. Then, we don't think the accused should be executed after only hearing the case for the prosecution. The entire process is designed to get to the truth, where bias is filtered out, countered and judged by an impartial jury. Only then, at that stage in the process, following a guilty verdict would we impose a death penalty and we might well allow, given there have been notable miscarriages of justice, an appeal process, before carrying it out.

When it comes to political decisions we don't follow this sort of rational process, or the sort of rational process we follow when considering a new job even.

Think about that. When looking at changing jobs there will be many factors to take into account.

Salary
Number of hours
Shift pattern
Travel time to work
Working Environment
Type of work
Flexibile hours
Work colleagues
Boss
Pressure
Challenge
Perks
and so on

These will be evaluated between the job you have now and the new job and ultimately it may come down to just needing a change, to get out of the place you are in and on to pastures new. Conversely, you may be perfectly happy doing the job you are doing, but an opportunity comes up for longer hours and less pay, but you will be working with animals and you love animals and that sways it.

Never the less, all those other factors will have been taken into account and then weighed against that emotional response. Never will someone be offered a job with animals and accept it without knowing answers to at least some of those other questions. 'Do you want a job, it's with animals?' 'Yes'. 'It's in the Shetlands, long hours, minimum wage, no take backs though, you've said it now'.

When choosing a holiday, buying a new car or even a dustpan and brush we'll look into it more than we do when it comes to elections, because when it comes to elections most of us have already made up our minds. We will vote for the tribe we identify most with, sod the manifesto. I know I am guilty of that. What is more, even knowing that, I don't think I will be able to do anything about it. Shame on me. If I can't, with my awareness of this and my professed love of critical thinking and science, what chance does a Tory have, who is generally even more a captive to his emotions than someone like me?

That is why it is a favourite trick of radio dj's or morning tv shows to do that trick where they present the Labour's manfesto to Conservative voters and get approval and disapproval of the Tory manifesto if they think it is a Labour initiative. And vice versa.

We actually do approach political decisions differently to other decisions. Heck, there are even different parts of the brain light up under MRI scans. In fact there are differences in the parts of the brains that light up in Conservative voters compared to Liberals. Experts in Cognitive Neuroscience can predict to a 70% accuracy whether someone is a Conservative or Liberal just by looking at the size and activity in just two key parts of the brain, the amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex.

Kanai, Fielden, Firth & Rees 2011 paper

Incidentally, the Firth is Colin Firth. As a guest editor of Radio 4's Today programme, he asked the question : are there any differences in the brains of people who are left wing and right wing? The Fielden is the BBC Science correspondent who contacted Geraint Rees from University College London to investigate. They carried out scans of Conservative MP Alan Duncan and Labour MP Stephen Pound and a sample of 90 young adults and found the answer, surprisingly, was yes.
 
Politics should be a core GCSE subject that all students should take, or even a module in a GCSE Sociology subject covering religion, politics and other social issues. Arming people with a bit of knowledge of how politics works, how it impacts our lives and why we should all give a dam and do our research properly.
 
That's a fair point but if you're gonna bring up the lives of iraqi's then are our servicemen worth more than the many multiples of lives of people that didn't get murdered and oppressed by Saddam, once he was deposed. It's far more complicated than you are playing it out to, and you are highlighting exactly the issue I pointed to. The Blair years, domestically were the best years we have had by any means you can measure....but the public have been poisoned against it on one issue....an issue that the Tories themselves started by joining in the first Iraq War, voted for the second one, and would have happened anyway even if Blair had refused to join in. So keep your eye on the ball, and the challenge still exists, name a better time in our lifetimes for most Brits...
I didn’t bring up the lives of Iraqis someone else did. I said getting into bed with a right wing American government was a foreign policy disaster which it was.

It was suggested that the ballot box was not the place to protest against this. I’m not sure where else the voter that felt very strongly that British involvement in Iraq was not only illegal but morally wrong could protest as putting them on trail as was suggested is not in the gift of the electorate.

I don’t need to rise to the challenge on naming a better time domestically than under Blair as In my lifetime I agree there hasn’t been one and it’s no coincidence that Mandleson has been brought out of the shadows to chart a path from opposition to government as was reported the other day. Whether he can do it in these very different times is another matter.
 
Politics should be a core GCSE subject that all students should take, or even a module in a GCSE Sociology subject covering religion, politics and other social issues. Arming people with a bit of knowledge of how politics works, how it impacts our lives and why we should all give a dam and do our research properly.

I think so too, but critical thinking should certainly be taught.
 
There is a thought process we can go through and usually do when it matters, that is designed to weed out biases, because we know we have these biases and that these biases can cloud our judgement. That is not to say that our feelings on a subject are not important. They are and they should be part of the equation, but they should enter the equation at the right place in the process.

I'll give you an example.

Some people passionately believe in the death penalty, some are passionately against it. Some think the death penalty should be applied for only certain types of crime eg child murderers, treason or the murder of a Police Officer. Some think the death penalty should be introduced because it acts as a deterrent, some because it would save money on prison fees, some because they simply feel this is an appropriate level of retribution, an eye for an eye as it were. Now, people might think they have good reasons for wanting the death penalty, but if evidence showed that it did not act as a deterrent, or save money, then they might change their opinion.

Most importantly, there is a process that most would agree we should go through before the death penalty is applied. Most would say that people should not be executed merely for being suspected or accused of treason or child murder and yet sometimes mobs have strung up or beaten to death outsiders suspected of crimes. Wrongly. Hence we go through a well thought out process. We do not let family members or close friends and collegaues lead the investigations, or sit in judgement. We let disinterested professionals investigate and bring charges. Then, we don't think the accused should be executed after only hearing the case for the prosecution. The entire process is designed to get to the truth, where bias is filtered out, countered and judged by an impartial jury. Only then, at that stage in the process, following a guilty verdict would we impose a death penalty and we might well allow, given there have been notable miscarriages of justice, an appeal process, before carrying it out.

When it comes to political decisions we don't follow this sort of rational process, or the sort of rational process we follow when considering a new job even.

Think about that. When looking at changing jobs there will be many factors to take into account.

Salary
Number of hours
Shift pattern
Travel time to work
Working Environment
Type of work
Flexibile hours
Work colleagues
Boss
Pressure
Challenge
Perks
and so on

These will be evaluated between the job you have now and the new job and ultimately it may come down to just needing a change, to get out of the place you are in and on to pastures new. Conversely, you may be perfectly happy doing the job you are doing, but an opportunity comes up for longer hours and less pay, but you will be working with animals and you love animals and that sways it.

Never the less, all those other factors will have been taken into account and then weighed against that emotional response. Never will someone be offered a job with animals and accept it without knowing answers to at least some of those other questions. 'Do you want a job, it's with animals?' 'Yes'. 'It's in the Shetlands, long hours, minimum wage, no take backs though, you've said it now'.

When choosing a holiday, buying a new car or even a dustpan and brush we'll look into it more than we do when it comes to elections, because when it comes to elections most of us have already made up our minds. We will vote for the tribe we identify most with, sod the manifesto. I know I am guilty of that. What is more, even knowing that, I don't think I will be able to do anything about it. Shame on me. If I can't, with my awareness of this and my professed love of critical thinking and science, what chance does a Tory have, who is generally even more a captive to his emotions than someone like me?

That is why it is a favourite trick of radio dj's or morning tv shows to do that trick where they present the Labour's manfesto to Conservative voters and get approval and disapproval of the Tory manifesto if they think it is a Labour initiative. And vice versa.

We actually do approach political decisions differently to other decisions. Heck, there are even different parts of the brain light up under MRI scans. In fact there are differences in the parts of the brains that light up in Conservative voters compared to Liberals. Experts in Cognitive Neuroscience can predict to a 70% accuracy whether someone is a Conservative or Liberal just by looking at the size and activity in just two key parts of the brain, the amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex.

Kanai, Fielden, Firth & Rees 2011 paper

Incidentally, the Firth is Colin Firth. As a guest editor of Radio 4's Today programme, he asked the question : are there any differences in the brains of people who are left wing and right wing? The Fielden is the BBC Science correspondent who contacted Geraint Rees from University College London to investigate. They carried out scans of Conservative MP Alan Duncan and Labour MP Stephen Pound and a sample of 90 young adults and found the answer, surprisingly, was yes.
Very interesting. One thing I would say where your comparison falls down when comparing say a job offer with your ballot paper. That difference being that we usually make our minds up sub coinsciously over a longer period of time when deciding how to vote. Changing your opinion or mine is a pointless exercise for a political party they are aiming at the floaters. I am not sure whether all you have said would apply equally to someone who wasn't politically engaged.

Really interesting point s and thanks for the material.
 
The fact that the opposition didn’t oppose Iraq doesn’t alter the fact that a Labour government got into bed with Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney and set in train the biggest foreign policy disaster for generations. The electorate can’t put these people on trial and withdrawing support for them at the ballot box is entirely up to the man in the street and his conscience.

Iraq was a failure in the decision making process as much as anything else. There are many parallels with Brexit and with the governments response to the Coronavirus pandemic. This is why we must learn these lessons.
 
Iraq was a failure in the decision making process as much as anything else. There are many parallels with Brexit and with the governments response to the Coronavirus pandemic. This is why we must learn these lessons.
Yes we should. There have been other occasions when the official opposition has supported the government in getting bad ideas through the commons. The vote to hold a referendum on brexit for instance was overwhelmingly supported by the parliamentary Labour Party. Only the SNP opposed. Some bad ideas are worse than others though.
 
Very interesting. One thing I would say where your comparison falls down when comparing say a job offer with your ballot paper. That difference being that we usually make our minds up sub coinsciously over a longer period of time when deciding how to vote. Changing your opinion or mine is a pointless exercise for a political party they are aiming at the floaters. I am not sure whether all you have said would apply equally to someone who wasn't politically engaged.

Really interesting point s and thanks for the material.

If this interests you, I can highly recommend this not too lengthy book as a good place to start.
 

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I said getting into bed with a right wing American government was a foreign policy disaster which it was.
That is hardly exclusively a Blair thing, every British PM in the last 40 years has done exactly the same, some moreso

I’m not sure where else the voter that felt very strongly that British involvement in Iraq was not only illegal but morally wrong could protest as putting them on trail as was suggested is not in the gift of the electorate.
It isn't the gift of the electorate, people's justice would be a terrible situation to allow

I don’t need to rise to the challenge on naming a better time domestically than under Blair as In my lifetime I agree there hasn’t been one
Great, that is the point I made before the obvious and predictable diversion to Iraq. Blair alone isn't culpable in that, nearly every Tory MP backed it, and if they had been in power it would have been exactly the same support and if we hadn't gone in with the yanks, they still would have invaded Iraq. For full disclosure we should have instigated regime change when he gassed the Kurds, and put him up in the Hague for crimes against humanity. The failure wasn't instigating regime change through invasion, it was a failure to plan and support a free and fair election and provide financial support to get Iraq back off its knees.
 
I think so too, but critical thinking should certainly be taught.
Well to start to get people to think critically you would need to expand A level uptake and grades, because that's where Blooms taxonomy level 4 comes in and is effectively the start of critical thinking rather than basic knowledge, comprehension and application.
 
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