Happy INDICTMENT DAY, y’all!

From NBCNews (Art Lien)

HAPPY INDICTMENT DAY! Paulie, it couldn’t be happening to a nicer fella, except for all the others that you’re going to flip on and send up that shit river without a paddle because there is no honor among thieves, amirite ya Ol’ Pussy Grabber? It’s what you’d do!

So, let’s celebrate Indictment Day by looking at the most ridiculous gyrations of the Ol’ Pussy Grabber and the his apologists who all have their heads stuck up his ass — yes, we’re thinking of you, Sean Hannity — have been spewing from their lie holes since they realized that Mueller was riding into town to throw some bad hombres in jail!

A quick aside: This post is one of an interrelated series on (a) the corrosive toxic effect the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s use of chaos and misinformation  (Deflecting to Clinton), (b) the ways social media is changing our culture and interactions (Brain Hack: the Looming Disaster), and (c) how all this is likely to affect the future of our country. The series includes posts and memes. Unfortunately, it means that general information like the Illusion of Truthiness (with apologies to Stephen Colbert) is spread throughout as it is used to explain and illustrate phenomenon.

On Friday, the Ol’ Pussy Grabber grabbed his teensy-weensy tweeter in his chubby stubbies and began tweeting all over America in a frantic frenetic attempt to quell his anxiety, and he hasn’t stopped all weekend.  The sun rose on Indictment Day, and the Ol’ Pussy Grabber was still tweeting to the fake news: since the Clinton campaign or supporters or both paid for the Steele Dossier, it can’t be true, so I can haz all the not being indicted, impeached, and going to jail, now, please? No, sir. You still hafta be indicted and impeached and go to jail.

Never seen such Republican ANGER & UNITY as I have concerning the lack of investigation on Clinton made Fake Dossier (now $12,000,000?),….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 29, 2017

The Diabolical Effectiveness of False Equivalence

If we look rationally at the idea that the Clinton campaign paying for opposition research whether it leads to an indictment for criminal behavior or not is equivalent to the Ol’ Pussy Grabber allegedly colluding with Russia to bugger the 2016 election, we conclude that it is bonkers. There is no equivalence there.

So, why does this false equivalence work? After all, more people than just the willingly naive and gullible base of the Ol’ Pussy Grabber believe this whopper. Look at all the reporters falling all over themselves breathlessly reporting what has been known for over a year now as if it were breaking news OMG hold on to your ass you’re not going to believe this!

To decipher this psychological mystery, we have to return to the roots of the Psy of Life and to our dear old hero, Daniel Kahneman and his fearless band of behavioral economists and their heuristics approach to deciphering human decision making as reported in Thinking Fast and Slow.  A heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. But, to formulate an adequate answer to why the false equivalency works, meaning why people just accept it, we have to weave several heuristics together.

Constructing Normalcy

Is Orange Trump the New Black?

First, we have to consider how we build normalcy. Essentially, normal are the things that happen over and over again in your personal world, enough so you grow to expect them and aren’t surprised when they do happen even if they don’t happen every day. Things that surprise can be dangerous and get our attention. Things that don’t surprise must be normal.

One way the false equivalency works is that it lulls our thinking to sleep so we accept the lie without questioning it.

How many of each kind of animal did Moses take onto the ark?

Have fun with this question. Ask your friends, neighbors, co-workers, wait staff, anyone who will listen long enough to answer. If you do, you’ll find most people will answer two without blinking an eye and never realize that the answer is none. Moses didn’t take any animals on to the arc because Noah did. Moses brought the commandments down from the mountain. But, because the question has a Biblical connotation and Moses has a Biblical connotation, we don’t examine the question too carefully. The error just glides past our consciousness with barely a ripple.

Every time the Ol’ Pussy Grabber puts the Steele Dossier into the same sentence or tweet as the collusion with Russia scandal and probe, he’s doing the same thing. They both have a veneer of criminality to them, so they seem to belong together. We just don’t question it. It is easier to accept the false equivalence than to question it.

Causes and Intentions

Here’s another statement to consider:

Jane discovered her wallet was missing.

What are you imagining about Jane? That she got home and realized that she had misplaced her wallet? In your mind’s eye, could it be in the car, at work, on the table at the restaurant where she had lunch, her other purse?

Now consider this revision:

After spending a day exploring beautiful sights in the crowded streets of New York,
Jane discovered her wallet was missing.

How has the image dancing in your mind’s eye changed? She was pick pocketed right? She’ll never see her wallet again.

We hear these statements, and we fill in the blanks. It is only human to. This is the human tendency that is ruthlessly exploited when people like Senator James Inhofe (R – Paragon of Virtue) says, In the meantime, don’t forget we still have all the Hillary activity. We’re filling in the blanks with what he has implied: there is lots of criminality around Clinton’s campaign that should be investigated, too.

Intensity Matching

How We Deal With Complexity

The comparison of the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s alleged collusion with Russia to the Clinton campaign continuing the funding of the Steele Dossier — the opo research was started by a Repube never Trumper — creates a false equivalence. We’re comparing apples and oranges, but our brain is only too happy to go along because to question it and tease it apart is way too difficult.

Kahneman uses this example:

If Sam were as tall as he were intelligent, how tall would Sam be?

To answer this question, we have the match the intensity of the height of the man to the intensity of his intelligence. So, if he were highly intelligent, we would estimate his height to be quite tall. If he were a genius, we might even give him giant height. And, if he were on the lower end of the intelligence bell curve, we would match that with a short height, and if he were way down there in the bottom quartile of intelligence, we would give him a minuscule height.

This is essentially what the Ol’ Pussy Grabber and his apologists are asking us to do when they equate sponsoring of the Steele Dossier with the Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s alleged collusion with Russia to steal the election.

If colluding with Russia was bad, how bad would the Clinton campaign be since they paid a company that once had a Russian client to continue investigating my campaign and eventually turned out the Steele Dossier that every credible investigation from Mueller to the Senate is using as a road map to investigate my campaign?

When you say it like that, anything will sound stupid, but you see what I mean. The reader or listener is matching the intensity of their estimation of the badness of the Clinton campaign to the intensity of the alleged collusion even though opposition research is a normal part of campaigning. The Clinton campaign would have to be as bad or worse as the Ol’ Pussy Grabber in that question.

And, it just keeps getting worse. The Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s gaslighting techniques keep taking advantage of our human tendency towards mental shortcuts.

The Affect Heuristic

How Obama Created Trump

Clinton is a divisive character in modern American political culture. It is a universal truth that there is a significant percentage of lefties who cannot sleep with a pea under their mattress. They just can’t. The 30 year Repube smear campaign against Clinton inserted a pea under the mattress of every lefty, and those who just can’t tolerate having a mushy pea under their mattress, couldn’t bring themselves to vote for her.

The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.

— Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow

The stirring chants of lock her up that the Ol’ Pussy Grabber and his sycophants led during his campaign helped strengthen the emotion that is stirred when Clinton’s name is mentioned. So, every time the Ol’ Pussy Grabber or one of the Congressional Repube ass lickers mention Clinton in connection to the alleged collusion of the Ol’ Pussy Grabber, whatever arguments you can mount about she has never even been charged with a crime, just investigated to death by mindless Congressional Repube bots won’t matter. The conclusion that she is guilty will win out over any arguments about proof or logic.

A Tale of Rape…How the Pussy Grabber Won

It is this emotional attitude that you have toward Clinton that causes the intensity of your conclusion of how damning it is that her campaign had any part of the funding of the Steele Dossier. If you are a Clinton supporter, then there is nothing wrong with her having funded the dossier research or had involvement in any of the Uranium One decisions. If you are a Clinton hater, then you are convinced that nothing but pure unadulterated evil was perpetrated when she signed the check for the Steele Dossier or made a decision in the Uranium One deal. If you are a Clinton doubter, then you feel uneasy when thinking about the dossier or the uranium deal.

This is a corrosive, vile, and cynical assault on Clinton to try and alleviate some of the pressure of having been involved in a treasonous affair.

Unfortunately, there is yet one more aspect to this whole utterly repugnant revolting episode.

Illusory Recall

Memory is a fickle mistress, when you need her, she is just as apt to let you down. You just can’t rely on your memory, there are too many moving parts that can misalign. The Ol’ Pussy Grabber uses this brain hack to gaslight you as soon as look at you.

Any time we hear something or read something, we lay down an engram or memory trace for it. It literally causes the connections between certain neurons to change, to either strengthen or weaken. So, having read that Clinton’s funding of the Steele Dossier is a terrible thing, even if you don’t agree with it, causes you to feel a sense of familiarity for the sentence the next time you read it, which produces a veneer of truthiness. This truthiness leads to accepting a sense of the criminality in the relationship — given the above — between Clinton and the dossier even if you don’t agree with the statement.

It is the one reason that the Ol’ Pussy Grabber will repeat his lies until you and I are nauseated; he knows it will cause them to seem familiar to you.

Familiarity has a sense of truthiness about it, with apologies to Stephen Colbert.

These heuristics are so firmly embedded in our psyches that to foil them is nearly impossible. It makes the cynical exploitation of them for personal gain all the more diabolical.