The one problem is they don’t need to have the level of intelligence you are talking about to game the system in their favor. And as they talk about in the Weeds, there is an asymmetric relationship the ease with which the rigging they are doing can occur and what it takes to make progressive change.
I’ll never understand how smart people are religious. I just don’t get it. I understand the public display of being religious. I’m sure Obama and Clinton aren’t religious but they know they have to show that they are. But these guys in courts? Like, WTF? How are you brainwashed like that?
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I’m an atheist, but I can understand how some smart people can be religious, in one way or another, often idiosyncratically. What I don’t understand is how smart people can be doctrinaire, relying on positions that have been discredited over the last 300 years. I think a lot of it has to do with them being constantly rewarded up the social and professional ladder by agreeing to play for one team, which they come to identify with strongly.
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I think this is a interesting thesis and suspect it is correct, but I’m not sure how one would really tackle it in a rigorous manner.
Also, when you are a TRUE Believer, like Barr or the Catholic federalists, or Pol Pot, or Williams Jenning Bryant, intellectual back and forth becomes just an inconvenience. How can Barr use his power to support Trump–doesn’t Trump falsify his beliefs about the unitary executive? One would think, but I suspect Barr hasn’t change his mind about much in the last 50 years.
Some religious people are smart but all religious people are intellectually lazy. It’s two different things.
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Because Donnie Dum Dum, no one cares about a deplorable shithole state like Louisiana.
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With them it’s not about doctrine and faith, it’s the predestination. They believe they have been chosen to inherit wealth, power and privilege and that it is imperative that they keep it by any means necessary.
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I imagine he has changed his mind on Chevron Deference.
Yes, I’m glad they discussed Chevron Deference in the Weeds podcast really bizarre, but I find the attack on Chevron really bizarre. 15 years ago it was established black letter law, and it makes a lot of sense. There were two executive orders last week that have apparently been in the works for a while to limit agency powers (e.g., prevent agencies from interpreting laws to cover actions aimed at global warming), but I probably won’t read them because there are better hobbies than being an up to date expert on administrative law, but I do hope to hear some podcasts discuss them. They’re basically attacks on the ability of the state to regulate enacted on behalf of people who don’t like to be regulated. You see, the fundies are too small of a subset to fully enact the cabal, you also need the support of business interests who don’t care much about God but care a lot about regulations.
It really doesn’t though. It simply takes never looking for counter evidence. This is where all religious people excel. They just never look for anything to counter their silly supernatural ideas. In their defence, one of the brilliant aspects of organized religion is a strong prohibition to doing so.
My extended family are all Mormon. Of course, it takes one google search to expose the absolute fraud at the core of the whole religion but not one has ever gone the search. A few cousins have left the church and they always tell me how shocked they are at how easy it was to find the truth if they’d only looked earlier.
This is also why religious people tend to be trumpkins. It takes the exact same intellectual laziness to ignore the truth about trump. Like religions tell their believers to never seek the truth, trump tells his to not believe the mainstream media. It’s the exact same mechanism being exploited to manipulate people who are at their core monumentally intellectually lazy.
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Only thing I will say about what simplicitus’ opinion that I disagree with is this focus on credentials. I work and know a lot of people with heavy legal credentials and it really tells you nothing about their intellectual capability beyond certain levels. At a certain point, it doesn’t really matter what someone’s credentials say. It’s a stupid thing in the legal profession where everyone is a snob about credentials for these types of positions while a lot of the lawyers who actually get the sophisticated analytical work done could be from anywhere with any background.
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Organized religion is the opium of the masses, and an effective tool for those in power to keep their subjects in line.
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And also going to catholic high school and college says almost nothing about religious convictions as an adult. Catholic HS is where your parents send you so you don’t need to interact with the poor/black kids. The denomination of private colleges seems wholly irrelevant. I went to a catholic college and beyond the crosses and weird stuff like no condoms being sold on campus and two mandatory theology courses (which did not need to be on the topic of Christianity), you’d never really know.
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