maxistentialist:

Many of my friends are surprised and heartbroken that their candidate, Bernie Sanders, lost New York tonight.

I don’t have a candidate in this race - my candidate was Joe Biden, and he didn’t run. But as someone who has been through a few heartbreaking idealistic campaigns, I know how it feels.

I thought I would share an interesting passage from Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet. His book is about the unhealthy consequences of losing control of the information you consume, and he shares this amazing story about what it was like to work on the Howard Dean campaign:

In the summer of 2003, I packed my bags and headed up to New England to work as the lead programmer for the insurgent presidential candidate, Howard Dean. The staff was reasonably kind — mostly native Vermonters and interns at the time. They liked to pick on this poor Southerner, though; at one point, someone warned me that if I spent too much time outside with my eyes open in the winter, the fluid in my eyeballs would freeze over. I remember shutting my eyes hard and sprinting out across the ice to my car and grasping for the door handle blindly on several occasions. Yankees are tricky, I tell you what.

Cults, startups, Apple keynotes, and political campaigns all have one thing in common: a group of people with delusional loyalty to the mission they’re trying to accomplish. Those of us on the Dean campaign feasted on a diet consisting of the narrative that we would be the ones to remove the evil George W. Bush from office. I ended up gaining a lot from that campaign: about 32 pounds from the constant supply of campaign-contributed Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, and a healthy dose of crazy.

Each morning, the media miners — the folks in charge of watching all the cable news — would feed us clips that told us how well we were doing. The afternoon was filled with blog posts from across the Internet talking about how revolutionary our campaign was. Evenings were filled with watching the latest and greatest episodes of “The West Wing” starring President Bartlett — the fictional president that we assured ourselves was based on Howard Dean, despite producer and writer Aaron Sorkin donating twice as much money in 2004 to the presidential campaigns of Dick Gephardt, Wesley Clark, and John Edwards.

There was also constant speculation: Republican Strategist Karl Rove had said, gleefully, that Dean was the candidate he wanted to win the Democratic nomination. We were emboldened by his claim. They were afraid of us — Karl Rove never says what he means. He must be giving us his endorsement because he doesn’t want to face us! We’d try to find as many facts as we could to support this idea.

That CNN cut to Donald Rumsfeld instead of showing Howard Dean’s speech on tax policy? Certainly evidence that the White House was using whatever it could to keep us off the air. Obviously CNN, too, had become an instrument of this evil republican regime.

The week before the Iowa caucuses, I remember asking the campaign’s pollster, Paul Ford, by how much we were going to win Iowa. His response was: “We’re not. John Kerry is going to win it by 18 points.”

My jaw dropped. I wasn’t sad or disappointed. I was mad at Paul and a little disappointed in him. How could he be such a traitor? Hadn’t he seen the news? He clearly was incompetent. Any fool could see that we’d correctly leveraged the Internet in Iowa and this puppy was in the bag. Howard Dean would win Iowa and go on to beat George W. Bush.

But Paul was right and we were crazy. You know the rest of the story: Howard Dean lost the Iowa caucus by nearly 20 points, and would go on to give a concession speech with a yell that became his defining moment. Only the political intelligentsia would remember his use of the Web. The rest of the electorate remembers him for that terrible scream.

The morning after the caucuses, our Burlington, Vermont, offices were filled with more delusion. One of my colleagues ran up to me as I walked into the office and said, “Clay, did you see the Governor’s speech last night? It was awesome. He’s totally back. We’re going to win this thing.”

We redoubled our efforts — though Dean was down by double-digits in New Hampshire, we could make a comeback. Every primary and caucus after that, we convinced ourselves we still had it. As the weeks went by, as the sinking feeling got stronger that we would lose to John Kerry, we got hungrier and hungrier for any poll that would give us even a slim chance of winning.

If, a month later, you had polled the staff to ask who would win the Wisconsin primary — our line in the sand — we’d have told you it was Howard Dean. And we’d believe, out of desperation, anything that told us we were right.

We came in third.

One of the cruel tricks of the human mind is that when we care deeply about something, we are most vulnerable to comforting delusions. In this case: lazy heuristics, confirmation bias, and cognitive dissonance.

(via maxistentialist-deactivated2020)

I was asked on Facebook how I could support Bernie Sanders in light of his “support of abortion.”

yesdarlingido:

To provide some context, here are the highlights of what was posted on my wall: “His form of socialism involves raising taxes in a ‘steal from the rich to give to the poor’ kind of way.” Further, he writes, “I believe his policies would actually end up hurting ‘the least of these’ …because he supports the abortion industry, Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood, etc.” Lastly, he encouraged me to “thoughtfully reflect on Bernie’s policies from a biblical perspective before voting for him this Tuesday.”

I’m sharing my response on tumblr because I understand that a large majority of my followers are Christians, and my support of Bernie confuses the conservative portion of those followers. I’m here to provide my thoughts on that to let you inside my brain in a way, because I truly value electing a candidate who I think upholds my convictions the best. Here are those convictions:

While I understand that Bernie is an imperfect politician with imperfect policies, I have decided that he is the candidate that aligns the most with my convictions. While there are candidates in the GOP that confess their affiliation with Christianity, I mean it when I say that the majority of Bernie’s policies remind me of Jesus. I see that you can’t fathom it due to Planned Parenthood, but there are so many other policies worthy of my advocacy and support. I think it is an overstatement and an exaggeration of facts to say that Bernie “supports abortion.” He supports Planned Parenthood, and 3% of their funds are related to abortion services. I support the other 97% of their funding and I’m genuinely grateful for how they care for women. But I will not spend any time defending that 3% because I stand with you, agreeing that it is a heart wrenching thing that could never fit into my biblical ethics. While I have a more conservative view than Bernie, it’s important to understand that his stance is that it is not and should not be the government’s right to tell a woman what to do with her body and while I get that this disqualifies him in your eyes, I have to acknowledge that there are many other things going on in our nation that cannot be overlooked. I can’t write off Bernie because I disagree with one of his beliefs when compared to the other twenty-two policies.

I do not think that America is a Christian nation. “One nation under God” never meant my Lord and Savior. Our forefathers came to America for freedom of religion. They had a theist worldview—not a Christian one. So, please don’t misunderstand me to be apathetic about my Christian principles. Even if you don’t agree, at least understand that my perspective is that I do not view the government as my moral leader, and I am for a separation of church and state. The government’s job is to maintain order in our nation, not to outlaw sin. Similarly, the government’s view of life is not the same as the biblical view. So as for PP, I understand the value and biblical calling to defend the helpless, but while conservatives are rallying outside of abortion clinics, they are also pro-gun and pro-war and tens of thousands of innocent, helpless lives are lost in the middle east and here in our country’s schools every week due to gun violence. I consider myself far beyond the rhetoric of pro-life which argues something that sounds a lot more like pro-birth to me. As much as I am for defending the unborn, I am also for defending those who are born into a corrupt society that does not defend them, and the overwhelming majority of Bernie’s policies seek to care for and defend the marginalized.

The policies that do remind me most of Jesus are the ones that stand up for minorities, fight for the middle and lower class, and seek to be good stewards of what we have by addressing our crumbling infrastructure, addressing the corrupted criminal justice system, and seeking to provide education, jobs, and security for veterans and the elderly. When politicians support policies that push others down to uphold the wealthy, they’re able to pass legislation that perpetuates this economic divide, and when that continues to happen you get major wealth inequality, which is a reality for America right now and the reason the middle class continues to shrink. The poor get poorer and the rich get richer. If this inequality remains unchecked our society will suffer. Saying “Socialism” is a dead end is just wrong. The US has many socialist government programs that are super necessary: social security, Medicare, Public schools, the roads, the army, national parks etc. The real problem is the socialism of the rich: bailouts on Wallstreet, the continued increasing of subsidies for big agriculture and pharmaceutical companies, monopolization of cable companies, big CEO tax breaks, companies like Walmart abusing welfare by paying their employees low wages and guiding them to the government for the rest of the money they need to survive… It is very ignorant to suggest that Bernie wants the US to model Soviet Russia. The reason people like Bernie is because he is a candidate who hasn’t been bought. We like to see a candidate who is honest. We like to see a candidate who cares about ALL of the American people, not just the ones on top.

I don’t think of it as “stealing from the rich.” It’s an increase in taxes that doesn’t go up too much for anyone except the extremely rich, but mostly the billionaires, and it will not affect their lifestyle in any way. It is hard for most people to conceptualize what a billion dollars is, but you don’t get that kind of money by simply being a hard worker. That kind of money multiplies off of privilege in a corrupt economy. I encourage you to recall the content from The Working Poor that we read in our first semester. The poverty in our country is not due to laziness, but a broken system. I don’t see how maintaining our current system would even vaguely reflect biblical principles. I remember from the last time you commented on a Facebook post of mine that you think that generosity should depend on an individual’s own prompting. While in a perfect world, people—especially Christians—would live lives marked by generosity, the majority of people are self-focused, worried about money, and cling to the proverbian verses about working hard to dismiss the notion that we should give to the poor. Leaving it up to the goodness of people’s hearts to give has never worked and it never will. It is the government’s responsibility to care for the basic needs of the people. Today 62 people own HALF of the world’s wealth. Five years ago that number was 388. That is sickening. Trickle-down economics does not work and capitalism really only benefits those who are born into privilege. I like that Bernie loves America, but that he is humble enough to acknowledge, confront, and proactively change the policies that hold us back as a nation. Out of all the candidates, Bernie’s economic platform is radical not just because it’s something no other president has done, but because I believe it models the gospel.
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Tomorrow Michigan and Mississippi will vote in the primaries. I live in MS and have many friends in MI, so it’s going to be a big day. Hilary is the projected winner of both. I hope that if you live in MS or MI, you will consider showing up to vote for Bernie Sanders. 

(via sociologyandstigma)