Les Jones

Political Survival Kit > Trust Cues, or, We're All Big F***ing Whores Now

Mark Steyn:

Randi Rhodes agrees with Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro on everything - abortion, health care, climate change, you name it. Yet the first is "a f***ing whore" and the second is "David Duke in drag" merely because they disagree on which Democratic senator would make the best president. The people applying these deranged epithets to the Clintons are in large part the very same people who spent the Nineties applying equally deranged epithets to anyone who disagreed with the Clintons.

There's something rather heartening about this for those of us on the right who've been on the receiving end of the left's vehemence: Apparently there really is nothing personal about it. You can be a chickenhawk warmonger racist homophobe mysogynist Bush shill or a pro-feminist pro-gay pro-black icon of progressive politics for a generation, but, if you cross the likes of Randi Rhodes, you're all the same and you merit the same four-letter words and KKK slurs. The left's Discoursometer is like one of those shower units where the slightest nudge turns it to scalding.

The best way to understand some people's politics is to realize that their politics are more like gang signs than position statements arrived at by careful consideration of the facts. And like the man said, it's hard to reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into.

Arnold Kling treated the subject well in his piece on trust cues:

This raises the possibility that political beliefs serve primarily as trust cues. For example, those who favor an increase in the minimum wage are sending trust cues to people on the Left, and those who oppose an increase in the minimum wage are sending trust cues to people on the Right.

The actual consequences of raising the minimum wage are rarely discussed. In other words, political debates often ignore what I call Type C arguments (from empiricism) and turn instead to type M arguments, which accuse one's opponent of belonging to an outcast group. The reason for this is that people are not trying to persuade each other rationally. Instead, they are using trust cues to indicate that failure to agree implies excommunication from the group.

And this, on actual science vs. trust cues:

What is odd is that an association of academics should find it productive to take an "official position" on anything. I do not need an "official position" of physicists to convince me of the law of gravity. I do not believe in the laws of supply and demand because they are the "official position" of the American Economic Association (to my knowledge, the AEA has never stated an official position in favor of them). A book or article that reports observations and analysis is a scientific statement. An "official position" is a trust cue.