re: #21 dragonath

Haha, this reads like an Onion article.

But! This makes Ryan look like even more of an ass than Romney, which I didn’t think was possible.

All this article really proves is that reporters, bloggers, and political partisans who really want to believe something will assume that thing is true, without caution or fact checking. This phenomenon is not unique to those biased to leftist politics. This is a bi-partisan poison — as laid out by Aaron Powell and Trevor Burrus at Cato in their essay “Politics Makes Us Worse” libertarianism.org

This behavior, while appalling, shouldn’t surprise us. Psychologists have shown for decades how people will gravitate to group mentalities that can make them downright hostile. They’ve shown how strong group identification creates systematic errors in thinking. Your “teammates” are held to less exacting standards of competence, while those on the other team are often presumed to be mendacious and acting from ignoble motives. This is yet another way in which politics makes us worse: it cripples our thinking critically about the choices before us.