Any moron can blog!
A blogger named Berry Beth, on a blog I subscribe to called blog.humancentric.com, recently made the most retarded post I’ve ever seen on what I thought was a reputable website. He’s writing about group think and Nazis (natch), but the vague writing, re-coining of phrases, and incoherent arguments below show that yes, anyone can be freakin blogger.
David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times contributed an article to the Sunday News & Observer on March 21, 2010. He wrote well of the contrast between individual thinking, person-to-person, perspectives and decision–making and what he called “group think.” He points out that individual thinking is driven by the tendencies of fairness, embarrassment, social propriety, kindness, and an understanding for and defense of the “underdog.” Group think, on the other hand, reflects our tendencies for “us v them” thinking and reflects historical shame fests such as the Jews v Nazis, Tutsis v Hutus, and Shiites v Sunnis. The contrast, is brilliantly mapped onto our current political theatre, and, for many, is a truly scary scenario when taken to its logical extreme outcome.
First off, why does Group Think represent mass murder but Individual Think doesn’t represent homicide? And since when is taking something to it’s “logical extreme” brilliant and not just a straw man argument?
The concept of “Group think”, however is even more ominous when viewed in the inevitable context and outcome of another psychological (human factors) principle developed and expressed by a researcher and human behaviorist named Jens Rasmussen, a European, Danish specifically, who proposed and wrote elaborately on a structure of human performance based on skill-rule-knowledge distinctions…
Under “rule”-based behavior, people perform tasks based on consistently applied sets of rules, procedures, policies, perspectives, and philosophies that dictate specifically how they will act and react, interpret and define, situations…In effect, the person abandons their owns perspective and decision-making capability in favor of the established “rules” of engagement in order to avoid the typical accompanying game I refer to as “bet your license.”…
Now, I hate the Danes as much as anyone else, but in the above paragraphs is Beth saying that a research said that rules cause people to follow rules? How is THAT news?
He also fails to hit some key words and then begins to make up his own. Psychological != human factors, “rule”-based behavior is called FOLLOWING THE RULES, and “bet your license” is already called Cover Your Ass.
Plus, the connection between group think (where each individual makes an influenced decision to do the same thing) and bureaucracy (where an individual is removed from decision making) is tenuous. A Nazi who turns in his Jew neighboors is profoundly different from a German citizen who is told he’ll be killed if he doesn’t tell the Gestapo where his Jew neighboors are hiding.
I have long complained about our tendencies to move in this direction because we are creating an almost endless file of bad decisions, an enormous set of examples of people in positions of responsibility who will not, or worse, cannot, apply their training, experience, or pure intelligence to situations and, hopefully, innovate our perspective as a group in some enlightening way. Now we must answer the question being begged, “Why?”
Yea, I too hate it when I have to deal with AT&T but WHAT specific bad decisions are you talking about? WHO are these people. These are the questions I’m asking, not “Why?”
Unfortunately we are too often led not by the “best and brightest” but rather by the hobgoblins whose little minds prefer rules and policies that provide a false sense of consistency, conformity, and removal of responsibility based on our ability to place blame for mistakes elsewhere.
Hardly an original thought, Socrates said that we should be ruled by a kind of philosopher-king, which was a terrible idea then and is a terrible idea now. The qualities which make someone the ”best and brightest” aren’t the same that make someone a good leader. Tact, fairness, charisma, strength, and dexterity aren’t directly related to raw brainpower. We don’t need Stephen Hawking as our President, and he damn well doesn’t want to be president either.
As we have so often heard, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Ignore the connection between people and guns or blame it on the intent of forefathers who made the rules and then conveniently died centuries ago. A more modern day example that hits home is to examine the rules that govern our members of Congress regarding their benefits, retirement, and behavior. It doesn’t take long to see how convenient and beneficial “rule”-based performance can be and the disastrous “group think” behaviors such philosophies generate.
I can’t even figure out this out-of-left-field paragraph; I think he’s trying to spin this into an anti-conservative rant. But if Beth is against rules, then Beth is against gun control which is clearly an additional rule. He then says that people blame gun freedom on the founding fathers, but that’s not true either. People just ignore the founding fathers when making gun-control arguments. Nobody gets shot and curses Thomas Jefferson.
Then Beth enlightens us with a modern day example because Gun Control isn’t a modern issue. The only problem is that congress’ benefits, retirement and behavior are three things that I haven’t heard about in years. Unless he’s talking about some politicans’ sexy and scandalous behavior but those are mostly governors and not representatives and remembering Clinton and JFK we can pretty sure sex scandals have been going on for decades and the problem probably isn’t related to groupthink.
Group think and rule-based behavior. A recipe for the destruction of America.
As Berry Beth has clearly shown, group think creates rules, which has recently been shown to induce rule following behvaior. This behvaior leads to rules which mandate gun ownership, political scandals, and Nazism. To reverse this trend, those with the highest IQs should be our leaders.
Bloggers on the other hand, can be morons.