{"id":1863,"date":"2010-05-13T07:16:04","date_gmt":"2010-05-13T11:16:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicholsclan.com\/tinblog\/?p=1863"},"modified":"2010-05-10T08:34:26","modified_gmt":"2010-05-10T12:34:26","slug":"cognitive-dissonance-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2010\/05\/cognitive-dissonance-2.html","title":{"rendered":"Cognitive Dissonance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cse.unt.edu\/people\/StudentNewsletters\/2008Apr\/survey.gif\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" title=\"Survey\" src=\"http:\/\/www.cse.unt.edu\/people\/StudentNewsletters\/2008Apr\/survey.gif\" alt=\"Survey\" width=\"277\" height=\"207\" \/><\/a>I usually try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes stupid just is. \u00a0 And as comedian Ron White is fond of saying, &#8220;You can&#8217;t fix stupid.&#8221;\u00a0 A <a href=\"http:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/PollingUnit\/poll-half-birthers-call-suspicion-approve-obama\/story?id=10576748&amp;page=1\">recent ABC News poll<\/a> found that 20% of Americans are &#8220;birthers&#8221;.\u00a0 That is, they believe it&#8217;s likely or true that President Obama was born in a foreign country.\u00a0 But wait, that&#8217;s not the stupid (or at this point, even the surprising) part.<\/p>\n<p>Of that 1 in 5 real Americans who love their country and would defend its Constitution to their graves, fully a third approve of the job Obama is doing.\u00a0 That&#8217;s right.\u00a0 Somewhere around 7% of the population has rationalized that while the President may be in office in flagrant violation of our most sacred political document, at least he&#8217;s doing a good job of flying the plane he hijacked.<\/p>\n<p>While it&#8217;s possible that this slice of America may have developed a new level of cognitive dissonance or simply be too brain dead to fog a mirror, it&#8217;s also possible they were busy texting friends or watching Oprah while taking the survey and were just sort of verbally checking boxes at random.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, it&#8217;s pretty clear that while the reported margin for error in these sorts of polls may be statistically accurate, the true margin that yields actionable data is significantly higher.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I usually try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes stupid just is. \u00a0 And as comedian<\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\"><a href=\"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2010\/05\/cognitive-dissonance-2.html\" title=\"Read Cognitive Dissonance\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1863"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1865,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1863\/revisions\/1865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}