SPEAKING OF THE KRAZY...

There's a great review article in Boston Globe about the psychology of the rubes (and others):

How facts backfire
Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains
By Joe Keohane
July 11, 2010

Just as the Free Market Fairy is a myth, so is the Enlightenment's view of rationality, especially in politics. As the psychologist Drew Westen found, our political beliefs are controlled by our emotions, not our reason. The Globe article summarizes studies done by other researchers that come to the same conclusion.

I found this particularly disturbing because I spend a lot of time trying to debunk right-wing lies on message boards:

Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

I wrote below that the Baggers seems to be facing an existential crisis and this may account for their unwillingness to face the facts:

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

Even worse, people like me are as hard to correct as any conservative rube:

A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong.