Posted by tangplay on 8/2/2019 2:29:00 PM (view original):
Posted by dahsdebater on 8/2/2019 1:36:00 PM (view original):
Posted by tangplay on 8/2/2019 1:05:00 PM (view original):
Posted by dahsdebater on 8/2/2019 11:01:00 AM (view original):
First of all, cite your sources. That 80% is nothing close to what I remember. Second, there are plenty of reasons people dislike/suspect opposing politicians that have nothing to do with race.
If you think Obama wasn't born in America, you are a racist. The end.
There is no logic that supports this assertion. Ay all.
You are correct, nothing but pure racism could explain why people think Obama wasn't born in America. You honestly believe people question it if Obama is white?
People want to believe negative or harmful assertions about people who disagree with themselves. We automatically assume people who disagree with us are ignorant, stupid, and bad. So you don't have to be racist to buy into birtherism once it's been brought up. You just have to dislike Obama's policies, and you are likely to want to believe.
I don't think any scientific data exists on this, but based on my personal polling of more liberally-inclined friends, more self-identified Democrats agree with statement A than statement B below, unless B is asked
immediately before A.
A) Trump was personally involved in directing collusion with the Russians during the 2016 general election
B) Trump is smart enough to direct collusion with the Russians during the 2016 general election
In a sense this isn't a surprising result. Self-identified Democrats don't like Trump or his politics, so their picture of him is that he's not smart and he probably does bad things. But it's an obvious logical fallacy. It's possible for B to be true without A. It is impossible for A to be true without B. B is
obviously more likely than A. But it just feels wrong if you hate the guy's politics, so that's not what people believe. It's a lot like the Linda problem - a result of the basic automated mental heuristic of representativeness. If my picture of Trump is that he's bad and stupid, I will respond affirmatively to his being both bad and stupid. If my picture of Obama is that he is bad, I'm ready to believe almost any bad thing I hear about him (like that he falsified his birth certificate), even if it doesn't make logical sense.