Fisking the STrib Village Idiot, Katherine Kersten's latest Ill-conceived Screed

Katherine Kersten wrote an op ed piece last Sunday that demonstrates a complete and utter lack of intellectual integrity, and failure at critical thinking.  This instance was so egregious that it stood out in a long string of similarly poor opinion pieces for the many failures of Kersten.  There ARE good conservative opinion columnists; we have to wonder why the STrib doesn't get a better one.  Kersten is incompetent, and should be an embarrassment to conservatives everywhere.
from the STrib:

Liberals, take a long look in the mirror

• Article by: KATHERINE KERSTEN , Star Tribune
• Updated: May 6, 2012 - 8:01 PM

The evidence shows you're more poorly informed and less tolerant

Except that it doesn't. 
The evidence, to the extent there is credible academic research, shows quite the opposite, consistently, across a significant spectrum of specialties and disciplines.  So let's take a look at what Kersten deems 'evidence'.  Kersten is, according to Wikipedia, a graduate of Notre Dame, Yale, and the University of Minnesota Law School, and has practiced as an attorney, so presumably she should have a functional understanding of what evidence looks like.   It is hard to believe that Kersten learned her cherry picking from any of those institutions.  For those of you who are unclear what cherry picking is, here is a handy definition:
Cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position. It is a kind of fallacy of selective attention, the most common example of which is the confirmation bias

So let's take a look at the 'evidence' that Kersten is presenting:

Survey data make  clear that Republicans, on average, are better informed than Democrats about political issues. Data from the American National Election Study has confirmed this over the years, and an April 2012 Pew Research Center survey -- "What the Public Knows about the Political Parties" -- is the latest to document it.
On eight of the survey's 13 questions about politics, Republicans outperformed Democrats by an average of 18 percentage points. "Republicans fare substantially better than Democrats on several questions in the survey, as is typically the case in surveys about political knowledge," according to the study.
The widest gap -- 30 points -- came on a question about which political party is "generally more supportive of reducing the size of federal government." Seventy-six percent of Republicans, but only 46 percent of Democrats, correctly named the GOP.

I would challenge the wording of the question, and therefore the correctness of the answers.   Republicans certainly give lip service to making government smaller, and they are strenuous in their efforts to sell off government functions to private parties seeking to make a profit off of government, like those who get a lot of money from corporations like FedEx to privatize the post office.  That is more like corruption than it is making government smaller.  But if you take a look at the expansion of another government function, the military, or the intrusive legislation like unnecessary and expensive drug testing that has only served to prove what was already well established, that there is not any greater drug use among the poor on welfare than other demographics, it is arguably an intrusive expansion of government.  Ditto the expansion of intrusive measures like medically unnecessary trans vaginal probes of women, or the more intrusive surveillance that began under Republican George Bush.  There are a lot of ways one can measure government, and arguably being more big brother-like is one of them.   But there is more that argues against the Republican claims about smaller government. In an attempt to be more broad based rather than cherry picking information,  the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which promotes the conservative Austrian School of economic theory, a right wing think tank, hardly an liberal entity, wrote this in 2002:

Contrary to  popular myth, every Republican president since and including Herbert Hoover has increased the federal government's size, scope, or power--and usually all three. Over the last one hundred years, of the five presidents who presided over the largest domestic spending increases, four were Republicans. Include regulations and foreign policy, as well as budgets approved by a Republican Congress, and a picture begins to emerge of the Republican Party as a reliable engine of government growth.

Further, knowing the cant and chant of a specific political party is not the same thing as having a grounding in political issues, nor did I see a time frame in the wording of the question.  All this proves is that Democrats don't take seriously what the Republicans say about themselves.  Disbelieving Republicans is not at all the same as being ignorant; it indicates a healthy skepticism.
And as for ignorant, Kersten completely ignores for example a more complete and exhaustive poll, with more questions and greater complexity, that shows a largely conservative audience - Fox News viewers - were LESS informed about both domestic and world events, which include partisan politics in this country, than people who didn't watch the news at all:

Fox News viewers less informed than those who don’t watch news at all: study

MEENA HARTENSTEIN

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

If Fox News viewers want to be informed about current events, they might as well turn off the TV.

A poll released by Fairleigh Dickinson University on Monday found that people who get their news from Fox News know significantly less about news both in the U.S. and the world than people who watch no news at all.

In a survey of 612 New Jersey natives, Fox News fans flunked questions about Egypt and Syria when compared with people who don't watch the news. Fox viewers were 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians toppled their government and 6 points less likely to be aware that Syrians have not yet overthrown theirs.

And Forbes magazine, writing about the same poll noted that a group that conservatives have often characterized as liberals were BETTER informed about these same events.

Readers of The New York Times,USA Today and listeners to National Public Radio were better informed about international events than other media outlets.In one major example, New Jersey poll participants were questioned about the outcome of the so-called Arab Spring uprisings in North Africa earlier in the year. A total of 53% of respondents know that Egyptians were successful in overthrowing dictator Hosni Mubarak. Also, 48% know that the Syrian uprising has thus far been unsuccessful in ousting Assad.

So unless Ms. Kersten can show that the Democrats were not in fact correct for identifying that the Republicans ARE the party that enlarges government, more so than the Democrats, or unless Ms. Kersten can demonstrate conclusively that conservatives have become drastically better informed since late 2011, I would argue that she has come closer to straining her arm patting herself and her fellow conservatives on the back than she has in the slightest strained her intellect to publish something of value.  I believe that can fairly be construed as pandering to the right, rather than constructing a valid opinion piece.
Ms. Kersten then goes on to convict herself of more egregious examples of cherry picking information and calling it evidence when she addresses tolerance.

A March 2012 Pew report,  entitled "Social Networking Sites and Politics," found that 28 percent of liberals have "blocked, unfriended or hidden someone" on social-networking sites because of their political postings, compared with 16 percent of conservatives.
Come to think of it, that shouldn't surprise anyone who's spent time on a college campus. We're used to hearing that left-wing students have shouted down a conservative speaker. But when did you last hear about conservative students silencing a liberal speaker?

Seriously? THIS is her definition for intolerance?  Perhaps Ms. Kersten should familiarize herself with the Gish Gallup, which is applied to right wingers technique of simply steamrolling debate by swamping the opposition with the quantity, the sheer volume of their opposition, rather than quality of argument or fact.

The Gish Gallop is a skeptics'  jargon term, named after creationist Duane Gish, for the debating technique of drowning the opponent in such a torrent of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood in real time. The term was coined by Eugenie Scott from the National Center for Science Education.  

The debating jargon term for this is spreading. You can hear some mind boggling examples here. It arose as a way to throw as much rubbish into five minutes as possible. In response, some debate judges now limit number of arguments as well as time.
Use by bloggers
A variant of the Gish Gallop is employed by bloggers who post an endless series of dubious assertions - each of which can be countered, but to no effect, as it will be buried under the cascade of dubious posts. 

Then there is the related tactic, developed and used by the right, originally in promoting creationism, the PRATT (aptly named, as an acronym, Brit slang for ass):

A point refuted a thousand times, commonly abbreviated as PRATT, is a common phrase on internet forums where debates have a tendency to go in circles. Once people have refuted a point the first thousand times, it's hard for them to muster the motivation to do it again. Once someone has labeled an argument a PRATT, that usually means they have no interest in discussing it. This could itself be a diversionary tactic.  The website talk.origins acts as a repository of PRATTs commonly used by creationists, and presents (usually in great detail) their refutations and science behind them. The site is a good starting point when facing a PRATT.

ALL of these are right wing tactics used to drowned out the person they wish to silence in different forms of political and social issue discussions.  Beyond that is the evidence of conservatives - Tea Partiers and other Republicans - shouting down speakers at town halls across the nation in 2009, or the efforts to simply keep out people who don't agree with the speaker practiced by notable Republicans, like Michele Bachmann.  Or the right wing tactic of silencing opposition by banning recording devices. There are MANY ways to shut down opposition besides shouting, but the Republicans, and their Tea Party subsidiary of extremists have engaged in far more abuse of shouting down people than liberals ever have.


I would argue that the reason that more liberals have banned the opposition is that conservatives are badly behaved.  I can think of a couple of examples of people banned right here - Swiftee, KRod, and Serr8d - for harassment and vulgar or violent comments, including an excessive volume of offensive comments that are time consuming to delete or moderate.  In the case of Serrhd, the violations were so extreme it led to complaints to both his email provider and the IP owner, which happened to be his employer.  His employer found the content so offensive he was threatened with being fired.  THAT was what it took to stop the harassment.
Are there people on the left who act badly? Yes, and they should be and are repudiated.  ANYONE who does such things is wrong and bad and should stop.  But in my experience this is more of a problem from the right than an offense against them, consistent with an immoral approach to opposition.  It is consistent with their use of tactics like the Gish Gallop, and PRATT, and shouting down people, and with instances like the Republicans running as false Democrats in Wisconsin.  There is no respect on the right for opposition or dissent, there is no tolerance on the right, and they are more willing than the left to use unethical means to achieve their goals, or to embrace and accept extremists who use violence or who promote hate speech.  It is the right who engages in Right Wing Authoritarianism where 

According  to research by Altemeyer, right-wing authoritarians tend to exhibit cognitive errors and symptoms of faulty reasoning. Specifically, they are more likely to make incorrect inferences from evidence and to hold contradictory ideas that result from compartmentalized thinking. ... Altemeyer suggested that authoritarian politicians are more likely to be in the... Republican Party in the United States.

Authoritarians are generally more favorable to punishment and control than personal freedom and diversity. For example, they are more willing to suspend constitutional guarantees of liberty such as the Bill of Rights. They are more likely to advocate strict, punitive sentences for criminals,^[18] and they report that they obtain personal satisfaction from punishing such people. They tend to be ethnocentric and prejudiced against racial and ethnic minorities,^[19] and homosexuals.^[20]  

Republicans have no claim to tolerance when they make the word moderate in their campaigns a dirty word.  Republicans have absolutely NO claim to being more tolerant than anyone else when they exclude  people from participating in their own party for a lack of extremism in purity tests.  In the case below, the so-called 'third party' candidate was ANOTHER Republican.
From Politico:
Minn. GOP brings out the knives for moderates
By JAMES HOHMANN | 12/11/10 5:28 PM EST  
In a dramatic display of the new Republican order, Minnesota’s state GOP banished 18 prominent party members — including two former governors and a retired U.S. senator — as punishment for supporting a third-party candidate for governor.
The stunning purge, narrowly passed by the state Republican central committee last weekend, suggests more than just a fit of pique: by banning some of the state’s leading moderates, the Minnesota GOP moved toward extinguishing a dying species of Republican in one of its last habitats. Those exiled warned that the measure, which bans the 18 former members from participating in party activities for two years and bars them from attending the 2012 Republican National Convention, may provoke a backlash that undercuts the party’s competitiveness in a state that’s voted for the GOP presidential nominee just once in the past half century.
“The Republican party is trying to become ... you would call it introverted totalitarianism,” said former congressman and Gov. Al Quie, a onetime vice presidential prospect who plans to stick with the party despite the penalty. “It’s just plain dumb on their part. ... In the long run, if the party persists with this, [it's] going to just become smaller and smaller and eventually something else would come in its place.”
Among those rebuked along with Quie were former U.S. Sen. David Durenberger, former Gov. Arne Carlson and former state House Speaker David Jennings.

For Pete's sake - Republicans aren't even tolerant of other Republicans who are less extreme or crazy.
Ms. Kersten desperately needs to spend some time in front of her own mirror having a long talk with her conscience on what intellectual integrity means, and with luck maybe she will find hers again.  It's been missing in action for a long, long time, and a reconnection with it is long overdue.  Then Ms. Kersten needs to spend some time with her dictionary, relearning what the words tolerant and informed really mean, instead of what she apparently thinks the words mean.
And in the interim, the STrib would be wise to permanently replace Ms. Kersten with someone who is both better informed and more honest on behalf of a conservative point of view.  Because, clearly, from their words and their conduct, both Ms. Kersten and a significant number of Republicans need some serious remediation on those subjects.  She is an embarrassment to thinking readers, of all political stripes.