BlogWonks

Socialism gives the state ultimate power to rework peoples lives by fiat (since their plans are going to be unpleasant, they automatically detach from hearing the public – or else a majority will stop them once they realize what they have done - the despair and productivity plummet when the next realization that they cant go back sets in).

Is it then any wonder that Stalin and Mao and others didn’t care about the opinions of the 100+ million people they tortured to death?

Is it any wonder that we have delegated powers to clerks to remove children from homes that police cant even enter without a warrant? By the way, the state has no right to delegate powers since the powers are granted by the people. that is unless the people no longer are listened to, and so no longer can be heard to delegate, so someone has to do it regardless of any din. Its all for the greater good. No?

Is it really for the greater good that habeus corpus is gone? Why would dissolution of posse commitatus be a good thing? Why would allowing corporatists to take property be in the best interest of the people? Well, the state doesn’t have the power to do anything quite yet. The ability to fully ignore the people hasn’t been reached quite yet.

Turns out that limits on power for our state representatives, is the best way to be heard.

Which means that Socialism, Feminism, Communism, and ideological thinking has to eventually be thrown out as its a primitive way to deal with the world by having everyone look through the same eyes from one point. It means that the will, and information, and choices have to flow from the people to the state, not from the state to the people, or else they ignore new options.

As long as socialism is on the table, our leaders do not have to listen to us.

Combine that with the fact that they have ultimate power of life and death with their policies.

The state that can do anything for you, can do anything to you.

In such a state, 10 people can point the finger at the other 9, and all 10 can be in trouble with the state.

The state will stupidly and gladly do its job in exchange for the power to go after every complaint.

Since socialism grants them the power to do anything in the name of any presumed justification and pragmatism, they have the most powerful feelings that one can have. They are in a position to literally play god with the lives of BILLIONS of people and their posterity. The fact that they say they want to make the new socialist man, shows that they see this power and like it, and believe that they are god. After all, the office to them is vacant.

The saying is wrong, its not the “end justifies the means”, it’s the “presumptive end that justifies the means”.

The saying assumed that the justification is valid and reachable not perpetually a carrot out of the grasp of those trying to get there with no way to get there. So now, fantasy, can justify any means that fantasy can dream up.

It can assign any end, even if unreachable, and then commit any act, for that premise reason.

When people feel powerful, they ignore new opinions, study finds

Don’t bother trying to persuade your boss of a new idea while he’s feeling the power of his position – new research suggests he’s not listening to you. “Powerful people have confidence in what they are thinking. Whether their thoughts are positive or negative toward an idea, that position is going to be hard to change,” said Richard Petty, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

The best way to get leaders to consider new ideas is to put them in a situation where they don’t feel as powerful, the research suggests.

“If you temporarily make a powerful person feel less powerful, you have a better chance of getting them to pay attention,” said Pablo Briñol, lead author of the study and a social psychologist at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain. Briñol is a former postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State.

The study was published in a recent issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

This research looks at an issue that has been largely ignored by social scientists, Petty said. Many studies have looked at how the power of a person delivering a message impacts those who receive it. But this appears to be the first study that looks at how the power of the message recipient affects persuasion.

In several related studies, the researchers told college students they would be participating in two supposedly separate experiments. In one experiment, the students role-played in a situation in which one was a boss – in other words, had a position of power – and the other was an employee who simply took orders.

In the second experiment, the participants viewed a fake advertisement for a mobile phone. The ad was designed to see if participants were paying attention to the message, so half the participants received ads with particularly weak arguments for buying the phone (for example, touting that it had a broad currency converter), while the others received strong arguments (the phone could be recharged in just 5 minutes). Participants were then asked to rate how favorably they viewed the phone.

When the role-playing exercise was conducted before viewing the phone ad, those who played boss were more likely than those playing employees to rate the phone similarly — whether they received the strong or the weak arguments.

“The strength of the argument made no difference to those who played the boss – they obviously weren’t paying attention when they felt powerful,” Petty said. “Those who played the employee, who were made to feel powerless, paid a lot more attention to the arguments. They weren’t as confident in their own initial beliefs and weighed the arguments more carefully.”

In a related study, the order of the experiments was essentially reversed. Participants first read the mobile phone ads, and were presented with either the strong or the weak arguments, and wrote down their thoughts while reading it. However, before they actually rated the phones, the same participants took part in the role-playing exercise in which some were the boss and some the employee. Later, they went back and rated the phones.

The results showed that the bosses in the role-playing exercise were now more influenced by the quality of the arguments in the ads.. Those who were low-power employees were not as influenced by the ad quality.

“When power was experienced after the ads had been processed, it gave people confidence in their most recent thoughts, so if they read strong arguments, they rated the phones more favorably. If they read weak arguments, they were much more negative toward the phone,” Petty said.

“Those who were feeling less power weren’t as confident about the validity of their thoughts to the ads, so the strength of the arguments didn’t matter as much.”

What this all means is that it matters when people are feeling powerful – before or after they receive a persuasive message. If the message comes right after their power is made relevant to them, then powerful people will be difficult to persuade because they are confident in their existing opinions. However, if people can be made to feel powerful right after a strong persuasive message, attitude change is more likely because powerful individuals will feel confident in the positive thoughts they generate to the message, Petty said.

For example, if you have strong arguments to get a raise, try not to ask the boss in her office, where she is surrounded by the trappings of power. Bring up the topic in a lunch room or somewhere where there aren’t reminders of who is in charge.

But if you do have to talk in the boss’s office, try to say something that shakes his or her confidence.

“Our research shows that power makes people more confident in their beliefs, but power is only one thing that affects confidence,” Petty said. “Try to bring up something that the boss doesn’t know, something that makes him less certain and that tempers his confidence.”

But once you do make your argument, assuming it is cogent, it is good to remind the boss that he is in charge.

“You want to sow all your arguments when the boss is not thinking of his power, and after you make a good case, then remind your boss of his power. Then he will be more confident in his own evaluation of what you say. As long as you make good arguments, he will be more likely to be persuaded,” Petty said.

Petty said the research casts doubt on the classic assertion that power corrupts people and leads them to negative actions. Instead, what power does is make people more likely to unquestionably believe their own thoughts and act on them, he said.

Both low- and high-power people may have negative thoughts at times, and think about doing something bad. But because high-power people are more confident in their thoughts – and less susceptible to countering views – they are more likely to follow through into action.

“A lot of people may have a momentary thought about doing something bad, but they don’t do it because they can inhibit themselves. A powerful person is more likely to follow through on the negative thoughts,” Petty said.

By the same token, if a powerful person has a positive, pro-social thought, she may be more likely to follow through on that thought and turn it into reality.

“Powerful people are more likely to act on what they are thinking – good or bad – without second guessing themselves,” Petty said.

This is all well and good when you can get the entity bearing power in a location and talk to them. When it comes to leaders of nations, the only people that can do that are manipulators from other nations, and intellectuals they have favored to do their thinking for them. Given that these people can off balance them, they get to control the controller.

Without good limits creating good government, there is no way for the people to have the kind of dialogue with their leaders that will be productive. Their leaders become deaf, dumb and blind, and you know where they stick the cork. From that point on, the leaders can only see through reports, studies, and arguments from the privileged with an agenda to power. Which is why they should be letting the people make the choices in their lives.

Given that leaders today are VERY far from the lives of those they represent, the space for mischief is enormous, and if the person taking up the reigns happens to be a power seeker, they want it precisely because they don’t have to answer to anyone.

A sociopath would find such a place, to be a heaven.

Is it any wonder that when socialism is on the table, the people that go for the state are the people who want absolute power now that it’s available and reachable? And that when the state has grand limits on power, they go elsewhere as there are too many watching them, and too many holding them to their words, and outcomes.

It’s as easy as understanding hunting or fishing. The kind of creature that comes to your party depends on the kind of bait you leave out to attract them. Throw peanut butter in the ocean, and you won’t get many sharks. Show the sharks the blood of their potential victims, and they all show up from miles around to feed.

By allowing socialism, what kind of bait are we putting out, and what kind of leaders does it attract?