Articles by Germaine Descant

The folk theory of democracy The common perception holds that the people elect their leaders at the polls and then hold them accountable for representing their will. The folk theory is appealing because it puts the will of the people and their interests at the heart of government. Sovereignty resides with the people who control the agenda. Voters act as government watchdogs to enforce shared values and curb abuses. Voters correct their mistakes or punish failure at the polls by changing govern...

Analyses of policy proposals from Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders estimate that their proposals would increase the national debt by about $8 to $30 trillion between 2016 and 2026. According to information the Washington Post and the New York Times recently published, this is how much each candidate would add to the debt: * Rubio - $8.2 trillion * Cruz - $10.2 trillion * Trump - $11.2 - $15 trillion * Sanders - $19 - $30 trillion The Republican Reality Disconnect T...

NPR and other media outlets have aired interviews with Iowans on why Iowa always gets to go first. Who goes second gets far less coverage, but the same logic presumably applies. If what some Iowans say is representative of at least half of its residents, most are an arrogant bunch. More disturbingly but not surprisingly, Iowans are not logical. The Iowa is Best 'Rationale' Like most empty political rhetoric, there is usually a big disconnect between rhetoric and the real world. The rational f...

One can ask what most accurately describes the essence of intelligent, objective, public service-oriented politics. Is it primarily an honest competition among the dominant ideologies of our times, a self-interested quest for influence and power or a combination of the two? Does it boil down to understanding the biological functioning of the human mind and how it sees and thinks about the world? Or, or is it something else entirely? Turns out, it isn’t even close. Superforecasting comes down sq...

In the wake of the 14 terrorism-inspired murders in San Bernardino on December 2, 2015, and other recent terror attacks, some Americans altered their travel plans. They were worried about their personal safety. A survey found that about 10% of American travelers canceled a planned trip, causing a potential loss of about $8.2 billion in travel-related spending. Another 18% changed their destination to one that was perceived to be safer, while another 25% delayed travel. In other words, recent te...

For the most part, people view the world and politics and make judgments through biases that color what they see and understood. Personal morals or political ideology is a powerful perception-biasing lens that operates intuitively, fast and unconsciously. In essence, this lens is a personal moral framework the mind uses to make sense of the world. A key function of the unconscious mind is to make the world seem coherent. Coherence happens even when there isn’t enough information. It also someti...

Dissident Politics advocates a set of three political principles or morals that foster objectivity in politics. The proposal comes despite the innate intuitive-subjective nature of human cognition and American politics. Two core premises underpin the argument. The first is that modern politics is subjective and ineffective because the two-party system understands the intuitive aspect of human behavior and relentlessly exploits that biology to its own advantage, usually at the expense of the pub...

The Climate Science About 97-98% of climate science experts no longer debate whether anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real and caused primarily by human activity. Current debates center on how serious, how soon, and what and where specific changes will be. From time to time, a new phenomenon such as massive waves never seen before in the Arctic Ocean and their capacity to accelerate sea ice melt are described. That indicates that climate science, like the climate, is changing. Climate sc...

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand themTractatus Politicus It is OK to hate some human actions, but never stop trying to understand them and never let the hate get in the way of seeing clearly, even if understanding isn’t ultimately possibleUnderstanding is first, moral judgment and intuition is second What happened in Paris last Friday to the innocents needs no elaboration. We all know what happened. In the aftermath, there ...