We are at war. You can pretend we can be one country again, but we can't.

[Igel]

61. Watched a teacher complain once.

It was during a lecture on rewards and punishments as motivation in the classroom. The idea was that a reward would increase the behavior you desired and punishment would decrease it.

She'd tried every kind of reward she could think of and had been patient. She'd tried punishment. She decided the entire thing was a crock.

She'd tried praising the bad boys and saying how good it was they were finally doing what she wanted. They were being obedient. This reward produced the wrong response.

She tried punishing them by sending them to the principal, causing them to miss hours and hours of class, showing the class how defiant they were. This produced the wrong response.

Therefore the theory was wrong and she was through with the idea.

The lecturer asked if the kids got any kind of public recognition from their peers for their defiance. "Of course." And did the kid's peers look up to the goody-two-shoes, the nice kids? "No, they were sissies."

"So you're trying to get these boys to behave by making them look like sissies in front of their friends--by insulting them--and you punish them by making them look brave and defiant and make it so they don't have be in class?"

His point: You define "reward" by what the kid wants; you define "punishment" in terms of what the kid defines as punishment. You're right--it's arrogant to define the rewards and punishments in terms of what the teacher thinks should be rewards and punishments. Same for "nice". I've listened to what many said Obama did to be "nice," and most of the conservatives I know found it either meaningless or insulting--picking some point that most didn't think important and yielding on it in some way that most don't care about, or saying how, exactly, the conservatives wanted things done when most didn't.

Some USC folk did some research a few years ago. They asked conservatives if they understood other conservatives and if they understood liberals. They also asked liberals if they understood conservatives and other liberals. They posed a series of topics and asked each to explain themselves--and then to explain the viewspoints and reasons of others of like politics or opposing politics.

They found that a relatively small percentage of conservatives were willing to explain other conservatives' politics. Most who did so were right, although they gave themselves low odds of being right. Their answers didn't always agree with their own views--conservatives who were willing to answer were aware that most other conservatives would give other reasons. Very few were willing to explain liberals' politics. Most were wrong and thought they probably were. Their knew where their knowledge ended and ignorance began.

The researchers found that a startingly large percentage of liberals were willing to explain other liberals' politics. Typically each liberal said every other liberal thought precisely as s/he did; a hefty percentage were just plain wrong in explaining their colleagues' thinking. There was a marked lack of actual empathy and awareness of where one's ignorance began.

A startingly large percentage of liberals were willing to explain conservatives' politics. They were overwhelmingly wrong but said they were highly confident of their answers. And they were overwhelmingly wrong in mean-spirited and petty ways, and gave themselves similarly high confidence levels.