[overflow] Re: your mail

[Leslie Fish <lesliefish@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 04:47 PM 6/4/01 -0400, you wrote:

>You're welcome to your opinion.  I disagree with it, and think that it's
>counterproductive towards fixing the problems we do have with government.
>But again, I'm not going to argue matters of faith, which this undeniably
>is.

         "Matters of faith" or "Songs of Experience"?  A few years back, 
some buddies of mine who were doing a term-project in Social Psychology, 
noticed an interesting anomaly with the famous Adorno F-Scale test for 
authoritarian personalities;  there's one question which says: "Most 
political decisions are made in smoke-filled back rooms."  A positive 
response was supposed to indicate authoritarian tendencies, yet it showed 
up a lot on the profiles of people who rated quite non-authoritarian on all 
the other questions.  When examining the respondents, they discovered that 
all these people had had real political experience.  In other words, there 
was nothing authoritarian about these people;  they had just seen for 
themselves that most political decisions really ARE made in (nowadays 
smoke-free) back rooms!  Nothing can make you cynical about politics faster 
than some real hands-on work therein.

                                                                    --Leslie 
<;)))><