Warped by groupthink
The term groupthink was introduced in the November 1971 issue of “Psychology Today” by psychologist Irving Janis.
Janis had researched group decision-making under stressful conditions.
Groupthink strives to explain why groups reach dubious conclusions. Members often desire to conform or believe dissent will be punished or ridiculed.
Members must interact (compromise) to achieve consensus. A bit of compromise here and a back-channel deal there. Eventually the group reaches a sub-optimal conclusion.
Larger groups will necessarily require greater compromise to satisfy the motives, agendas and egos of its members. In highly consequential arenas, like politics, groupthink can have significantly worse consequences, leading groups to ignore critical information and ethical/moral issues to prioritize one specific goal while ignoring countless related consequences.
With groupthink in mind, consider the Declaration of Independence was drafted by a committee of five (Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, John Adams and Robert Livingston).
Drafting the U.S. Constitution began on May 25, 1787, and continued until Sept. 17, 1787. During this period, there were never more than 46 delegates present at any one time. It took nearly four months for the delegates to agree on four pages of text.
Today: 535 party loyalists in Congress struggle to codify the negotiated compromises and deals into thousand-plus-page legislation.
There is little-to-no time for review, comprehension or debate.
Ever heard, “We have to pass it to see what’s in it”?
Today’s congressional output is no longer sub-optimal, it is frightening.
Is it possible that America’s government has out-grown its constitutional britches?
Mike Fischer
Nezperce
Thanks for the disclaimer
I thank the editors of the Lewiston Tribune for pointing out that the U. S. Food and Drug Administration has warned against taking ivermectin for COVID-19 in a disclaimer at the beginning of Richard J. Eggleston’s Sept. 5 column.
Being a retired Washington State University chemistry professor, I looked up the chemical structure of ivermectin. It is not remotely similar to the kind of chemical compounds that work as antiviral agents.
Ivermectin is used mainly for curing farm animals of worms.
Chemistry and medicine are science. Politics are irrelevant to science, and scientists have to ignore politics in their search for scientific evidence. The notion that ivermectin is an appropriate medicine for COVID-19 is political.
Basing medical decisions on politics will kill people.
Eggleston’s knowledge as an eye doctor makes him an M.D., but it doesn’t make him competent to treat viral diseases.
Don Matteson
Pullman
Stop the virus
Every time a COVID-19 virus jumps from one human to another, it gets stronger and meaner. And it multiplies like crazy. We have to stop its jumping and multiplying.
Doctors have been wearing masks in operating rooms for decades, so as not to infect their patients. I’m sure no one would want to have surgery performed by a maskless doctor and risk having the doctor sneeze or breathe germs into the wound. Masks are effective. And doctors are able to function and perform highly technical procedures while wearing a mask. Masks may be annoying but they don’t reduce oxygen to the brain.
As for vaccines, millions of COVID-19 vaccines have been given with no known complications. And while it may be argued they don’t always prevent you from getting or spreading the virus, they do prevent you from dying or having to go to the hospital due to the virus. That translates into a miniscule risk for a huge benefit.
The doctors, nurses, therapists and staff of our hospitals and clinics are exhausted and demoralized. They can’t bear another surge of COVID-19 patients. The system is in danger of collapsing and then there will be no one to treat the heart attacks, car accidents, appendicitis or broken bones.
Show love for yourself, your neighbors, your health care workers and your community. Stop these little buggers from jumping to the next human by getting vaccinated and wearing a mask in public. There is no good reason not to.
Constance Brumm
Moscow
Cancel Eggleston
Regarding Richard Eggleston’s Sept. 5 commentary: If, as purported, those vaccinated for COVID-19 are fueling the rise of virus variants ..., why do greater than 95 percent of current regional and national hospitalizations involve non-vaccinated patients?
Eggleston’s logic about this doesn’t make sense. In fact, it seems the opposite.
Furthermore, if, as suggested, the COVID-19 vaccine enables variants to occur, similar logic would seem to support forgoing vaccines for the polio virus, influenza virus, measles virus and the like; something nearly everyone would think preposterous.
Quoting from Eggleston’s same rambling commentary: “Power by those who possess it to use force to subdue is evident in the brutalization of especially women and children in Afghanistan by the resurgent Taliban and here, the stick of forced vaccinations. ... ”
Indeed, it is true that power can be used to abuse, victimize and brutalize, not only in places such as Afghanistan but here in this country through the inane passage in Texas of an abortion law that does terrible harm.
Those in power in the Texas Legislature and governorship, and elsewhere, are using their powers to trample and restrict women and girls in ways not at all unlike what’s happening once again to females in Afghanistan.
Eggleston suggests at the column’s end that “we must remember who is really in charge.”
The Lewiston Tribune was in charge of allowing his thoughts to be aired on its editorial page. I hope the Tribune ceases doing so. It would open space for more deserving commentary.
Frances Conklin
Cottonwood
Setting Eggleston straight
Richard Eggleston’s opinion has many errors that must be corrected. I can only address two in the length of this letter.
Comirnaty is the new name for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine that millions of Americans have gotten. This vaccine has full Food and Drug Administration approval for people older than 16 and emergency use authorization for those ages 12 to 15.
He confuses antibiotics with antibodies.
Antibiotics are materials produced by organisms to fight off bacteria. They are produced in bulk and sometimes chemically modified. The reason antibiotic-resistance — not antibody-resistant — bacteria have arisen is because of overuse of antibiotics, primarily in agriculture.
More than 20 million pounds of medically important antibiotics — or 80 percent sold in the U.S. —are used mostly to promote growth of farm animals and are in their feed.
Antibodies are made by the immune system to fight off bacteria and viruses. Monoclonal antibodies for treatment are made in the laboratory from immune cells.
To mutate, both bacteria and viruses need to multiply.
Bacteria can be in the digestive tract, etc. They can multiply there and in sewage, etc.
Overuse of antibiotics led to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Viruses cannot multiply outside of a host cell. The best way to stop the virus is to vaccinate as many people as possible so that they can’t infect people as easily, multiply and mutate.
The reason more transmissible and potentially more deadly viruses arise is not because of vaccines but unvaccinated people allowing the virus to multiply and mutate.
Charlotte Omoto
Palouse
Celebrating ignorance
This is an excerpt from a Carl Sagan book that seems appropriate for what is happening in America today.
“ I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bits, lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
It seems to me that is where we are on almost all fronts, but especially the ignorance of those who won’t be vaccinated for the COVID-19. Those who do not are potentially exposing our children and babies younger than age 12 and possibly causing their death. That is just plain cold-hearted murder.
Most who won’t don’t even have truly valid reasons. The same applies to wearing a mask. It does not harm you; it’s just uncomfortable.
Starre Barnett
Clarkston
American Taliban
It seems to me the American Taliban has taken over Texas and is planning to take over the whole country.
Jerry Mattoon
Clarkston
Coulter got it right
Recent events in Afghanistan have given the hypocritical hot mouths of hype on the right plenty of fuel to try to cook Sleepy Joe’s goose with, and they are schmarming like lemmings in heat to the occasion.
These peabrains obviously don’t care to remember any of the former commander of misbelief’s bjillion screw-ups, like pulling our troops out of Syria in 2019 and abandoning the valiant Kurds who fought ISIS alongside the U.S. military. ...
Why did the goombahs on the right support the disastrous deal former President Donald Trump made with the Taliban in early 2020, completely bypassing the Afghan government and allowing 5,000 Taliban prisoners to be freed? ...
Are they all as dumb as their guru or, like him, do they not really give a farting farthing about Afghanistan or the people there, except as a means of getting their digs in at Biden and the libs?
Do they care that Trump was illegally delaying Special Immigration Visas for Afghans who worked with the U.S., in connection with Mr. Crybaby’s xenophobic Muslim ban, leaving President Joe Biden with a backlog of more than 17,000 SIV applicants? ...
Staunch Republican stalwart Anne Coulter, with her sharp wit and diplomatic tongue, obviously wasn’t speaking for the majority of her groupie mates when she recently praised Biden for bringing the troops home. ...
“Trump didn’t have the balls to get America out of Afghanistan, so he left it for Biden. And Biden did,” she said.
Well said, Anne. Well said.
Mike Epstein
Clarkston
Defeating COVID-19
To those with influence in our community: We find ourselves fighting a war against the ravages of COVID-19 and its variants, an unrelenting pandemic. We are now at a crisis level of health care in our region. Due to this crisis, health care rationing is now authorized (https://healthandwelfare.idaho.gov/news/idaho-activates-crisis-standards-care-north-idaho-due-surge-covid-19-patients-requiring).
We also know that this year’s war is not last year’s war. It is more aggressive.
We want to do all we can to limit the spread of this COVID-19 virus. We know that protection from the disease and its long-term effects can only be achieved by immunizing a very high percentage of the population.
Members of our community trust you and are influenced by your public leadership and guidance.
To limit exposure to this virus, please publicly urge your various communities to use face masks whenever social distancing is not possible.
To provide protection for themselves, their children, grandchildren and vulnerable communities from such severe infections, please publicly urge community members to be vaccinated. Available vaccines have proven to be both safe and effective.
We can win this war if everyone will follow the wise and thoughtful recommendations of medical experts and our community leaders, including yourself. Please know of our sincere love and great concern for all our community and we appreciate your service.
Eric K. Peterson
Lewiston
Crapo, Risch got fooled
Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, your “reasons” for voting for the deficit-spending, $1.5 trillion bill sought by the progressives and supported by you has just backfired. The progressives are using the trick you knew they would, budget reconciliation, to get the $3.5 trillion deficit-spending bill they also wanted. Yes that’s trillions, not billions nor millions.
Your statements that you were voting for the smaller package so you would not have to vote for the larger package was a fool’s argument. You are not gaslighting anyone with any intelligence when you speak about not raising the deficit or promoting spending within your means as campaign slogans with votes like this.
I cannot figure out why the Idaho State Republican Committee has not censored you for your votes. I have asked but have not been told. By the way, I have contacted both your offices and not gotten a response.
Ron Calhoun
Juliaetta
Consult Lucky Brandt
After reading Richard Eggleston’s commentary, it would probably be best for him to call Lucky Brandt and take his advice.
Dennis Smith
Lewiston
