{"id":14690,"date":"2018-12-19T03:54:28","date_gmt":"2018-12-19T03:54:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=14690"},"modified":"2018-12-20T03:58:02","modified_gmt":"2018-12-20T03:58:02","slug":"your-deeply-held-beliefs-may-just-be-wrong-5-essential-reads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/your-deeply-held-beliefs-may-just-be-wrong-5-essential-reads\/","title":{"rendered":"Your deeply held beliefs may just be wrong \u2013 5 essential reads"},"content":{"rendered":"

Naomi Schalit<\/a>, The Conversation<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Editor\u2019s note: As we come to the end of the year, Conversation editors take a look back at the stories that – for them – exemplified 2018.<\/em><\/p>\n

Our job at The Conversation is to work with scholars to publish analysis that helps readers make sense of the world. And if we demolish a few popularly held \u2013 but erroneous or misplaced \u2013 ideas and assumptions in the process, that makes me especially happy.<\/p>\n

Hence my list, here, of stories from 2018 that use facts to interrogate popular wisdom \u2013 and the ideas they proved wrong:<\/p>\n

1. Women can\u2019t possibly vote for Republicans<\/h2>\n

In an era when leading Republican political figures \u2013 from the president to a Supreme Court nominee \u2013 are accused of sexual assault, can women \u201cboth be Republican and insist upon women\u2019s rights,\u201d ask Rochester Institute of Technology scholars Christine A. Kray<\/a>, Hinda Mandell<\/a> and Tamar Carroll<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Yes, the scholars write. \u201cRepublicanism encompasses different visions of womanhood that allow women to feel that they can be Republican and also strong women<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

2. Kavanaugh will yank the Supreme Court far to the right<\/h2>\n

Brett Kavanaugh\u2019s appointment to the Supreme Court was widely predicted to plunge the court \u2013 and American law with it \u2013 into a new conservative era. But, writes University of Oregon law professor Ofer Raban<\/a>, \u201cthese prognoses fail to heed some fundamental distinctions among the decisions of the Supreme Court<\/a>, and may create a mistaken impression of the court\u2019s power and the inevitable trajectory of American law.\u201d <\/p>\n

Simply put, Raban wrote, \u201cSupreme Court rulings are often not the last word on a matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

3. Campaign spending is ruining democracy in the US<\/h2>\n

Seventy percent of Americans believe there\u2019s too much money in politics and that spending in elections should be limited. That includes both Democrats and Republicans, according to a recent Pew survey.<\/p>\n

\n \"\"<\/a>
\n Campaign spending isn\u2019t the problem.<\/span>
\n Shutterstock<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But campaign spending plays an important role in democracy, helping get candidates\u2019 messages out and educating the public. Columbia Law School scholar Richard Briffault<\/a> writes that \u201cthe volume of campaign spending is not the main problem with our campaign finance system.<\/a> The real challenge for our democracy is where so much of this money comes from.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cThe private dollars that drive the system come from a tiny fraction of our society,\u201d writes Briffault, from a donor class that is not \u201crepresentative of the broader community whose interests are all at stake in an election.\u201d<\/p>\n

4. Trump is another Hitler<\/h2>\n

Scholar Sylvia Taschka<\/a> of Wayne State tackled the countless references to President Donald Trump as this era\u2019s Hitler. <\/p>\n

Taschka acknowledges that some historians have made legitimate comparisons of the \u201cfew striking similarities between the rise of fascism in Germany then and the current political climate in the United States.\u201d <\/p>\n

But, such comparisons are false equivalencies that \u201cnot only risk trivializing Hitler and the horrors he unleashed<\/a>,\u201d she writes, but \u201calso prevent people from engaging with the actual issues at hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

5. Gun owners are crazy people<\/h2>\n

On \u201can ordinary day\u201d in 2011, writes criminal justice scholar Connie Hassett-Walker<\/a>, she found her husband watching a firearms video. She sat down with him, and that moment was the beginning of five years of research into videos made by gun owners that culminated in a book. <\/p>\n

\u201cFor all the noise around gun control versus gun rights, there was a story that was missed by non-gun owners like me: how much these guns mean to those who own them,\u201d writes Hassett-Walker.<\/p>\n

Americans live in a time of political polarization on a variety of social issues, she writes. \u201cBoth gun control and gun rights supporters would benefit from understanding how those with opposing political and social views see their identity and their culture<\/a>.\u201d\"The<\/p>\n

Naomi Schalit<\/a>, Senior Editor, Politics + Society, The Conversation<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Naomi Schalit, The Conversation Editor\u2019s note: As we come to the end of the year, Conversation editors take a look back at the stories that – for them – exemplified 2018. Our job at The Conversation is to work with scholars to publish analysis that helps readers make sense of the world. And if we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":14687,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[5627,5153,4439,5626,473,771,479,3255,1607,770,1441,708],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14690"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14690"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14691,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14690\/revisions\/14691"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}