tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47356364880535123302024-02-21T11:03:08.355-05:00Illusions Revolt!Sorting Through the Debris of Politics and Popular CultureRonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.comBlogger55125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-58054482451178396332020-08-08T16:25:00.001-04:002020-08-08T16:31:23.827-04:00The World on a Billionaire's Budget<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVRFby8iPH4d_dXHWIn93hoU6flRUSlUD-6UJcS8JFFBqps7Q-kISe6oeitx5QtcreXi_asoXVLVG2cHF0C9TQzkaWxYjbgpxL3xnaq1VXTh8lOTE_kVyJNQt7NeSNG5zQ8qahXaVQMQ0/s1410/bezos.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="937" data-original-width="1410" height="416" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVRFby8iPH4d_dXHWIn93hoU6flRUSlUD-6UJcS8JFFBqps7Q-kISe6oeitx5QtcreXi_asoXVLVG2cHF0C9TQzkaWxYjbgpxL3xnaq1VXTh8lOTE_kVyJNQt7NeSNG5zQ8qahXaVQMQ0/w625-h416/bezos.png" width="625" /></a></div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Originally posted at theconversation.com</i></div><div><br /></div><div><div>The world’s wealthiest are prospering. As of February 2017, there were about 2,000 billionaires in the world. This micro-elite controls over US$7.6 trillion, an increase of 18 percent from 2016.</div><div><br /></div><div>A billionaire’s spending power is difficult to grasp, both because most people do not correctly intuit large numbers, and because a billion dollars far outstrips most people’s experience.</div><div><br /></div><div>What does a household budget look like to a billionaire? To find out, let’s scale down a billionaire’s income to $50,000, the median American income, adjusting budget items proportionally.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>A year in the life of Joe Billionaire</b></div><div>To start, we need to estimate a billionaire’s annual income.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the 30 years from 1987 to 2016, Bill and Melinda Gates amassed about $120 billion. This figure represents $80 billion in net worth and $40 billion controlled by their charitable foundation. The Gates’ average annual income for these years is $120 billion divided by 30, or $4 billion. (The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a strategic partner of The Conversation US and provides funding for The Conversation internationally.)</div><div><br /></div><div>According to Forbes, the wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos increased last year from $72.8 billion to $108.7 billion. Despite billion-dollar hiccups caused by daily stock price fluctuations, Bezos’ 2017 wealth increase was at least $32 billion, over $1,000 per second around the clock.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>One cube represents the median U.S. worker’s income. Andrew D. Hwang, CC BY-SA</div><div>The Gates and Bezos are extremes. But what about a more typical billionaire’s income?</div><div><br /></div><div>Let’s assume a new fortune has been acquired over about one decade. Since the median worth on Forbes’ list is about $2 billion, a ballpark estimate of annual income is one-tenth of this, or $200 million.</div><div><br /></div><div>In absolute terms, $200 million per year is over $6 per second around the clock, equal to the global median annual income every eight minutes. Each year, Joe Billionaire amasses 4,000 median American incomes.</div><div><br /></div><div>In 2017, Jeff Bezos raked in 150 times more than Joe Billionaire – the equivalent of 600,000 median incomes.</div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>A billionaire’s household budget</b></div><div>Because Joe Billionaire accumulates 4,000 median American incomes, a $4,000 expenditure for Joe Billionaire is the same fraction of income as $1 for a median American earner.</div><div><br /></div><div>Let’s call $4,000 one “Joe buck,” or J$1. Joe Billionaire’s annual income is J$50,000. Thus, a $2,000-vacation package costs J$0.50, proportional to a half-dollar from a middle-class income.</div><div><br /></div><div>At this scale, a generous annual food budget comes to J$3. One year’s tuition at a prestigious university costs J$15. An extended stay in a top-quality hospital might run J$50. For J$150, Joe Billionaire can pick up a large middle-class home in most parts of the United States. If that’s too modest, a week’s income buys a mansion in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. Who needs student loans, health care and mortgages?</div><div><br /></div><div>Joe Billionaire can and does purchase goods and services not available to the rest of us. J$2,500 builds a media mouthpiece. Comparable political donations may be followed by a Cabinet appointment.</div><div><br /></div><div>Unlike a tithing purchase for you or me, a one-time J$5,000 donation for Joe Billionaire has no effect on spending power. We’re speaking of a scale where lavish living costs a few hundred Joe bucks. Next year will bring another J$50,000.</div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Matters of perspective</b></div><div>Ronald Reagan fomented outrage at one welfare recipient cheating the government of $8,000, or J$2. Unfortunately, we are not proportionally outraged by theft and losses dwarfing the human scale.</div><div><br /></div><div>By comparison, the Reagan-era savings and loan scandal, the Enron scandal, the mortgage-backed securities crisis and the annual losses to offshore tax havens cost ordinary taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of millions of times more than one welfare cheat. That’s enough to drain or break even Jeff Bezos’ bank.</div><div><br /></div><div>Public services are inexpensive by comparison. The 2017 budget for the National Institutes of Health was about $33 billion; for the National Science Foundation, $7.5 billion; for the National Endowment for the Arts, $150 million. The 2017 Boston city budget was just under $3 billion, including about $1 billion for public schools, $200 million for pensions and $78 million for the Public Health Commission.</div><div><br /></div><div>Most Americans don’t understand how inequitably American wealth is distributed. Worldwide, wealth inequality is even more stark.</div><div><br /></div><div>We live in a world where two dozen of the wealthiest individuals could collectively fund health and science research for the United States, where any of the thousand billionaires could individually fund the NEA with no practical impact to their purchasing power. Participatory government may remain, but only the ultra-wealthy need apply.</div></div>Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-40545817606043526532020-08-08T16:16:00.005-04:002020-08-08T16:32:08.801-04:00How Popular Culture Hobbles Protest Movements<h1 class="legacy">How popular culture hobbles protest movements</h1>
<span><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/chauncey-maher-1122802">Chauncey Maher</a>, <em><a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/dickinson-college-3288">Dickinson College</a></em></span>
<p>In response to the anti-racism protests that have erupted across the U.S., many Americans are saying they <a href="https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/06/12/amid-protests-majorities-across-racial-and-ethnic-groups-express-support-for-the-black-lives-matter-movement/psdt_06-12-20_protests-00-1/">agree with the goals</a> of the demonstrators, but <a href="https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/06/12/amid-protests-majorities-across-racial-and-ethnic-groups-express-support-for-the-black-lives-matter-movement/psdt_06-12-20_protests-00-7/">not their methods</a>. In a recent Pew survey, 67% of Americans say they support the Black Lives Matter movement, but only 19% think protests and rallies – with their demands to defund the police and exact justice for George Floyd’s death – are an effective way to bring about change. </p>
<p>I’ve seen this refrain before. In fact, <a href="https://www.dickinson.edu/site/custom_scripts/dc_faculty_profile_index.php?fac=maherc">it’s inspired me to write a book</a> that explores the attitudes white people hold towards racial and economic justice. Often, when Americans express support for a particular issue – whether it’s about ending slavery or protecting civil rights – they’ll couch their advocacy with the caveat that the change must be gradual. Big, immediate changes are thought to be dangerous or otherwise impractical.</p>
<p>In learning more about why these attitudes are so resilient, I found that popular entertainment has played a role. For decades, books, movies and records that seem to challenge racism also subtly advance the idea that while progress is a worthy goal, it shouldn’t happen too quickly. There are many examples of this, but let me offer you three that illustrate some main themes.</p>
<h2>Is patience really a virtue?</h2>
<p>While “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/203/203-h/203-h.htm">Uncle Tom’s Cabin</a>” famously opened many Americans’ eyes to the horrors of slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel also encourages Black people to tolerate these horrors, wait for change and eventually forgive their oppressors.</p>
<p>Published in 1852, “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/203/203-h/203-h.htm">Uncle Tom’s Cabin</a>” opens with Mr. Shelby planning to sell his slaves to a slave trader. Some run away, but not Tom. He’s sold to Augustine St. Clare and then again to Simon Legree. Told to whip another slave, Tom refuses. Legree tells two other slaves, Sambo and Quimbo, to beat Tom. They do, but Tom forgives them, quoting the Bible: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” When some slaves escape, Legree asks Tom where they are, but Tom won’t tell. Legree beats him and orders Sambo and Quimbo to kill him. As Tom lays dying, he says again that he forgives them.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348483/original/file-20200720-37-bu2iid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/348483/original/file-20200720-37-bu2iid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348483/original/file-20200720-37-bu2iid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348483/original/file-20200720-37-bu2iid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348483/original/file-20200720-37-bu2iid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=995&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348483/original/file-20200720-37-bu2iid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=995&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/348483/original/file-20200720-37-bu2iid.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=995&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">An illustration from the 1897 edition of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/image-from-1897-showing-the-character-uncle-royalty-free-illustration/1148429875?adppopup=true">DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Stowe <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Cambridge_Companion_to_Harriet_Beech.html?id=pqDCQgAACAAJ">wanted her novel to advance the abolitionist cause</a>, and it sold 300,000 copies in its first year. But by making Tom a martyr, she inadvertently valorized patience as a response to slavery.</p>
<p>In 1949, novelist James Baldwin criticized the character Uncle Tom, writing that he is “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=wmnVhmw3zVoC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover&pg=PT29&dq=phenomenally+forbearing&hl=en#v=onepage&q=phenomenally%20forbearing&f=false">phenomenally forbearing</a>.” The result is someone who dies enslaved. </p>
<p>According to Baldwin, books like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” gave “liberal” Americans the impression that “everything will be all right” – as if simply opposing injustice were enough to end it.</p>
<h2>Does time always heal?</h2>
<p>A similar theme can be heard in popular music.</p>
<p>Released in 1964, Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” is <a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17267529">widely regarded as his best</a> song, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Dream_Boogie.html?id=YfB6_9eL24UC">one of the greatest of the 1960s</a> and <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-unlikely-story-of-a-change-is-gonna-come">an anthem of the civil rights movement</a>. In the refrain, Cooke sings, “It’s been a long, a long time coming, but I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.”</p>
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<p>If you’ve been waiting for needed change for a very long time, but it hasn’t come, you’d be disappointed, tired and angry. For this reason, Cooke’s refusal to give up has been a source of strength to many people.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.mtv.com/news/1602993/a-change-is-gonna-come-takes-on-new-meaning-at-inaugural-concert/">But many others hear</a> Cooke saying that change – or progress – will inevitably come. Martin Luther King Jr. called this a “<a href="https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html">mythical concept of time</a>,” according to which “there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills.” Heard that way, Cooke’s song cultivates the idea that change doesn’t necessarily require substantial effort; the passage of time will suffice.</p>
<p>If you’re not struggling with oppression, Cooke’s song can instead soothe a guilty conscience.</p>
<h2>One big happy family</h2>
<p>Movies have also served to temper radical change.</p>
<p>Released in 1989 and <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1008415_glory/reviews">adored</a> by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/14/movies/review-film-black-combat-bravery-in-the-civil-war.html">critics</a> and audiences, the film “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097441/">Glory</a>” tells <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/91210/tnr-film-classics-glory-january-15-1990">the story of the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts</a>, one of the first all-Black regiments of the Union Army during the Civil War. </p>
<p>One of the main characters is Trip, played by Denzel Washington, who won an Oscar for his performance.</p>
<p>In the first two-thirds of the film, Trip seems mean, tough and angry. He insults his tentmates. He stoically endures a whipping in front of his regiment for going absent without leave. He leads the charge among his comrades to protest unequal pay. He heckles white Union soldiers, and, when his white colonel offers him the privilege of carrying the regiment’s flag, he says he’s not fighting this war for the colonel.</p>
<p>But then viewers start to see a change in Trip. During the regiment’s ill-fated charge on Fort Wagner, a white regiment looks on. Trip catches the eye of a white soldier he had previously scuffled with. Trip looks away, and the white solider shouts, “Give ‘em hell 54th!” Trip grins, and all the white soldiers cheer on the 54th. In the final sequence of the film, with the regiment hunkered down at the parapet, the white colonel decides to lead them onward and is shot down immediately. First to rise, hoisting the regimental flag, Trip shouts to his comrades, “Come on!” He, too, is shot down. “Glory” ends with the colonel’s and Trip’s bodies being tossed into a trench grave, side-by-side.</p>
<p>What’s the significance of these changes in Trip?</p>
<p>For many viewers of the film, they can serve as a form of reassurance.</p>
<p>Trip’s grin signals he embraces the bigoted white soldier’s apparent change of heart. Hoisting the flag shows he now believes the white colonel shares his cause. And for audiences who worry Black people hate them or that Black people don’t realize they’re good people, these actions signal that all can be forgiven.</p>
<p>Black characters like Trip are an archetype in TV and film.</p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=XOCj6e_1SRUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">In a 1967 profile of Black actor Sidney Poitier</a> for Look magazine, Baldwin drew attention to it. In the article, he noted that Poitier’s roles “are designed not to trouble, but to reassure; they do not reflect reality, they merely rearrange its elements into something we can bear. They also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are.”</p>
<h2>Change isn’t comfortable</h2>
<p>Popular culture – even that which advances worthy ideas – can foster a complacency that has frustrated generations of Black activists.</p>
<p>In June, CNN commentator Van Jones said that Black Americans should worry less about the Ku Klux Klan and more about “<a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/05/29/van-jones-george-floyd-white-liberal-hillary-clinton-supporter-sot-newday.cnn">the white, liberal Hillary Clinton supporter</a>.” Jones was echoing Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “<a href="https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html">Letter From a Birmingham Jail</a>,” in which King wrote that “the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order’ than to justice.”</p>
<p>In other words, when push comes to shove, many people don’t want to sacrifice anything or experience discomfort.</p>
<p>Popular culture might serve as a salve for the conscience of many viewers, readers and listeners, <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/three-times-when-impractical-movements-led-to-real-change/">but real progress only happens when people push for it</a>, whether it was the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, that ended segregation on the city’s buses or the recent protests to curb police brutality.<!-- Below is The Conversation's page counter tag. Please DO NOT REMOVE. --><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/140892/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important" /><!-- End of code. If you don't see any code above, please get new code from the Advanced tab after you click the republish button. The page counter does not collect any personal data. More info: https://theconversation.com/republishing-guidelines --></p>
<p><span><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/chauncey-maher-1122802">Chauncey Maher</a>, Associate Professor of Philosophy, <em><a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/dickinson-college-3288">Dickinson College</a></em></span></p>
<p>This article is republished from <a href="https://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-popular-culture-hobbles-protest-movements-140892">original article</a>.</p>
Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-83898661917347887482018-06-23T15:54:00.000-04:002018-06-23T16:05:30.670-04:00Making Art "Should be Uncomfortable" – A Conversation With Visual Artist Lorna Simpson<br />
<figure><img alt="File 20180621 137714 tlo6n2.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224316/original/file-20180621-137714-tlo6n2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" />
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Visual artist Lorna Simpson speaks at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts Medal Gala in May 2018.
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Rutherford/Tufts University</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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BY <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/christina-sharpe-493316">Christina Sharpe</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/tufts-university-1024">Tufts University</a></em><br />
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<em>Lorna Simpson, a pioneering visual and conceptual artist whose striking work on race, gender and identity has placed her among the leading artists of her generation, was recently honored by the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) at Tufts University with the SMFA Medal, given annually in recognition of creative excellence in visual art, art history and arts advocacy. Simpson’s works have been presented in many of the world’s major art museums. Much of Simpson’s work focuses on experimenting and discovering new ways to develop imagery.</em><br />
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<em>Below is an excerpt from a public conversation, edited for clarity, between Simpson and York University Professor Christina Sharpe, Ph.D., at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where the SMFA at Tufts honored Simpson. Sharpe, a professor of English at Tufts when she spoke with Simpson, is a renowned feminist critic and author of “Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects” and “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.” Her scholarship is dedicated to the same concepts explored and confronted by Simpson’s work.</em><br />
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<strong>Christina Sharpe:</strong> I was introduced to your work when I was in graduate school at Cornell through an image of “The Waterbearer” that appeared on a syllabus. The text [on the image] reads, “She saw him disappear by the river, they asked her to tell what happened only to discount her memory.” I wonder if you could talk some about that early work in conceptual photography, the combination of image and text?<br />
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<strong>Lorna Simpson:</strong> That work was from 1985 or ‘86. By the time I got out of college, I was really questioning what I was doing with photography. I had opportunities to show; I had looked at a lot of work, and the way that work was being presented by photographers, but I kind of felt there was some assumption that was being made about how these images were being read. That got me to think about a different way of viewing an image with meaning.<br />
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“The Waterbearer” actually comes from a memory of my father’s relatives – my father was from Cuba and Jamaica – and how they would talk about their days between Jamaica and Cuba, and just different family events that there was a lot of secrecy around. In those stories, and in the conveyance of memories, I noticed there was a lot stopping short, or a tendency not to fill in all the blanks. There also was the consideration that memory is a contentious situation in a way, so that what one wants to voice in terms of memory doesn’t always get acknowledged. I think “The Waterbearer” was a contemplation about that.<br />
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<strong>Christina Sharpe:</strong> I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about some of the other conceptual photographers who influenced you. Who were you in conversation with? Who inspired your work? Who did you want to interrupt or contest?<br />
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<strong>Lorna Simpson:</strong> In the late 1970s, the canon of art history and photography was quite narrow, and so I spent a lot of time being on the Lower East Side, and also up in Harlem. What was interesting about that, and also being an intern at the Studio Museum in Harlem, [was that] I had this view of a whole other arena of practice. I immediately saw that there was this gulf between what I was learning and what I was seeing in the world, and that what was presented to me educationally was quite narrow.<br />
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I found myself in all these amazing situations that opened my eyes to the practice of contemporary art. I would say <a href="https://www.moma.org/artists/2486">David Hammons</a> was really important to my work. There was also <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/07/arts/review-art-split-show-of-black-artists-using-nontraditional-media.html">Charles Abramson</a>, and then maybe later <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/arts/design/adrian-piper-review-moma.html">Adrian Piper</a>.<br />
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<strong>Christina Sharpe:</strong> Your most recent body of work marks a change from that practice; obviously, your practice has evolved. I wonder if you could discuss the work that uses, for example, those vintage images from [the magazines] Jet and Ebony, as well as found images, and if you could speak to your movement to painting and sculpture?<br />
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<strong>Lorna Simpson:</strong> It was interesting going to [the University of California San Diego] in the early 1980s, because it was an era of performance art, and I found myself to be in this pool of people who were interested [in performance art]… Although it wasn’t an art form that I was particularly comfortable with, personally, the “performative” aspect of my work came from being immersed in that community. <br />
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I would say from that point on I didn’t feel wedded to a particular way of working, or that I had to have a particular medium in working a particular way that would define my entire career. It was more [that] the structural or conceptual idea framed how the work would be made. When working and painting now, […] I kind of feel like I don’t fear failure. I don’t have the sense that I need to do something more comfortable, because I think in terms of making art, and writing, and anything that we do as artists where we have to step up to the plate, it should be uncomfortable, it should be nerve-wracking, and there should be this level of unknown. Not at all times, but at certain points.<br />
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<strong>Christina Sharpe:</strong> There’s a book by Tina Campt called “<a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/listening-to-images">Listening to Images</a>.” She invites us to listen to these mundane, compelled photos, in which we might hear something like “black refusal,” or “desire,” which is to say that one may locate in them the dynamics of black life. I want to ask you, what do we hear in your work?<br />
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<strong>Lorna Simpson:</strong> I think my work is a conversation between me and me. I look in the mirror, I get up every morning, and I don’t go, “Oh my god, there’s a black woman in the mirror in front of me!” I take for granted and strongly have a sense of ownership of my own experience. And in the ownership of that experience, I have the expectation that my audience has to come with me, and that there is a universalism that I assume in what I’m doing. So while the work pictures black bodies – and considering the particular climate in which we’re living now, and the way that American politics have, in my opinion, reverted back to a caste that none of us want to return to – that that specter of the work is important. But at the same time, as a country – and speaking as an American – there has to be this kind of universal acknowledgment that America means many different things to many different peoples from many different places. And particularly, if you are not Native American and your people haven’t been here for centuries before the [17th century] settlement of America, then those experiences have to be regarded as valuable, and we have to acknowledge each other. This is the premise by which I view the world.<br />
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<strong>Christina Sharpe:</strong> Many years ago, in an interview that I read in BOMB magazine with Coco Fusco, you said, “I do not feel as though issues of identity are exhaustible. The notion of identity, be it self-constructed, or as an imposed ideology from outside, means to me that it’s a complex and contradictory system.” You said also that complexity’s what’s most interesting, and so I wonder if you could speak more about that complexity and questions and practices of image-making?<br />
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<img alt="The Conversation" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97818/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" width="1" /><strong>Lorna Simpson:</strong> Now I have a daughter who is 19, and watching her come of age, and seeing other young women in her circle and how they think about gender and sexuality, I am so grateful and overwhelmed that they actually read work that was written in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s. But their conception of how we think now about gender and binary systems doesn’t even consider those [older] ideas [from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s]…they’re like, “Oh, please, we’re not even going to talk about that.” I find that to be really amazing, and I am heartened by that. I feel that the younger generation of people understands the heart of gender and sexuality concepts, and understands where it leads. I find that exciting and amazing, and I’m grateful that that’s the case.<br />
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/christina-sharpe-493316">Christina Sharpe</a>, Professor of English, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/tufts-university-1024">Tufts University</a></em><br />
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This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com/">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/making-art-should-be-uncomfortable-a-conversation-with-visual-artist-lorna-simpson-97818">original article</a>.<br />
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Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-59008951162884199562018-06-23T15:38:00.000-04:002018-06-23T15:43:58.103-04:00Despite Disavowals, Leading Tech Companies Help Extremist<div>
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Because of its “extreme hostility toward Muslims,” the website Jihadwatch.org is considered an active hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. The views of the site’s director, Robert Spencer, on Islam led the British Home Office to ban him from entering the country in 2013.<br />
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But its designation as a hate site hasn’t stopped tech companies — including PayPal, Amazon and Newsmax — from maintaining partnerships with Jihad Watch that help to sustain it financially. PayPal facilitates donations to the site. Newsmax — the online news network run by President Donald Trump’s close friend Chris Ruddy — pays Jihad Watch in return for users clicking on its headlines. Until recently, Amazon allowed Jihad Watch to participate in a program that promised a cut of any book sales that the site generated. All three companies have policies that say they don’t do business with hate groups.<br />
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Jihad Watch is one of many sites that monetize their extremist views through relationships with technology companies. ProPublica surveyed the most visited websites of groups designated as extremist by either the SPLC or the Anti-Defamation League. We found that more than half of them — 39 out of 69 — made money from ads, donations or other revenue streams facilitated by technology companies. At least 10 tech companies played a role directly or indirectly in supporting these sites.<br />
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Traditionally, tech companies have justified such relationships by contending that it’s not their role to censor the Internet or to discourage legitimate political expression. Also, their management wasn’t necessarily aware that they were doing business with hate sites because tech services tend to be automated and based on algorithms tied to demographics.<br />
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In the wake of last week’s violent protest by alt-right groups in Charlottesville, more tech companies have disavowed relationships with extremist groups. During just the last week, six of the sites on our list were shut down. Even the web services company Cloudflare, which had long defended its laissez-faire approach to political expression, finally <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/service-provider-boots-hate-site-off-the-internet">ended its relationship</a> with the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer last week.<br />
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“I can’t recall a time where the tech industry was so in step in their response to hate on their platforms,” said Oren Segal, director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism. “Stopping financial support to hate sites seems like a win-win for everyone.”<br />
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But ProPublica’s findings indicate that some tech companies with anti-hate policies may have failed to establish the monitoring processes needed to weed out hate sites. PayPal, the payment processor, has a policy against working with sites that use its service for “<a href="https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full">the promotion of hate, violence, [or] racial intolerance</a>.” Yet it was by far the top tech provider to the hate sites with donation links on 23 sites, or about one-third of those surveyed by ProPublica. In response to ProPublica’s inquiries, PayPal spokesman Justin Higgs said in a statement that the company “strives to conscientiously assess activity and review accounts reported to us.”<br />
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After Charlottesville, PayPal stopped accepting payments or donations for several high-profile white nationalist groups that participated in the march. It posted a <a href="https://www.paypal.com/stories/us/paypals-aup-remaining-vigilant-on-hate-violence-intolerance">statement</a> that it would remain “vigilant on hate, violence & intolerance.” It addresses each case individually, and “strives to navigate the balance between freedom of expression” and the “limiting and closing” of hate sites, it said.<br />
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After being contacted by ProPublica, Newsmax said it was unaware that the three sites that it had relationships with were considered hateful. “We will review the content of these sites and make any necessary changes after that review,” said Andy Brown, chief operating officer of Newsmax.<br />
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Amazon spokeswoman Angie Newman said the company had previously removed Jihad Watch and three other sites identified by ProPublica from its program sharing revenue for book sales, which is called Amazon Associates. When ProPublica pointed out that the sites still carried working links to the program, she said that it was their responsibility to remove the code. “They are no longer paid as an Associate regardless of what links are on their site once we remove them from the Associates Program,” she said.<br />
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Where to set the boundaries between hate speech and legitimate advocacy for perspectives on the edge of the political spectrum, and who should set them, are complex and difficult questions. Like other media outlets, <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-investigated-technology-companies-supporting-hate-sites">we relied in part</a> on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s public list of “<a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2017/active-hate-groups-2016">Active Hate Groups 2016</a>.” This list is controversial in some circles, with critics questioning whether the SPLC is too quick to brand organizations on the right as hate groups.<br />
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Still, the center does provide detailed explanations for many of its designations. For instance, the SPLC documents its decision to include the Family Research Council by citing the evangelical lobbying group’s promotion of discredited science and unsubstantiated attacks on gay and lesbian people. We also consulted a list from ADL, which is not public and that was provided to us for research purposes. <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-investigated-technology-companies-supporting-hate-sites">See our methodology here.</a><br />
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The sites that we identified from the ADL and SPLC lists vehemently denied that they are hate sites.<br />
“It is not hateful, racist or extremist to oppose jihad terror,” said Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch. He added that the true extremism was displayed by groups that seek to censor the Internet and that by asking questions about the tech platforms on his site, we were “aiding and abetting a quintessentially fascist enterprise.”<br />
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Spencer made these comments in response to questions emailed by ProPublica reporter Lauren Kirchner. Afterwards, Spencer <a href="https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/08/leftist-journalist-lauren-kirchner-of-propublica-threatens-jihad-watch">posted an item</a> on Jihad Watch alleging that “leftist ‘journalist’” Kirchner had threatened the site. He also posted Kirchner’s photo and email, as well as his correspondence with her. After being contacted by ProPublica, another anti-Islam activist, Pamela Geller, also <a href="http://pamelageller.com/2017/08/lauren-kirchner-propublica-fascism.html/">posted an attack</a> on Kirchner, calling her a “senior reporting troll.” Like Spencer, Geller was banned by the British Home Office; her eponymous site is on the SPLC and ADL lists.<br />
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Donations — and the ability to accept them online through PayPal and similar companies — are a lifeline for sites like Jihad Watch. In 2015, the nonprofit website disclosed that three quarters of its roughly $100,000 in revenues came from donations, according to publicly available tax records.<br />
In recent weeks, PayPal has been working to shut down donations to extremist sites. This week, it pulled the plug on VDARE.com, an anti-immigration website designated as “white nationalist” by the SPLC and as a hate site by the ADL. VDARE, which denies being white nationalist, immediately switched to its backup system, Stripe.<br />
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Stripe, a private company recently described by Bloomberg Businessweek as a <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-01/how-two-brothers-turned-seven-lines-of-code-into-a-9-2-billion-startup">$9 billion startup</a>, is unusual in not having a policy against working with hate sites. It does, however, prohibit financial transactions that support drugs, pornography and “<a href="https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses">psychic services</a>.” Stripe provided donation links for 10 sites, second only to PayPal on our list. Stripe did not respond to a request for comment.<br />
VDARE editor Peter Brimelow declared on his site that the PayPal shutdown was likely part of a purge by the “authoritarian Communist Left to punish anyone who disagrees with their anti-American violence against patriotic people.” He urged his readers to donate through other channels such as Bitcoins. “We need your help desperately,” he wrote. “We must have the resources to defend ourselves and our people.”<br />
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In 2015, VDARE received nearly all of its revenue — $267,038 out of total $293,663 — from donations, according to publicly available tax return forms that the Internal Revenue Service requires nonprofits to disclose.<br />
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Brimelow did not respond to our questions, instead characterizing ProPublica as the “Totalitarian Left.”<br />
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Some sites also supplement their donations with revenue from online advertising. For instance, SonsofLibertyMedia.com, which is on the SPLC list, generated about 10 percent of its revenue — $37,828 — from advertising in 2015, according to its tax documents.<br />
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The site, which describes itself as promoting a “Judeo-Christian ethic,” and recently posted an article declaring that a black activist protesting Confederate statues needed “<a href="http://sonsoflibertymedia.com/female-protester-brags-tearing-confederate-statue-hours-later-arrested/">a serious beat down</a>,” does not appear to attract advertisers directly.<br />
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Instead, Sons of Liberty benefits from a type of ad-piggybacking arrangement that is becoming more common in the tech industry. The website runs sponsored news articles from a company called Taboola, which shares ad revenues with it. Known for being <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29322578">at the forefront of “click-bait,”</a> Taboola places links on websites to articles about celebrities and popular culture.<br />
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Taboola’s <a href="https://www.taboola.com/terms-of-use-11022016">policy</a> prohibits working with sites that have “politically religious agendas” or use hate speech. “We strive to ensure the safety of our network but from time to time, unfortunately, mistakes can happen,” said a Taboola spokeswoman. “We will ask our Content Policy group to review this site again and take action if needed.”<br />
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Sons of Liberty founder Bradlee Dean said that he forwarded our questions to his attorney. The lawyer did not respond.<br />
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Hate sites can initiate relationships with tech companies with little scrutiny.<br />
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Any website can fill out an online form asking to join, for instance, Amazon’s network, and often can get approved instantly. Once a website has joined a tech network, it can quickly start earning money through advertising, donations, or content farms such as Taboola that share ad revenues with websites that distribute their articles.<br />
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Some companies, such as Newsmax, say that joining their <a href="https://help.newsmaxfeednetwork.com/docs/how-do-i-sign-up-for-an-account">ad network requires explicit prior approval</a>.<br />
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But, according to a former Newsmax employee, the only criterion for this approval was whether traffic to the site reached a minimum threshold. There was no content review. Salespeople were told to be aggressive in signing up publishing partners.<br />
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“We’d put our news feed on anybody’s page, anyone who was willing to listen,” he said, “it’s about email addresses, it’s about marketing, they don’t care about ultra conservative or left wing.”<br />
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Dylan Roof frequented a website described by the SPLC as “white nationalist.” He said in a <a href="http://time.com/3930993/dylann-roof-council-of-conservative-citizens-charleston/">manifesto posted online</a> that finding the website was a turning point in his life. He went on to murder nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. That year, <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/06/25/white-supremacist-websites-business-oversight-column/29184499/">USA Today found</a> Newsmax ads on the site.<br />
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They no longer appear there.<br />
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<em>ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their <a href="http://www.propublica.org/forms/newsletter_daily_email">newsletter</a></em>.<br />
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<link href="https://www.propublica.org/article/leading-tech-companies-help-extremist-sites-monetize-hate" rel="canonical"></link><script async="" src="https://pixel.propublica.org/pixel.js" type="text/javascript"></script>Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-46144099851051654642018-06-23T15:22:00.000-04:002018-06-23T15:22:26.872-04:00Why Our Brains See the World as 'Us' versus 'Them'<figure><img alt="File 20180620 137750 j7ktun.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224114/original/file-20180620-137750-j7ktun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C95%2C1104%2C654&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" />
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What are your in-groups and out-groups?
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/set-people-portraits-vector-illustration-1065559073">ksenia_bravo/Shutterstock.com</a></span>
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By <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/leslie-henderson-141651">Leslie Henderson</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/dartmouth-college-1720">Dartmouth College</a></em><div>
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Anti-immigrant policies, race-related demonstrations, Title IX disputes, affirmative action court cases, same-sex marriage litigation. <br />
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These issues are continually in the headlines. But even thoughtful articles on these subjects seem always to devolve to pitting warring factions against each other: black versus white, women versus men, gay versus straight. <br />
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At the most fundamental level of biology, people recognize the innate advantage of defining differences in species. But even within species, is there something in our neural circuits that leads us to find comfort in those like us and unease with those who may differ?<br />
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<h2>
Brain battle between distrust and reward</h2>
As in all animals, human brains balance two primordial systems. One includes a brain region called the amygdala that can generate fear and distrust of things that pose a danger – think predators or or being lost somewhere unknown. The other, a group of connected structures called the mesolimbic system, can give rise to pleasure and feelings of reward in response to things that make it more likely we’ll flourish and survive – think not only food, but also social pleasure, like trust.<br />
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But how do these systems interact to influence how we form our concepts of community?<br />
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<a href="https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/">Implicit association tests</a> can <a href="https://theconversation.com/measuring-the-implicit-biases-we-may-not-even-be-aware-we-have-74912">uncover the strength of unconscious associations</a>. Scientists have shown that many people harbor an implicit preference for their in-group – those like themselves – even when they show no outward or obvious signs of bias. For example, in studies whites perceive blacks as more violent and more apt to do harm, solely because they are black, and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615624492">this unconscious bias is evident</a> even toward black boys as young as five years old.<br />
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Brain imaging studies have found <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0167276">increased signaling in the amygdala</a> when people make millisecond judgments of “trustworthiness” of faces. That’s <a href="https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-neuro-060909-153230">too short a time to reflect conscious processes and likely reveal implicit fears</a>.<br />
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In one study, researchers tapped into negative black stereotypes by playing violent rap music for white participants who had no external biases. This kind of priming made it hard for the brain’s cortex <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsr052">to suppress amydgalar activation and implicit bias</a>. Usually these “executive control” regions can override the amygdala’s push toward prejudice when confronted with out-group members. <br />
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<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/64286/original/2f7nrxvc-1415721237.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/64286/original/2f7nrxvc-1415721237.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" /></a>
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<span class="caption">There are plenty of ways to define who’s in-group and who’s out-group.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Black_sheep-1.jpg">Jesus Solana</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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Whether or not such biases are learned or in some way hardwired, do they reflect conflicting activity of the amygdala versus the mesolimbic system? That is, how do our brains balance distrust and fear versus social reward when it comes to our perceptions of people not like us?<br />
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Research into how the amygdala responds as people assess the relative importance of differences, such as race, is nuanced and complex. Studies must take into account the differences between explicit and implicit measures of our attitudes, as well as the impact of cultural bias and individual variation. Still, research suggests that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3136">signaling within the amygdala</a> underlies the degree to which people are reluctant to trust others, especially regarding in-group versus out-group preference. It’s reasonable to conclude that much of the human instinct to distrust “others” can be traced to this part of the brain that’s important for <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2017.11.056">feelings of fear and anxiety</a>.<br />
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<h2>
Reward from ‘sameness’</h2>
As opposed to fear, distrust and anxiety, circuits of neurons in brain regions called the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.02.018">mesolimbic system are critical mediators of our sense of “reward</a>.” These neurons control the release of the transmitter dopamine, which is associated with an enhanced sense of pleasure. The addictive nature of some drugs, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2017.01.040">as well as</a> <a href="http://www.who.int/features/qa/gaming-disorder/en/">pathological gaming</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.02.006">gambling</a>, are correlated with increased dopamine in mesolimbic circuits. <br />
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In addition to dopamine itself, neurochemicals such as oxytocin can significantly <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2017.06.011">alter the sense of reward and pleasure</a>, especially in relationship to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2016.11.039">social interactions</a>, by modulating these mesolimbic circuits.<br />
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Methodological variations indicate <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2018.04.011">further study is needed</a> to fully understand the roles of these signaling pathways in people. That caveat acknowledged, there is much we can learn from the complex social interactions of other mammals.<br />
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The neural circuits that govern social behavior and reward <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.22735">arose early in vertebrate evolution</a> and are present in birds, reptiles, bony fishes and amphibians, as well as mammals. So while there is not a lot of information on reward pathway activity in people during in-group versus out-group social situations, there are some tantalizing results from <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.22735">studies on other mammals</a>.<br />
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For example, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2014.05.017">in a seminal paper</a>, neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth and his colleagues at Stanford combined genetics and behavioral tests with a cutting-edge approach <a href="https://www.neurophotometrics.com/what-is-fiber-photometry">called fiber photometry</a> where light can turn on and off specific cells. Using this process, the researchers were able to both stimulate and measure activity in identified neurons in the reward pathways, with an exquisite degree of precision. And they were able to do this in mice as they behaved in social settings.<br />
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/64281/original/nxr747dp-1415720190.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/64281/original/nxr747dp-1415720190.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" /></a>
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<span class="caption">Are you like me or not?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Field_Vole_by_Bruce_McAdam.jpg">Bruce McAdam</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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They showed that neural signaling in a specific group of these dopamine neurons within these mesolimbic reward loops are jazzed up when a mouse encounters a new mouse – one it’s never met before, but that is of its own genetic line. Is this dopamine reward reaction the mouse corollary of human in-group recognition?<br />
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What if the mouse were of a different genetic line with different external characteristics? What about with other small mammals such as voles who have dramatically different social relationships depending upon whether they are the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1152/physiol.00049.2005">type that lives in the prairie or in the mountains</a>? Is there the same positive mesolimbic signaling when a prairie vole encounters a mountain vole, or does this “out-group” difference tip the balance toward the amygdala and expressing fear and distrust?<br />
Scientists don’t know how these or even more subtle differences in animals might affect how their neural circuits promote social responses. But by studying them, researchers may better understand how human brain systems contribute to the implicit and unconscious bias people feel toward those in our own species who are nonetheless somewhat different.<br />
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<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224076/original/file-20180620-137717-1afw45l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224076/original/file-20180620-137717-1afw45l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" /></a>
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<span class="caption">Higher brain functions can override more primitive instincts.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/brain-cerebrum-anatomy-cross-section-103381424?src=csl_recent_image-3">CLIPAREA l Custom media/Shutterstock.com</a></span>
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<h2>
Neural signaling is not destiny</h2>
Even if evolution has tilted the balance toward our brains rewarding “like” and distrusting “difference,” this need not be destiny. Activity in our brains is malleable, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2010.02.005">allowing higher-order circuits in the cortex</a> to modify the more primitive fear and reward systems to produce different behavioral outcomes.<br />
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Author <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en">Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie</a> eloquently states that “the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” In other words, stereotypes reduce those not exactly like us to only their differences.<br />
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So why would people put up with the discomfort that differences evoke, rather than always selecting the easy reward with sameness? In his book “<a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/8757.html">The Difference</a>,” social scientist <a href="https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/scottepage/">Scott Page</a> provides mathematical evidence that although diverse individuals are less trusting of one other, when working together, they are more productive. <br />
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From cracking the Enigma code in World War II to predicting stock prices, Page provides data to demonstrate that a diversity of perspectives produces better innovation and better solutions than the smartest set of like-minded experts. In short, diversity trumps ability. And diversity significantly <a href="https://hbr.org/2018/01/how-and-where-diversity-drives-financial-performance">enhances the level of innovation</a> in organizations across the globe.<br />
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So acknowledge the amygdalar distrust that differences evoke. Then, while you may not get that same boost of dopamine, recognize that when it comes to what will promote the greatest good, working with those “not like us” has its own rewards.<br />
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<img alt="The Conversation" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98661/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" width="1" /><em>This is an updated version of an <a href="https://theconversation.com/people-like-us-how-our-brains-view-others-33974">article originally published on Nov. 12, 2014</a>.</em><br />
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/leslie-henderson-141651">Leslie Henderson</a>, Professor of Physiology and Neurobiology, Dean of Faculty Affairs, Geisel School of Medicine, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/dartmouth-college-1720">Dartmouth College</a></em><br />
<br />
This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com/">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-our-brains-see-the-world-as-us-versus-them-98661">original article</a>.<br />
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Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-90927560831425380402018-06-23T15:11:00.000-04:002018-06-23T15:11:27.279-04:00Jared Kushner’s Grandmother Bemoaned the “Closed Doors" That Faced Refugees to America<h1>
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<i>This article was co-published by ProPublica and The Washington Post</i><br />
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Way before Jared Kushner became internationally famous by moving into the White House to work for his father-in-law Donald Trump, those of us who live in New Jersey knew the family was an amazing story of immigrant success.<br />
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Jared Kushner’s paternal grandparents, Holocaust survivors Joseph and Rae Kushner, came to the United States in 1949 as impoverished Eastern European refugees and begat a family whose office buildings, apartment complexes and philanthropic efforts are important parts of the business and social landscapes in New Jersey and elsewhere.<br />
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Yes, there are scandals and feuds besetting parts of the family, and Jared’s father Charles racked up some prison time. But the family’s rise from refugees to titans is an example of what can happen when people are admitted into this country, work hard and prosper.<br />
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I got curious about the Kushner history after Jared invoked his immigrant forbears in his recent speech at the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. “I keep a photo of them on my desk” in the White House, he said.<br />
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As a grandson of Jewish Eastern European immigrants myself — my late father and Kushner’s late grandmother even had the same birth name, Slonimsky, but spelled it differently — I was impressed that Kushner remembers his roots and discusses his origins publicly.<br />
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But I wondered how — or if — Kushner could reconcile his father-in-law’s “keep ’em out” immigration philosophy with the story of his paternal grandparents, who spent 3 1/2 years in a displaced persons camp in Italy before being admitted to the U.S. In a 1982 interview given by the late Rae Kushner to a Holocaust research center, Jared’s grandmother talks about how wrong she felt it was for the U.S. to let people like her and her husband languish in displaced persons camps for years awaiting permission to enter the country.<br />
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I was especially taken by this portion: “The day after we got married [in Budapest, Hungary], we smuggled ourselves over the border into Italy,” Rae Kushner said. “This was our honeymoon. In Italy, we sat in a displaced persons camp. It was like being in the ghetto again. … Nobody wanted to take us in. So for 3 1/2 years we waited until we finally got a visa to come to the United States.”<br />
Later on, she says that, “For the Jews, the doors were closed. We never understood that. Even President Roosevelt kept the doors closed. Why?”<br />
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The answer, of course, can be found by looking at some less-than-inspiring U.S. history. The Immigration Act of 1924 set stringent limits on the number of people the U.S. would admit from Poland (where Joseph and Rae Kushner were from) and other Eastern European countries. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t seek to make exceptions to those rules — perhaps because, in addition to the immigration quotas, there was a nasty outfit called the America First Committee. Its prominent members included Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator, and its supporters included Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semite who gained huge popularity as “the Radio Priest from Royal Oak, Michigan.” The committee tried to keep the U.S. out of World War II and blamed American Jews for supposedly pushing Roosevelt to have our country enter the hostilities. The committee folded after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, but its influence lingered.<br />
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It all added up to huge impediments for Jewish refugees to enter the United States. I wanted to know how Kushner reconciles his family immigration history with his father-in-law’s immigration policies. I also wanted to find out if Kushner knew the history of “America First,” which my children, who are members of Kushner’s generation, said they hadn’t heard about until I mentioned it to them recently.<br />
So I sent the White House press office an email outlining some of the major elements in this column, asking for comment or a conversation. I never heard back.<br />
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Perhaps Kushner opposes large parts of his father-in-law’s immigration program, and has been opposing it privately. But it’s also possible that Kushner has no problem reconciling his family history with Trump’s policies. Rae Kushner was an eloquent, plainspoken critic of U.S. immigration policies. Her grandson Jared’s public silence speaks volumes, too, in its own way.<br />
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<em>ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their <a href="http://www.propublica.org/forms/newsletter_daily_email">newsletter</a></em>.<br />
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<br />
<link href="https://www.propublica.org/article/jared-kushner-grandparents-refugees-america-immigration" rel="canonical"></link><script async="" src="https://pixel.propublica.org/pixel.js" type="text/javascript"></script>Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-4928653216892185232018-06-23T13:16:00.002-04:002018-06-23T13:16:19.139-04:00Preventing Crimes Against Humanity in the US<figure><img alt="File 20180621 137750 1s7b2be.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224335/original/file-20180621-137750-1s7b2be.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" />
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Immigrant rights advocates speak against Trump’s policies in New Mexico.
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Russell Contreras, File</span></span>
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By <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/nadia-rubaii-279020">Nadia Rubaii</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/binghamton-university-state-university-of-new-york-2252">Binghamton University, State University of New York</a></em> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/max-pensky-392826">Max Pensky</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/binghamton-university-state-university-of-new-york-2252">Binghamton University, State University of New York</a></em><div>
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<br />
There are <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-reynosa/why-comparing-donald-trum_b_11097020.html">those who say</a> that comparing President Donald Trump’s rhetoric to that of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/25/the-theory-of-political-leadership-that-donald-trump-shares-with-adolf-hitler">Adolf Hitler</a> is alarmist, unfair and counterproductive. <br />
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And yet, there has been no dearth of such comparisons nearly one and a half years into his term. <br />
Many commentators have also drawn parallels between the conduct and language of Trump supporters and <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-right-hand-salute_us_56db50d8e4b03a405678e27a">Holocaust-era Nazis</a>. Recent news of ICE agents <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/19/families-border-separations-trump-immigration-policy">separating immigrant families</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/18/17474986/family-separation-border-video">housing children in cages</a> have generated <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/jews-separated-from-families-during-holocaust-condemn-us-border-policy/">further comparisons</a> by world leaders, as well as Holocaust survivors and scholars. Trump’s use of the word <a href="http://time.com/5316087/donald-trump-immigration-infest/">“infest”</a> to refer to immigrants coming to the U.S. is particularly striking. Nazis referred to infestations of Jewish vermin, and Rwandan Hutu’s labeled Tutsi as cockroaches.<br />
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In August 2017, in the wake of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/us/charlottesville-virginia-overview.html">Charlottesville</a> violence, the president used a familiar <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/09/10/moral-equivalence-and-donald-trump/?utm_term=.3c94a721693a">rhetorical strategy</a> for signaling support to violent groups. He referenced violence on “<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-on-charlottesville-i-think-theres-blame-on-both-sides/">both sides</a>,” implying moral equivalence between protesters calling for the removal of Confederate statues and those asserting white supremacy. His comments gave white supremacists and neo-Nazis the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/neo-nazi-daily-stormer-trump-charlottesville_us_59905c7ee4b08a2472750701">implied approval</a> of the president of the United States.<br />
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Many of these groups explicitly <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/national-socialist-movement">seek to eliminate from the U.S.</a> African-Americans, Jews, immigrants and other groups, and are willing to do so through violence. As co-directors of Binghamton University’s <a href="https://www.binghamton.edu/i-gmap/">Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention</a>, we emphasize the importance of recognizing and responding to early warning signs of potential genocide and other atrocity crimes. Usually, government officials, scholars and nongovernmental organizations look for these signals in <a href="http://genocidewatch.net/alerts-2/new-alerts/">other parts of the world</a> – Syria, Sudan or Burma. <br />
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But what about the U.S.? <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/us/politics/trump-immigration-children-executive-order.html">President Trump’s executive order</a> halting family separations provides Congress an opportunity to act. How the legislators respond will be an important indicator of where the U.S. is headed.<br />
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Is it possible in the US?</h2>
The term “genocide” invokes images of <a href="http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/auschwitzgaschambers.html">gas chambers</a> the Nazis used to exterminate Jews during World War II, the Khmer Rouge <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/08/07/why-the-world-should-not-forget-khmer-rouge-and-the-killing-fields-of-cambodia/?utm_term=.afd11df0ea84">killing fields</a> of Cambodia and thousands of Tutsi bodies in the <a href="http://partners.nytimes.com/library/world/africa/052194rwanda-genocide.html">Kagera River</a> in Rwanda. On that scale and in that manner, genocide is highly unlikely in the United States.<br />
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But genocidal violence can happen in the U.S. It has happened. Organized policies passed by elected U.S. lawmakers have targeted both <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/indian-treaties">Native Americans</a> and <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.org/interactive/slavery-united-states/">African-Americans</a>. Public policies defined these groups as not fully human and not protected by basic laws. Current policies treat immigrants the same way.<br />
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The threat of <a href="https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%2078/volume-78-i-1021-english.pdf">genocide</a> is present wherever a country’s political leadership tolerates or even encourages acts with an intent to destroy a racial, ethnic, national or religious group, whether in whole or in part. While genocide is unlikely in the United States, atrocities which amount to mass violations of human rights and crimes against humanity are evident. The U.N. defines <a href="http://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/crimes-against-humanity.html">crimes against humanity</a> as any “deliberate act, typically as part of a systematic campaign, that causes human suffering or death on a large scale.” Unlike genocide, it does not need to include the actual destruction or intent to destroy a group.<br />
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According to <a href="https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/06/19/dallas-holocaust-survivorsees-reflection-faces-children-separated-parents">Holocaust survivors</a>, the current <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2018/jun/19/children-separated-from-parents-cry-at-us-detention-centre-audio">visual and audio accounts</a> of children separated from their parents in border detention facilities reminds them of practices of the Nazis in ghettos and concentration and extermination camps.<br />
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The Holocaust took the international community by surprise. In hindsight, there were many signs. In fact, scholars have learned <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/confront-genocide/how-to-prevent-genocide/early-warning-project">a great deal</a> about the danger signals for the risk of large-scale violence against vulnerable groups.<br />
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In 1996, the founder and first president of the U.S.-based advocacy group <a href="http://www.genocidewatch.org/">Genocide Watch</a>, <a href="http://www.genocidewatch.org/aboutus/bydrgregorystanton.html">Gregory H. Stanton</a>, introduced a model that identified <a href="http://www.genocidewatch.org/genocide/8stagesofgenocide.html">eight stages</a> – <a href="http://genocidewatch.org/genocide/tenstagesofgenocide.html">later increased to 10</a> – that societies frequently pass through on the way to genocidal violence and other mass atrocities. Stanton’s model has its <a href="https://africacheck.org/2016/09/15/analysis-genocide-watch-thin-transparency-methodology/">critics</a>. Like any such model, it can’t be applied in all cases and can’t predict the future. But it has been influential in our understanding of the sources of mass violence in <a href="http://makuruki.rw/en/spip.php?article1344">Rwanda</a>, <a href="http://time.com/4089276/burma-rohingya-genocide-report-documentary/">Burma</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/03/15/the-u-s-house-just-voted-unanimously-that-the-islamic-state-commits-genocide-now-what/">Syria</a> and other nations.<br />
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The 10 stages of genocide</h2>
The early stages of Stanton’s model include “classification” and “symbolization.” These are processes in which groups of people are saddled with labels or imagined characteristics that encourage active discrimination. These stages emphasize “us-versus-them” thinking, and define a group as “the other.”<br />
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As Stanton makes clear, these processes are universally human. They do not necessarily result in a progression toward mass violence. But they prepare the ground for the next stages: active “discrimination,” “dehumanization,” “organization” and “polarization.” These middle stages may be <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=dn8nH-TFEyYC&pg=PA63&lpg=PA63&dq=dehumanization+as+predictor+of+genocide&source=bl&ots=1NcxXXnKTO&sig=65w1626sw7v2hAC5NjhZg8Eatco&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi6_7fd4d7VAhVMxCYKHYTVDFA4ChDoAQglMAA#v=onepage&q=dehumanization%20as%20predictor%20of%20genocide&f=false">warning signs</a> of an increasing risk of large-scale violence.<br />
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Where are we now?</h2>
Trump’s political rhetoric helped propel him into office by playing on the fears and resentments of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/donald-trump-and-the-rise-of-white-identity-in-politics-67037">electorate</a>. He has used derogatory <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/9-outrageous-things-donald-trump-has-said-about-latinos_us_55e483a1e4b0c818f618904b">labels for certain religious and ethnic groups</a>, hinted at <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/03/politics/trump-conspiracy-theories/index.html">dark conspiracies</a>, winked at <a href="http://mashable.com/2016/03/12/trump-rally-incite-violence/#4xz9X6b1Tiqp">violence</a> and appealed to <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20170427/100-days-trumps-america">nativist and nationalist sentiments</a>. He has promoted discriminatory policies including <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/us/politics/trump-travel-ban.html?_r=0">travel restrictions</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/26/trump-just-eviscerated-his-claim-to-being-an-lgbt-ally/">gender-based exclusions</a>. <br />
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Classification, symbolization, discrimination and <a href="https://humanrightspolicy.org/2017/05/07/president-trumps-dehumanizing-rhetoric-represents-a-lingering-american-problem/">dehumanization</a> of Muslims, Mexicans, African-Americans, immigrants, the media and even the political opposition may be leading to polarization, stage six of Stanton’s model. <br />
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Stanton writes that polarization further <a href="http://www.genocidewatch.org/images/8StagesBriefingpaper.pdf">drives wedges</a> between social groups through extremism. Hate groups find an opening to send messages that further dehumanize and demonize targeted groups. Political moderates are edged out of the political arena, and extremist groups attempt to move from the former political fringes into mainstream politics.<br />
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Do Trump’s implied claims of a moral equivalence between neo-Nazis and counter protesters in Charlottesville move us closer to the stage of polarization? <br />
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Does housing children in cages at border detention facilities in the name of deterrence represent a deepening dehumanization?<br />
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Certainly, there are reasons for deep concern. Moral equivalence – the claim that when both “sides” in a conflict use similar tactics, then one “side” must be as morally good or bad as the other – is what logicians call an <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Informal-Logical-Fallacies-Brief-Guide/dp/0761854339">informal fallacy</a>. Philosophers take their red pens to student essays that commit it. But when a president is called on to address his nation in times of political turmoil, the claim of moral equivalence is a lot more than an undergraduate mistake. <br />
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Similarly, when warehousing children in cages and tent cities is justified as a policy of deterrence, this is more than an academic policy debate. We suggest this is a deliberate effort to dehumanize and polarize, and an invitation to what may come next.<br />
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While the U.S. may not be on the path to genocide in the sense of mass killings, it clearly is engaging in other crimes against humanity – deliberately and systematically causing human suffering on a large scale and violating <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/world/americas/us-un-migrant-children-families.html">fundamental human rights</a>. <br />
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<h2>
Responding and preventing</h2>
Polarization is a warning of the increased risk of violence, not a guarantee. Stanton’s model also argues that every stage offers opportunities for prevention. Extremist groups can have their financial assets frozen. Hate crimes and hate atrocities can be more consistently investigated and prosecuted. Moderate politicians, human rights activists, representatives of threatened groups and members of the independent media can be provided increased security. <br />
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Encouraging responses have come from the international community, the electorate, business leaders and government officials. German Chancellor Angela Merkel <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/world/europe/charlottesville-far-right-trump-merkel.html">condemned the racist and far-right violence</a> displayed in Charlottesville, and U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/theresa-may-joins-cross-party-criticism-donald-trump-charlottesville-speech">harshly criticized</a> Trump’s use of moral equivalence. More recently, Pope Francis and the governments of various countries have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/pope-francis-criticizes-trumps-family-separation-policy-on-migrants-says-populism-is-not-the-solution/2018/06/20/65c15102-7472-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f28d41218380">spoken out</a> about U.S. family separation practices. <br />
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The recent <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/06/20/621726939/u-s-pulls-out-of-u-n-human-rights-council">withdrawal of the U.S. from the U.N. Human Rights Council</a> suggests that international pressure may not be effective. Domestic actors may have more luck.<br />
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Individuals and groups are following the recommendations presented in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/com_ten_ways_to_fight_hate_2017_web.pdf">guide to combating hate</a> in supporting victims, speaking up, pressuring leaders and staying engaged. Business leaders have also <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/08/14/ken-frazier-trump-charlottesville-response/">expressed their discontent</a> with Trump’s polarizing statements and actions. The American Academy of Pediatrics has gone so far as to label the immigrant family separations a form of <a href="http://thehill.com/latino/392790-american-academy-of-pediatrics-president-trumps-family-separation-policy-is-child">mass child abuse</a>. <br />
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Local governments are struggling to maintain their status as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/us/judge-blocks-trump-sanctuary-cities.html">sanctuary cities</a> or <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/03/10/aclus-people-power-project-launch-cities-resistance-effort">cities of resistance</a>. These cities try to provide refuge for immigrants despite <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/28/sanctuary-city-raid-deportation-trump-immigration">ICE raids and arrests</a>. The general public and politicians of both parties and at all levels are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/19/child-separation-camps-trump-border-policy-backlash-republicans">speaking out</a> about the separations, and it appears they may be heard. <br />
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In our assessment, these actions represent essential forms of resistance to the movement toward escalating atrocities. The <a href="http://time.com/5317703/trump-family-separation-policy-executive-order/">executive order</a> issued by President Trump this week provides the elected representatives in Congress with an important opportunity. Will they be complicit in or act to prevent further atrocities?<br />
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<img alt="The Conversation" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98679/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" width="1" />It also provides the general public an opportunity to strongly assert a commitment to human rights. How Congress responds will be a clear indicator of whether our democratic checks and balances are functioning to stop atrocities from escalating, or whether we are continuing down a dangerous path.<br />
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/nadia-rubaii-279020">Nadia Rubaii</a>, Co-Director, Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, and Associate Professor of Public Administration, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/binghamton-university-state-university-of-new-york-2252">Binghamton University, State University of New York</a></em> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/max-pensky-392826">Max Pensky</a>, Co-Director, Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, Professor, Department of Philosophy, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/binghamton-university-state-university-of-new-york-2252">Binghamton University, State University of New York</a></em><br />
<br />
This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com/">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/preventing-crimes-against-humanity-in-the-us-98679">original article</a>.<br />
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Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-80438399503969733972018-06-22T20:14:00.000-04:002018-06-22T20:14:34.137-04:00Children Have Been Separated From Their Families for Generations – Why Trump's Policy Was Different<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIxV9cVu9hvA6uytm1SAaEDrPiTIQxPv8_pHWk6B412FnoyMq8FuxS7RNQxf4UH-6xUytTBTWrwTMbG46kNFeM5jRPm50SqFZov3oj_tY8IqG7LrwhYP10WCRj0vNS2W6xKZA8VxoAbjTw/s1600/kids2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="925" data-original-width="1388" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIxV9cVu9hvA6uytm1SAaEDrPiTIQxPv8_pHWk6B412FnoyMq8FuxS7RNQxf4UH-6xUytTBTWrwTMbG46kNFeM5jRPm50SqFZov3oj_tY8IqG7LrwhYP10WCRj0vNS2W6xKZA8VxoAbjTw/s640/kids2.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">US Customs and Border Patrol</td></tr>
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BY <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/gordon-lynch-501268">Gordon Lynch</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-kent-1248">University of Kent</a></em>
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After weeks of mounting pressure, Donald Trump signed an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/us/politics/trump-immigration-children-executive-order.html">executive order</a> on June 20 to stop his administration’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/trump-and-sessions-can-end-immigrant-family-separations-without-congress-help-98599">policy of separating migrant children</a> from their parents at the southern border of the US. Putting the policy into a wider historical context of state-sanctioned policies of child separation helps to understand why some aspects of it were remarkably distinctive – and caused such international outrage. <br />
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From the closing decades of the 19th century, <a href="https://www.academia.edu/36691325/Saving_the_child_for_the_sake_of_the_nation_moral_framing_and_the_civic_moral_and_religious_redemption_of_children">an array of policies emerged</a> across the Anglophone world which challenged assumptions about parents’ inalienable rights to their children. A transnational child protection movement led to the formation of child protection societies, beginning with the <a href="https://www.nyspcc.org/about-the-new-york-society-for-the-prevention-of-cruelty-to-children/history/">New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children</a> in 1875. New legislation followed in the UK, Canada and Australia allowing the removal of children from parents on grounds of cruelty or neglect. <br />
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Alongside this, various forms of welfare intervention developed which removed children from their families, with varying degrees of parental consent. This was done on the basis that children would be placed in new environments better suited to their moral, religious and civic development. <br />
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These included policies that sought to place children from indigenous communities in institutions in which they could be “Christianised and civilised”. This led to “Indian” residential schools <a href="http://nctr.ca/map.php">in Canada</a> and <a href="https://www.pbs.org/video/unspoken-americas-native-american-boarding-schools-oobt1r/">the United States</a>. It also sparked programmes which moved unaccompanied children around within their own country, such as the <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo3630532.html">American “orphan trains”</a>, or to other countries, such as the <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/remembering-child-migration-9781472591128/">UK child migration schemes</a> where children were sent to Canada or Australia. Other forms of residential incarceration were also introduced, such as <a href="http://www.childabusecommission.ie/rpt/ExecSummary.php">the industrial school system in Ireland</a>. <br />
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224176/original/file-20180621-137741-atk60h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" />
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<span class="caption">An ‘Indian’ residential school in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1908.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system#/media/File:Indian_school.jpg">Library and Archives Canada via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<h2>
Sacred bonds broken</h2>
These initiatives continued just as ideas of the sacred emotional ties between parent and child were becoming <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/5452.html">more pervasive in society</a>. However, state-sanctioned policies of family separation, usually delivered by leading charities and religious organisations, operated on the basis that such sacred bonds need not be respected for certain types of parents. These extended far beyond cases of child cruelty to judgements made about the suitability of a parent based on their ethnicity, class, lifestyle or marital status.<br />
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While the history of these welfare initiatives is complex and diverse, two common characteristics stand out. First, moral justifications were made for them with claims that the child’s social background – including the relationship with their parents – was a harmful influence and that removal of the child was necessary for saving them as a future citizen. <a href="http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719078941/">Moral symbolism</a> of the polluting home and the rescue of the child from darkness to light proliferated in publicity materials and public statements of support for their work. <br />
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Second, in almost all cases – apart from in the US – such welfare initiatives have become a focus of national shame and regret, expressed through <a href="https://www.iicsa.org.uk/news/inquiry-publishes-child-migration-programmes-report">inquiries</a> and <a href="http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=905">truth commissions</a>, <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8531664.stm">public apologies</a> and, in some cases, <a href="http://www.rirb.ie/">financial compensation</a>.<br />
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In some respects the current policy by the Trump administration reflects aspects of this history. Similar dehumanising moral language about parents used to justify child separation in the past has been reflected in statements made by US officials that describe migrants as criminals. As Trump put it in one tweet, they <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1009071403918864385">threaten to “infest” American society</a>. <br />
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Scale and harm</h2>
In other respects, there are striking differences. The sheer scale of reported separations – <a href="https://apnews.com/dc0c9a5134d14862ba7c7ad9a811160e">2,300 migrant children</a> are said to have been removed from parents in six weeks – is extraordinary compared to previous state-sanctioned policies of separation. If rates of removal had continued at this level, the policy would have led to numbers of separations of children from parents in five years that other historical policies took several decades to realise. <br />
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Compared to historical welfare interventions, this US policy also lacked any moral claim that the separations were for the good of the child. It functioned simply as a punitive measure against immigration, ignoring evidence of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/what-separation-from-parents-does-to-children-the-effect-is-catastrophic/2018/06/18/c00c30ec-732c-11e8-805c-4b67019fcfe4_story.html?utm_term=.7ea30788ab50">traumatic effects of separation</a> from parents for children. This may help to explain why it has received much greater public censure than previous policies which received varying degrees of public toleration or support on the basis of claims that they benefited the children involved.<br />
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Another contrast concerns the speed and extent to which public opposition to the policy grew. Historically, state-sanctioned policies of child separation have often faced public criticisms and periodic scandals. But despite evidence of their harmful effects the policies usually persisted for decades, in part because public opinion has too readily deferred to the positive moral intent that governments and voluntary organisations claimed had driven the separations. <br />
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An example of this was the finding of the <a href="https://canadianhistory.ca/natives/timeline/1900s/1907-the-bryce-report-on-health-conditions-in-residential-schools">Bryce Report of 1907</a> which revealed that in the Indian residential schools in Canada, the mortality rate of indigenous children from tuberculosis was 24% – double that of the wider indigenous population. Support for the missionary aims of this work meant, however, that <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10767-013-9132-0">far from being closed down</a> the residential school system subsequently expanded and did not undergo any significant reforms until the 1960s.<br />
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By comparison, public opposition to the Trump administration’s family separation policy has grown rapidly through print and broadcast media no longer characterised by such deference. <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1008953199963746304">Social media</a> has also played an integral part in this process. Visual records of previous state-sanctioned policies of child separation were usually made by those supporting them, such as publicity photographs of British child migrants smiling and waving <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/stolen-childhoods-20110610-1fwru.html">into the camera</a> before setting off overseas. <br />
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By contrast, the widespread circulation of images and <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/children-separated-from-parents-border-patrol-cbp-trump-immigration-policy">audio files</a> capturing the distress of migrant children has played an <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10767-013-9132-0">important role in mobilising public opinion</a> against the moral symbolism that dehumanises migrants and legitimises such separations. <br />
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<img alt="The Conversation" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98587/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" width="1" />Judged in this historical context, if Trump’s policy proves shortlived, it is because its exceptional scale and brutality lacked sufficient moral legitimacy in American public opinion to outweigh the powerful images of children’s suffering circulated in the media. For those children who have already been separated from parents – uncertain how they will be reunified – this will come as little consolation.<br />
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/gordon-lynch-501268">Gordon Lynch</a>, Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-kent-1248">University of Kent</a></em><br />
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This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com/">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/children-have-been-separated-from-their-families-for-generations-why-trumps-policy-was-different-98587">original article</a>.<br />
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<br />Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-32782032016882775302018-06-22T12:09:00.000-04:002018-06-22T12:09:47.616-04:00John McCain Helped Build a Country That No Longer Reflects His Values<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimlGqQYVHq6u7CGLcjrnxmwVnAMefN-w0Ej3oBiB2oEd7J5GtvF23F3Az2Lb0JdV2OR6WeKApdZ8s_x3ttQn94NX_L-ZP0f89dwGxZ3-adg_sntTk5orQqwFvmjWR6_KdPxenlTM1dyIBa/s1600/Mc.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="662" data-original-width="1600" height="264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimlGqQYVHq6u7CGLcjrnxmwVnAMefN-w0Ej3oBiB2oEd7J5GtvF23F3Az2Lb0JdV2OR6WeKApdZ8s_x3ttQn94NX_L-ZP0f89dwGxZ3-adg_sntTk5orQqwFvmjWR6_KdPxenlTM1dyIBa/s640/Mc.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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By <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/elizabeth-sherman-485056">Elizabeth Sherman</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/american-university-school-of-public-affairs-3417">American University School of Public Affairs</a></em>
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Arizona Sen. John McCain – <a href="https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2018/04/02/john-mccain-family-navy-officers-destined-u-s-naval-academy/538429001/">scion of Navy brass</a>, flyboy turned <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/sorry-trump-story-john-mccain-war-hero-355617">Vietnam war hero</a> and tireless defender of American global leadership – now faces <a href="http://time.com/5260113/john-mccain-health-book/">terminal brain cancer</a>. <br />
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I am a <a href="https://www.american.edu/spa/faculty/esherman.cfm">scholar of American politics</a>. And I believe that, regardless of his storied biography and personal charm, three powerful trends in American politics thwarted McCain’s lifelong ambition to be president. They were the rise of the Christian right, partisan polarization and declining public support for foreign wars.<br />
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Republican McCain was a <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/227647-sen-mccain-huddles-with-democrats-on-campaign-finance-reform">champion of bipartisan legislating</a>, an approach that served him and the Senate well. But as political divides have grown, bipartisanship has fallen out of favor. <br />
Most recently, <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/387037-mccain-urges-senate-to-reject-haspels-nomination">McCain opposed Gina Haspel</a> as CIA director for “her refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality” and her role in it. Having survived brutal torture for five years as a prisoner of war, McCain maintained a resolute voice against U.S. policies permitting so-called “enhanced interrogations.” Nevertheless, his appeals failed to rally sufficient support to slow, much less derail, her appointment. <br />
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Days later, a White House aide said McCain’s opposition to Haspel didn’t matter because <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/5/13/17349424/john-mccain-cancer-kelly-sadler-sarah-sanders">“he’s dying anyway.”</a> That disparaging remark and the refusal of the White House to condemn it revealed how deeply the president’s hostile attitude toward McCain and everything he stands for had permeated the executive office. <br />
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So McCain ends his career honorably and bravely, but with hostility from the White House, marginal influence in the Republican-controlled Senate, and a public less receptive to the positions he has long embodied. <br />
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The outlier</h2>
McCain’s first run for the presidency in 2000 captured the imagination of the public and the press, whom he wryly <a href="https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2018/04/02/john-mccain-2000-republican-presidential-campaign-george-w-bush-arizona-senator/537969001/">referred to as “my base.”</a> His self-confident <a href="https://youtu.be/T5iexUtP4Vc">“maverick” persona</a> appealed to a more secular, moderate constituency who like him, might be constitutionally opposed to the growing political alignment between the <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252504967_Of_Movements_and_Metaphors_The_Co-Evolution_of_the_Christian_Right_and_the_GOP">religious right and the Republican Party</a>. <br />
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McCain enthusiastically bucked his party and steered his “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/11/us/2000-campaign-quest-birth-death-straight-talk-express-gamble-gamble.html">Straight Talk Express</a>” through the GOP primaries with a no-holds-barred <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000228/aponline165646_000.htm?noredirect=on">attack on Pat Robertson</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/29/us/2000-campaign-arizona-senator-mccain-denounces-political-tactics-christian-right.html">Rev. Jerry Falwell</a>. The two were conservative icons and leaders of the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority. <br />
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McCain branded Robertson and Falwell “<a href="http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0002/28/se.01.html">agents of intolerance</a>” and “empire builders.” He charged that they used religion to subordinate the interests of working people. He said their religion served a business goal and accused them of shaming <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/29/us/the-2000-campaign-excerpt-from-mccain-s-speech-on-religious-conservatives.html">“our faith, our party, and our country.”</a> That message earned McCain a primary victory in New Hampshire but his campaign capsized in South Carolina, where Republican voters launched George W. Bush, the stalwart evangelical, on his path to a presidential victory in 2000 against Democratic nominee, Vice President Al Gore. <br />
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By 2008, McCain saw <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/campaign-2008/articles/2008/09/24/the-evangelical-vote-how-big-is-it-really">the political clout</a> of white, born-again, evangelical Christians. By then, they <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the-faithful-voted-a-preliminary-2016-analysis/">comprised 26 percent of the electorate</a>. Bowing to political winds, he adopted a more conciliatory approach. <br />
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McCain’s willingness to defend America as a “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/29/us/politics/29cnd-mccain.html">Christian nation</a>” and his controversial choice of Alaska <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/us/politics/30veep.html">Gov. Sarah Palin</a>, an enthusiastic standard bearer for the Christian right, as his running mate, signaled the electoral power of a less tolerant, more absolutist “values-based” politics. <br />
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McCain’s about-face reveals a political pragmatist willing to make peace with the Christian right and accept their ability to make or break his last attempt at the presidency. <br />
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His strategy reflected his tendency to abandon principles if they threatened his quest for the presidency. Having railed eight years prior against the hypocrisy of the right-wing religious leadership, McCain may have felt some <a href="http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0002/28/se.01.html">personal discomfort kowtowing</a> to the dictates of self-appointed moral authorities. But the electorate had changed since then, and McCain showed he was willing to shift his position to accommodate their beliefs. <br />
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The primary that year also required an outright <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/07/us/2000-campaign-republicans-mccain-renews-attack-ads-bush-talks-race-tolerance.html">appeal to independents</a> and even crossover Democrats. That would potentially provide enough votes to boost him past George W. Bush, whose campaign had already <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/21/us/the-2000-campaign-the-christian-right-evangelicals-found-a-believer-in-bush.html">expressed allegiance</a> to the conservative religious agenda. <br />
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In 2008, Mitt Romney, a devout Mormon considered <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-campaign-evangelicals-idUKBRE83T1CU20120430">religiously suspect by many evangelicals</a>, emerged as McCain’s main rival for the nomination.<br />
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Sensing an opportunity to establish a winning coalition, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/us/politics/09mccain.html">McCain jettisoned his former objections</a> to the political influence of the religious right, shifting from antagonism to accommodation. In doing so, McCain revealed his flexibility again on principles that might fatally undermine his overriding ambition – winning the presidency. <br />
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In fact, the <a href="https://ssrn.com/abstract=1903153">incorporation of the religious right</a> into the Republican Party represented but one facet of a more consequential development. That was the fiercely ideological <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/packages/political-polarization/">partisan polarization</a> that has come to dominate the political system. <br />
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The lonely Republican</h2>
Rough parity between the parties since 2000 has intensified the electoral battles for Congress and the presidency. It has <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/article182599481.html">supercharged the fundraising</a> machines on both sides. And it has nullified the “regular order” of <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/books/its-even-worse-than-it-looks-how-the-american-constitutional-system-collided-with-the-new-politics-of-extremism/">congressional hearings, debates and compromise</a>, as party leaders scheme for policy wins. <br />
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Fueled by highly engaged activists, interest groups and donors <a href="https://www.press.umich.edu/4882255/campaign_finance_and_political_polarization">known as “policy demanders</a>,” partisan polarization has overwhelmed moderates in our political system. McCain was a bipartisan problem-solver and was willing to compromise with Democrats to pass <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Bipartisan_Campaign_Reform_Act">campaign finance reform</a> in 2002. He worked with the other side to <a href="https://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=a7591ed4-a6be-42c1-b052-9608391f21ef">normalize relations with Vietnam</a> in 1995. And he joined with Democrats to pass <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2018/02/04/new-bipartisan-immigration-plan-to-be-introduced-in-the-senate/?utm_term=.e55418696b34">immigration reform</a> in 2017. <br />
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But he was also one of those moderates who ultimately found himself <a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18664285">on the outside of his party</a>. <br />
McCain’s dramatic Senate floor <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2017/07/28/watch-senate-members-gasps-applaud-mccain-votes-no-skinny-repeal/519289001/">thumbs-down repudiation</a> of the Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare turned less on his antipathy to Trump and more <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/us/politics/mccain-graham-cassidy-health-care.html">on his disgust with a broken party-line legislative process</a>. <br />
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On an issue as monumental as health care, he insisted on a return to <a href="https://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2017/9/statement-by-senator-john-mccain-on-health-care-reform">“extensive hearings, debate, and amendment.”</a> He endorsed the efforts of Sens. Lamar Alexander, a Republican, and Patty Murray, a Democrat, to <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/why-john-mccain-killed-obamacare-repealagain">craft a bipartisan solution</a>. <br />
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Foreign and defense policy was McCain’s signature issue. He wanted <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/magazine/18mccain-t.html">a more robust posture</a> for American global leadership, backed by a well-funded, war-ready military. But that stance <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/2008/03/19/public-attitudes-toward-the-war-in-iraq-20032008/">lost support a decade ago</a> following the Iraq War disaster.<br />
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McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign slogan of “<a href="https://www.ithaca.edu/rhp/programs/cmd/blogs/posters_and_election_propaganda/obama_and_mccain_slogans/">Country First</a>” signified not only the model of his personal commitment and sacrifice. It also telegraphed his belief in the need to <a href="http://www.ontheissues.org/international/John_McCain_War_+_Peace.htm">persevere in the war on terror</a> in general and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in particular. <br />
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But by then, 55 percent of registered independents, McCain’s electoral base, <a href="http://www.people-press.org/2007/02/15/war-support-slips-fewer-expect-a-successful-outcome/">had lost confidence</a> in the prospects for a military victory. They favored bringing the troops home. <br />
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Over the course of six months that year, independent <a href="http://www.people-press.org/2007/02/15/war-support-slips-fewer-expect-a-successful-outcome/">support for the Iraq war fell</a> from 54 percent to 40 percent. Overall opposition to the troop “surge” was at 63 percent. Barack Obama’s promise to wind down America’s military commitment and do “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTPJSUTSt0">nation-building at home</a>” resonated with an electorate wearied by the conflict and buffeted by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Financial-Crisis-of-2008-The-1484264">their own economic woes</a>. <br />
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Advocate for global leadership</h2>
McCain continues to assert the primacy of American power. He decries the <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/10/17/john_mccain_us_must_not_refuse_obligations_of_international_leadership_in_favor_of_half_baked_spurious_nationalism.html">country’s retreat</a> from a rules-based global order premised on American leadership and based on freedom, capitalism, human rights and democracy. <br />
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Donald Trump <a href="https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2017/1214/Jerusalem-etc.-How-US-global-leadership-has-changed-under-Trump">stands in contrast</a>. Trump, like Obama, promises to terminate <a href="https://www.weeklystandard.com/thomas-donnelly-and-william-kristol/the-obama-trump-foreign-policy">costly commitments abroad</a>, revoke defense and trade agreements that fail to put
“America First,” and rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. In his run for the presidency, Trump asserted that American might and treasure had been <a href="https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/03/15/the-president-has-had-enough-of-being-challenged-over-foreign-policy">squandered defending the world</a>. Other countries, he said, took advantage of U.S. magnanimity.<br />
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In Congress, Republicans have become <a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2018/04/gop-foreign-policy-opinion-in-the-trump-era/">cautious about U.S. military interventions</a>, counterinsurgency operations and nation-building. They find <a href="http://news.gallup.com/poll/162854/americans-oppose-military-involvement-syria.aspx">scant public support</a> for intervention in Syria’s civil war. <br />
Seeing Russia as America’s implacable foe, McCain has <a href="https://www.cardin.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/cardin-mccain-prod-trump-administration-to-use-global-magnitsky-tools-to-punish-human-rights-violators-and-corrupt-officials-from-around-the-world">sponsored sanctions legislation</a> and prodded the administration to implement them more vigorously. <br />
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Accepting the Liberty Medal in Philadelphia, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2017/10/17/john-mccain-full-speech-liberty-medal.cnn">McCain repudiated Trump’s approach</a> to global leadership. He declared, “To abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”<br />
McCain has spent his life committed to principles that, tragically – at least for him – have fallen from favor. <br />
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<img alt="The Conversation" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97054/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" width="1" />He faces great personal peril now – at the same time that the country’s repudiation of the principles he’s championed may put the nation at risk.<br />
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/elizabeth-sherman-485056">Elizabeth Sherman</a>, Assistant Professor Department of Government, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/american-university-school-of-public-affairs-3417">American University School of Public Affairs</a></em><br />
<br />
This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com/">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/john-mccain-helped-build-a-country-that-no-longer-reflects-his-values-97054">original article</a>.<br />
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<br />Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-90144069335815456552018-06-22T12:07:00.001-04:002018-06-22T12:07:34.873-04:00Why the Christian Right Opposes Pornography But Still Supports Trump<figure><img alt="File 20180404 189813 pdvtgk.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213262/original/file-20180404-189813-pdvtgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" />
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Stormy Daniels, an adult star, at a local restaurant in downtown New Orleans. </figcaption><figcaption style="text-align: center;"> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Bill HaberBy</span></span></figcaption><figcaption style="text-align: center;"><span class="attribution"><span class="source"><br /></span></span></figcaption>
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By <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/kelsy-burke-296467">Kelsy Burke</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-nebraska-lincoln-832">University of Nebraska-Lincoln</a></em><br />
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Many commentators have <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/evangelical-christians-trump-bill-clinton-apology/495224/">pointed out the hypocrisy of Christian leaders</a> who claim a moral high ground while supporting President Donald Trump. The latest scandal involving an alleged extramarital affair with pornographic film star <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/24/style/stormy-daniels.html">Stormy Daniels</a> proves no exception.<br />
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The Christian right that supports Trump has found ways to justify their support of the president, for example, with <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/26/17164268/stormy-daniels-donald-trump-bible-christian">analogies of how God used King David</a>, a man with personal flaws, for the greater good of the country. All the while, however, evangelical leaders remain definitively opposed to pornography. <a href="http://www.faithwire.com/2017/05/10/christian-evangelist-issues-dire-warning-about-porn-youd-better-have-your-child-prepared/">In the words</a> of an evangelical celebrity and outspoken opponent of pornography, Josh McDowell, it is “probably the greatest problem or threat to the Christian faith in the history of the world.”<br />
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As a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=erJnfJMAAAAJ&hl=en">sociologist</a> who studies <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520286337">how evangelicals talk about sex</a>,
I see evangelical Trump supporters’ reaction to the latest Stormy Daniels scandal as fitting right into how evangelical Christians have responded to pornography in recent history.<br />
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The Christian anti-pornography movement</h2>
Christian opposition to pornography has long been connected to larger efforts to impose Protestant morality onto American politics and culture. Sociologist <a href="http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/feature/sociology_department_founder_joseph_gusfield_91_dies">Joseph Gusfield</a> would call it a “<a href="https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/83sbd7dy9780252013126.html">symbolic crusade</a>” – which is less about porn per se and <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/perversion-for-profit/9780231520157">more about broader social concerns</a> over changing gender roles, sexual norms and family life. <br />
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<span class="caption">Rev. Billy James Hargis.</span>
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Long before the Christian right emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Billy James Hargis an evangelical preacher and radio host, <a href="https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/r-marie-griffith/moral-combat/9780465094769/">warned that pornography encouraged the spread of communism</a>. Hargis first gained national attention in the 1950s for preaching against communism in his radio program “Christian Crusade.” He was convinced that homosexuality, sex education and pornographers fueled a communist-friendly moral decay.<br />
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Later in the 1980s, evangelical Protestants mobilized against the sexual revolution of the 1970s. One of their targets was the pornography industry that had grown with the invention of the VCR and led to pornographic videos entering American homes. A<a href="https://academic.oup.com/socpro/article/61/2/175/1672018">long with other anti-pornography organizations</a>, the fundamentalist Protestant political organization, the Moral Majority, supported efforts to enforce and increase obscenity laws to regulate and reduce pornography.<br />
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The Moral Majority’s platform <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/perversion-for-profit/9780231520157">linked pornography with their other concerns</a>, suggesting that pornography, just like homosexuality or abortion, contributed to the moral decline of America. <br />
More recently, evangelical and Latter-day Saints or Mormon politicians have been urging <a href="https://fightthenewdrug.org/here-are-the-states-that-have-passed-resolutions/">states across the country</a> to pass resolutions declaring pornography to be “a public health crisis.” <br />
All these political efforts sent a straightforward message: Porn is bad. <br />
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Evangelical self-help and sex advice</h2>
But the story is not so simple. In the 1970s, an evangelical <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/saving-sex-9780199942251?cc=us&lang=en&">self-help and sex-advice industry emerged</a> that put a religious twist on a cultural obsession with personal and relationship satisfaction and happiness. At the time, authors like conservative political activists <a href="https://www.zondervan.com/the-act-of-marriage">Tim and Beverly LaHaye</a> and Focus on the Family founder <a href="https://www.tyndale.com/p/bringing-up-boys/9781414391335">James Dobson</a> acknowledged that porn was a problem that Christians (almost always men but on <a href="http://store.purelifeministries.org/store/p/268-Create-in-Me-a-Pure-Heart.aspx">occasion women</a>) faced. Their writing focused on how pornography harmed marital relationships and personal well-being. At the same time, however, it described how devout Christians may be pornography consumers.<br />
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While clearly opposing the consumption of porn, self-help and sex advice book authors also normalized it. In their book, “<a href="https://bakerbookhouse.com/products/pure-eyes-a-man-s-guide-to-sexual-integrity-9780801072062">Pure Eyes: A Man’s Guide to Sexual Integrity</a>,” evangelical writers <a href="http://www.craiggross.com/">Craig Gross</a> (also founder of the anti-porn website <a href="https://www.xxxchurch.com/">XXX Church</a>) and Steven Luff asked their readers directly, <br />
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“Are you ready to admit … that you struggle with something that almost any man could be tempted by?”</blockquote>
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How evangelicals relate to porn</h2>
Today, there are evangelical <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Porn_Nation.html?id=9pI2mQEACAAJ">books</a>, <a href="http://dirtygirlsministries.com/">websites</a>, <a href="https://breakingfreesummit.com/">conferences</a> and <a href="https://puredesire.org/pages/find-group">small groups</a> to support evangelicals who are troubled by their own pornography use. Such resources describe pornography as potentially “addictive” and a ubiquitous temptation in our technology-driven world. Indeed, as sociologist <a href="http://soc.publishpath.com/Default.aspx?p=991325&Add=Show+Post&Key=Show+Post&ContentID=2258383&PostID=1176706&shortcut=sam-perry">Samuel Perry</a> <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224499.2017.1333569">finds</a>, even conservative Protestants who believe pornography is “always morally wrong” are only “somewhat less likely” to consume pornography compared to other Americans. He calls this “moral incongruence” and explains how conservative Protestants’ “avoidance of pornography does not (and perhaps cannot) keep pace with their professed opposition to it.”<br />
This moral incongruence has changed how evangelicals relate to pornography. The moral conviction against porn remains strong, but there is also sympathy for its consumers.<br />
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<span class="caption">Evangelical logic supposes that giving into sexual temptations is part of the human condition.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://theconversation.com/drafts/94156/edit">ruperto miller</a></span>
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Whereas non-evangelicals may observe a contradiction when it comes to supporting both Christian values and President Trump, I have found in my research that conservative evangelicals don’t have to see it that way. Their logic supposes that giving into sexual temptations is part of the human condition: People are prone to sin and must seek forgiveness and support. <br />
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<img alt="The Conversation" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94156/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" width="1" />A man like Donald Trump, in other words, could benefit from the pages of evangelical self-help books. But his sexual failings needn’t get in the way of conservative politics.<br />
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/kelsy-burke-296467">Kelsy Burke</a>, Assistant Professor of Sociology, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-nebraska-lincoln-832">University of Nebraska-Lincoln</a></em><br />
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This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com/">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-the-christian-right-opposes-pornography-but-still-supports-trump-94156">original article</a>.<br />
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Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-57003358690519019682018-06-21T20:39:00.000-04:002018-06-21T20:39:18.747-04:00DeVos Has Scuttled More Than 1,200 Civil Rights Probes Inherited From Obama<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Our data analysis shows that the Trump administration is less likely than its predecessor to find wrongdoing by school districts on issues ranging from racial and sexual harassment to meeting educational needs of disabled students.</div>
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by Annie Waldman June 21, 2018</div>
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Whether schoolchildren in DeSoto County, Mississippi, are paddled varies by their race. Black students are almost two and a half times more likely than whites to endure the corporal punishment permitted under school district <a href="https://desoto.msbapolicy.org/DistrictPolicies/ViewsAdmin/SelectedDocumentReadOnly/tabid/8412/Default.aspx?docId=134965">policy</a> for skipping class, insubordination, repeated tardiness, flagrant dress code violations, or other <a href="http://www.desotocountyschools.org/?PN=News2&SubP=DNewsStory&gn=&DivisionID=&DepartmentID=&SubDepartmentID=&NewsID=86425&ShowNav=&StoryGroup=Current">misbehavior</a>: up to three “licks per incident on the buttocks with an appropriate instrument approved by the principal.”<br />
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Black students in DeSoto — a suburban area just south of Memphis, Tennessee — are also more prone to face other <a href="https://ocrdata.ed.gov/Page?t=d&eid=30562&syk=8&pid=2539">forms</a> of school discipline. While comprising 35 percent of district enrollment, they <a href="https://ocrdata.ed.gov/Page?t=d&eid=30562&syk=8&pid=2278">account</a> for 55 percent of suspensions and expulsions, and more than 60 percent of referrals to law enforcement, federal education data shows.<br />
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Citing such disparities, a group of families in the county <a href="https://b.3cdn.net/advancement/8687680e4efadcbee0_ejm6b1l3t.pdf">filed a federal complaint</a> in 2015 with the help of the Advancement Project, a national advocacy group. For three years, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights investigated DeSoto, visiting schools and meeting with parents and administrators, according to the complainants. Then, this past April, the department closed the probe without finding any violation, due to “insufficient evidence.”<br />
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“This is indicative of how they are now evaluating and handling complaints,” said Kaitlin Banner, a senior attorney with the Advancement Project.<br />
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A ProPublica analysis of data on more than 40,000 civil rights cases, obtained through multiple public records requests, bears out Banner’s point. We found that, under Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the department has scuttled more than 1,200 civil rights investigations that were begun under the Obama administration and lasted at least six months. These cases, which investigated complaints of civil rights violations ranging from discriminatory discipline to sexual violence in school districts and colleges around the country, were closed without any findings of wrongdoing or corrective action, often due to insufficient evidence.<br />
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Elizabeth Hill, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, didn’t dispute ProPublica’s data. She maintained that the Office for Civil Rights is “as committed as ever” to vigorous civil rights enforcement.<br />
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“Where the evidence is insufficient for OCR to prove a violation of law, or the facts show that dismissal is appropriate on other grounds, OCR closes the case, which provides much-needed closure for both students and institutions,” she said in an emailed response, adding that the Trump administration has “restored the role of OCR investigators as neutral fact-finders.”<br />
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ProPublica also found that the Office for Civil Rights has become more lenient. Under Obama, 51 percent of cases that took more than 180 days culminated in findings of civil rights violations, or corrective changes. Under the Trump administration, that rate has dropped to 35 percent. (We compared the first 15 months of resolved cases under Trump with the preceding 15 months under Obama, and limited our analysis to cases that took at least 180 days in an attempt to weed out those that were open-and-shut, duplicative, or didn’t require a full probe.)<br />
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Outcomes on specific topics reflect this pattern. For instance, 70 percent of complaints of discrimination against students with limited proficiency in the English language were upheld under Obama, compared to 52 percent under the current administration. The proportion of complaints substantiated regarding the individualized educational needs of students with disabilities has dropped from 45 percent to 34 percent; regarding sexual harassment and violence, from 41 percent to 31 percent; and regarding racial harassment, from 31 percent to 21 percent.<br />
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These differences reflect the contrasting approaches of the Obama and Trump administrations to civil rights enforcement, according to people familiar with both. Under Obama, the Office for Civil Rights looked into instances of discrimination against individuals, but also made it a priority to carry out more time-consuming and systemic investigations into disparate treatment of students based on race, disability, or other factors.<br />
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On the other hand, efficiency is the Trump administration’s priority. It has restricted the time and scope of investigations, concentrating on individual complaints that can be handled quickly, and seeking to clear a backlog of more expansive cases. As a result, it has resolved about 3,250 cases that lasted more than six months, compared to about 1,150 during the last 15 months of the Obama administration. Because of this high volume, the raw number of cases concluded with findings of wrongdoing has increased under DeVos, although the percentage is considerably lower.<br />
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“The extraordinary backlog of cases inherited by this Administration was greatly concerning to OCR,” said Hill. “Processing the stalled cases has been a priority, as has trying to meet our agency goal of processing new cases within 180 days.”<br />
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The data documents the Trump administration’s tilt away from systemic issues to complaints by individual students, said Seth Galanter, a former senior official in the Education Department’s civil rights office under Obama. “If all you see when you get a complaint is one kid and one dispute with a school, you will be able to resolve that — and maybe even in the kid’s favor — pretty quickly, but you are focusing on the needles and not the haystacks,” he said. “The way they are approaching it is they are only dealing with the squeaky wheel. They aren’t doing their full job, which means they can move quickly.”<br />
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Hill said such criticism was “unfounded. Under the current Administration, OCR decides whether to conduct systemic investigations based on the facts of a case, not the ideological biases of OCR’s political appointees as did the prior Administration,” she said. “OCR recognizes that many schools and colleges want to rectify civil rights problems and the end result will be greater equity for more students when OCR is willing to work with schools rather than against them.”<br />
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While the 12 regional bureaus under Obama often needed approval from headquarters to settle or dismiss a case, DeVos is resolving probes faster by decentralizing decision-making and giving the regions more latitude to decide outcomes, Hill said. Perhaps reflecting this policy, the proportion of investigations that found violations or required corrective action has ranged under DeVos from more than half for the New York office to about a quarter for the Philadelphia office. Hill said that OCR’s “legal standards are consistent nationally” and these variances reflect the different mix of cases that each office handles.<br />
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For our analysis, cases resolved through a settlement, mediation, or other involvement from OCR were counted as having corrective changes or findings of violations. If a single complaint contained multiple allegations, and one or more of the claims was substantiated, we marked the entire case docket as finding violations or resulting in corrective change. Because of gaps in the information provided to ProPublica, about 1.5 percent of OCR cases resolved under the Trump administration — most of them in a two-week period in December 2017 — are not reflected in our analysis.<br />
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Under federal law, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Office for Civil Rights is responsible for ensuring equal access to education and investigating allegations of discrimination in the country’s schools and colleges. Families and students can file complaints with the office, which then investigates and determines whether a college or school district may have violated federal law. If violations are substantiated, the office typically negotiates a settlement or prescribes corrective changes, which it sometimes oversees. For some complaints, the office may mediate a resolution. It receives more than 10,000 complaints annually, and has a target of resolving 80 percent of them within six months.<br />
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As the Obama administration tackled more complicated investigations, the cases took <a href="https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget17/justifications/z-ocr.pdf">longer</a> to resolve. From 2010 to 2015, time spent on the average sexual violence investigation increased from 289 to 963 days; on a school discipline case, from 198 to 451 days; and on a harassment probe, from 200 to 287 days. At the department’s request, Congress boosted the office’s budget.<br />
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DeVos is rolling back this expansion. In an internal memo last June, Candice Jackson, then the head of the civil rights office, urged investigators to stop looking at <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/shutdown-of-bryan-texas-schools-probe-shows-trump-administration-pullback-on-civil-rights">complaints</a> through a systemic lens, and dropped the requirement that all discipline and sexual violence investigations had to review three years of district or college data. A case processing manual released this past March broadened the circumstances that allow investigators to close a probe or dismiss a complaint — for example, if it is part of a serial filing (repeated complaints by one person or group about the same situation) or poses an “unreasonable” burden. DeVos also barred complainants from appealing the office’s decisions. The department <a href="https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget19/justifications/z-ocr.pdf">intends</a> to shrink OCR’s staff from 569 to 529, including nearly two dozen attorneys and equal opportunity specialists, according to its annual budget proposal.<br />
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Under DeVos, the department has scaled back a proactive type of civil rights investigation known as a compliance review. These reviews may stem from statistics, news reports or other sources, as well as from complaints by parents or students. They often explore systemic issues such as racial disparities. During the last 15 months of the Obama administration, OCR opened 13 compliance reviews, probing a variety of areas from access to rigorous curriculum to services for students with limited English proficiency. In its first 15 months, the Trump administration initiated only two compliance reviews, looking at education for students with disabilities in a juvenile correctional facility in Arizona, and use of isolation and restraints in an alternative education program based in Virginia. OCR may conduct more compliance reviews in the coming months, Hill said.<br />
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Since DeVos took over the education department, she has been under fire for her approach to civil rights. Earlier this month, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, alongside disability advocates, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/naacp-special-education-advocates-sue-betsy-devos-over-her-departments-handling-of-civil-rights-cases/2018/06/01/bb8d8e44-65b7-11e8-99d2-0d678ec08c2f_story.html?utm_term=.8b377d2336fb">filed a lawsuit</a> against the education department, alleging that its procedural changes are leading civil rights investigators to <a href="http://www.naacp.org/latest/naacp-files-suit-u-s-department-education-secretary-betsy-devos-summarily-abandoning-civil-rights-enforcement-policies-without-public-notice/">unlawfully</a> dismiss complaints without a full investigation. Hill declined comment on the pending litigation.<br />
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The drop-off in the rate of finding violations could mean that OCR’s investigations are becoming less rigorous, said Catherine Lhamon, the former head of the civil rights office under Obama. “We want speedy justice, but you still have to thoroughly investigate each complaint.” One long investigation terminated by the Trump administration took place in Bryan, Texas.
As ProPublica <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/shutdown-of-bryan-texas-schools-probe-shows-trump-administration-pullback-on-civil-rights">previously reported</a>, the Dallas bureau of the federal civil rights office spent more than four years investigating whether disciplinary practices in Bryan discriminated against students of color. Federal investigators <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4435297-Bryan-ISD-2nd-Reposnse-to-OCR-2-2-2017.html#document/p10/a416557">found</a> at least 10 incidents where black students received harsher punishment than their white peers for the same conduct.<br />
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Weeks before Trump’s inauguration, federal investigators and the district were on the cusp of a settlement that would have required more than a dozen reforms. But after DeVos took over, the case and the pending settlement were scuttled, with no findings of wrongdoing. In late April, OCR also shelved the investigation into school discipline in DeSoto County, where 852 students — more than half of them black — received corporal punishment in 2015.<br />
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Shelia Riley, the chairperson of DeSoto’s school board, told ProPublica that OCR’s decision was appropriate. “I read the [parents’] claims and I just felt like we were fair in our disciplinary decisions,” she said. She added that she supports corporal punishment for misbehaving students. Renee Wade, a registered nurse in DeSoto County, told ProPublica that her son, who is about to enter ninth grade, has received corporal punishment more than 10 times over the past seven years for conduct such as acting out in class. These behaviors are associated with his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, for which he has an individualized education program that doesn’t include physical beatings.<br />
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Even though Wade could exempt her son from being paddled under district policy, the alternative is typically suspension, which she felt wasn’t a practical option. Wade and her husband have full-time jobs and can’t care for their son if he’s home during the working day. “If the school can’t use corporal punishment, then they get suspended,” said Wade, who is African-American. “If you work, then this is not a possibility. I feel as a parent I have no other choice.”<br />
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<em>ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their <a href="http://www.propublica.org/forms/newsletter_daily_email">newsletter</a></em>.<br />
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<br />
<link href="https://www.propublica.org/article/devos-has-scuttled-more-than-1-200-civil-rights-probes-inherited-from-obama" rel="canonical"></link><script async="" src="https://pixel.propublica.org/pixel.js" type="text/javascript"></script>Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-43894273666535649602018-06-21T15:25:00.000-04:002018-06-21T15:25:34.245-04:00In Praise of Doing Nothing<br />
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<figure><img alt="File 20180529 80633 1gvg6vs.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220829/original/file-20180529-80633-1gvg6vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" />
<figcaption style="text-align: center;"> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/moving-traffic-light-trails-night-487507315">JoeyCheung/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption><figcaption style="text-align: center;"><br /></figcaption><figcaption style="text-align: left;"><figcaption style="text-align: center;"><br /></figcaption><figcaption style="text-align: center;">By <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/simon-gottschalk-471776">Simon Gottschalk</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-nevada-las-vegas-826">University of Nevada, Las Vegas</a></em></figcaption></figcaption></figure><br />
In the 1950s, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Take_Back_Your_Time.html?id=_UmpZOlnvU0C&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false">scholars worried that</a>, thanks to technological innovations, Americans wouldn’t know what to do with all of their leisure time. Yet today, as sociologist Juliet Schor <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=KjZ54lNDE2EC&dq=overworked+american&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y">notes</a>, Americans are overworked, putting in more hours than at any time since the Depression and more than in any other in Western society.<br />
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It’s probably not unrelated to the fact that instant and constant access has become de rigueur, and our devices constantly expose us to a barrage of colliding and clamoring messages: “Urgent,” “Breaking News,” “For immediate release,” “Answer needed ASAP.” It disturbs our leisure time, our family time – even our consciousness.<br />
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Over the past decade, I’ve tried to understand the social and psychological effects of our growing interactions with new information and communication technologies, a topic I examine in my book “<a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Terminal-Self-Everyday-Life-in-Hypermodern-Times/Gottschalk/p/book/9781472437082">The Terminal Self: Everyday Life in Hypermodern Times</a>.”<br />
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In this 24/7, “always on” age, the prospect of doing nothing might sound unrealistic and unreasonable. But it’s never been more important.<br />
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Acceleration for the sake of acceleration</h2>
In an age of incredible advancements that can enhance our human potential and planetary health, why does daily life seem so overwhelming and anxiety-inducing? Why aren’t things easier?<br />
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It’s a complex question, but one way to explain this irrational state of affairs is something called the force of acceleration. <br />
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<a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/social-acceleration/9780231148351">According to German critical theorist Hartmut Rosa</a>, accelerated technological developments have driven the acceleration in the pace of change in social institutions. We see this on factory floors, where “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=bdBTAAAAMAAJ&q=inauthor:%22Edward+J.+Hay%22&dq=inauthor:%22Edward+J.+Hay%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjs5vHLm6vbAhUjLn0KHaRSAqcQ6AEILjAB">just-in-time</a>” manufacturing demands maximum efficiency and the ability to nimbly respond to market forces, and in university classrooms, where computer software instructs teachers how to “move students quickly” through the material. Whether it’s in the grocery store or in the airport, procedures are implemented, for better or for worse, with one goal in mind: speed.<br />
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Noticeable acceleration began more than two centuries ago, during the Industrial Revolution. But this acceleration has itself … accelerated. Guided by neither logical objectives nor agreed-upon rationale, propelled by its own momentum, and encountering little resistance, acceleration seems to have begotten more acceleration, for the sake of acceleration. <br />
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To Rosa, this acceleration <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/hartmut-rosa-essay-acceleration-plagues-modern-society-a-909465.html">eerily mimics</a> the criteria of a totalitarian power: 1) it exerts pressure on the wills and actions of subjects; 2) it is inescapable; 3) it is all-pervasive; and 4) it is hard or almost impossible to criticize and fight. <br />
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<h2>
The oppression of speed</h2>
Unchecked acceleration has consequences.<br />
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At the environmental level, it extracts resources from nature faster than they can replenish themselves and produces waste faster than it can be processed. <br />
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At the personal level, it distorts how we experience time and space. It deteriorates how we approach our everyday activities, deforms how we relate to each other and erodes a stable sense of self. It leads to burnout at one end of the continuum and to depression at the other. Cognitively, it inhibits sustained focus and critical evaluation. Physiologically, it can stress our bodies and disrupt vital functions.<br />
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For example, <a href="https://www.bookdepository.com/Gender-Divisions-Working-Time-New-Economy-Diane-Perrons/9781847204974">research finds</a>
two to three times more self-reported health problems, from anxiety to sleeping issues, among workers who frequently work in high-speed environments compared with those who do not.<br />
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When our environment accelerates, we must pedal faster in order to keep up with the pace. Workers receive more emails than ever before – <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/3395457/this-is-how-much-time-you-spend-on-work-emails-every-day-according-to-a-canadian-survey/">a number that’s only expected to grow</a>. The more emails you receive, the more time you need to process them. It requires that you either accomplish this or another task in less time, that you perform several tasks at once, or that you take less time in between reading and responding to emails.<br />
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American workers’ productivity <a href="https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/">has increased dramatically since 1973</a>. What has also increased sharply during that same period is the pay gap between productivity and pay. While productivity between 1973 and 2016 has increased by 73.7 percent, hourly pay has increased by only 12.5 percent. In other words, productivity has increased at about six times the rate of hourly pay.<br />
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Clearly, acceleration demands more work – and to what end? There are only so many hours in a day, and this additional expenditure of energy reduces individuals’ ability to engage in life’s essential activities: family, leisure, community, citizenship, spiritual yearnings and self-development.<br />
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It’s a vicious loop: Acceleration imposes more stress on individuals and curtails their ability to manage its effects, thereby worsening it.<br />
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<h2>
Doing nothing and ‘being’</h2>
In a hypermodern society propelled by the twin engines of acceleration and excess, doing nothing is equated with waste, laziness, lack of ambition, boredom or “down” time.<br />
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" /></a>
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<span class="caption">An ad for Microsoft Office stresses the importance of being able to always work.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/migrated-images/62/1440.MODHarrisSurveyInfographic_110613-FinalHighRes.png">Microsoft</a></span>
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<br />
But this betrays a rather instrumental grasp of human existence.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1809754">Much research</a> – and many spiritual and philosophical systems – suggest that detaching from daily concerns and spending time in simple reflection and contemplation are essential to health, sanity and personal growth.<br />
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Similarly, to equate “doing nothing” with non-productivity betrays a short-sighted understanding of productivity. In fact, psychological <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2432964">research suggests</a> that doing nothing is essential for creativity and innovation, and a person’s seeming inactivity might actually cultivate new insights, inventions or melodies. <br />
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<a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060750510/in-praise-of-slowness">As legends go</a>, Isaac Newton grasped the law of gravity sitting under an apple tree. Archimedes discovered the law of buoyancy relaxing in his bathtub, while Albert Einstein was well-known for staring for hours into space in his office.<br />
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<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40222893?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">The academic sabbatical</a> is centered on the understanding that the mind needs to rest and be allowed to explore in order to germinate new ideas. <br />
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Doing nothing – or just being – is as important to human well-being as doing something. The key is to balance the two.<br />
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<h2>
Taking your foot off the pedal</h2>
Since it will probably be difficult to go cold turkey from an accelerated pace of existence to doing nothing, one first step consists in decelerating. One relatively easy way to do so is to simply turn off all the technological devices that connect us to the internet – at least for a while – and assess what happens to us when we do.<br />
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<a href="https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/cyber.2016.0259">Danish researchers found</a> that students who disconnected from Facebook for just one week reported notable increases in life satisfaction and positive emotions. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/technology/16brain.html">In another experiment</a>, neuroscientists who went on a nature trip reported enhanced cognitive performance.<br />
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Different social movements are addressing the problem of acceleration. The <a href="https://www.slowfoodusa.org/about-us">Slow Food</a> movement, for example, is a grassroots campaign that advocates a form of deceleration by rejecting fast food and factory farming. <br />
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As we race along, it seems as though we’re not taking the time to seriously examine the rationale behind our frenetic lives – and mistakenly assume that <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/being-busy-is-nothing-to-brag-about_us_5a4b9a6de4b0d86c803c7971">those who are very busy</a> must be involved in important projects. Touted by the <a href="https://twitter.com/nbcnews/status/898748875225260032?lang=en">mass media</a> and <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2013/11/06/microsoft-office-declares-get-it-done-day/">corporate culture</a>, this credo of busyness contradicts both how most people in our society define “<a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-the-good-life-4038226">the good life</a>” and the tenets of many Eastern philosophies that extol the virtue and power of stillness.<br />
<br />
<img alt="The Conversation" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95998/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" width="1" />French philosopher Albert Camus perhaps <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/20617-idleness-is-fatal-only-to-the-mediocre">put it best</a> when he wrote, “Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”<br />
<br />
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/simon-gottschalk-471776">Simon Gottschalk</a>, Professor of Sociology, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-nevada-las-vegas-826">University of Nevada, Las Vegas</a></em><br />
<br />
This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com/">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/in-praise-of-doing-nothing-95998">original article</a>.<br />
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<br />Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-30697244644073298462018-06-21T15:24:00.000-04:002018-06-21T15:24:18.533-04:00Are Americans Becoming More Xenophobic?<br />
<figure><img alt="Image 20170103 18659 13gyh0.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/151668/original/image-20170103-18659-13gyh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" />
<figcaption style="text-align: center;"><span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/pic-371542753/stock-vector-flat-design-map-of-the-united-states-made-up-of-a-crowd-of-people-icons-eps-10-vector-royalty-free-stock-illustration.html">'Map' via www.shutterstock.com</a></span>
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By <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/allison-skinner-292904">Allison Skinner</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/northwestern-university-1259">Northwestern University</a></em><br />
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One might wonder how a country that’s becoming <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2015/06/25/new-census-figures-show-youth-diversity/ifAAGYM96DyDXqqWRCHm5H/story.html">increasingly diverse</a> – <a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/07/06/its-official-the-us-is-becoming-a-minority-majority-nation">some projections</a> have the country becoming majority minority by 2060 – is witnessing a resurgence of white nationalist movements that used to exist on the margins of American politics.<br />
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As a psychologist who studies social attitudes and biases, I am interested in the impact that increasing diversity and social progress can have on racial attitudes. <a href="http://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2016.34.6.544">In a recent study</a>, a colleague and I analyzed how simple reminders of diversity and minority power can influence biases. The results show that the growth of minority populations in the United States could mean that xenophobic, racist rhetoric is more likely to resonate with many Americans.<br />
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<h2>
How diversity influences racial attitudes</h2>
For the study we recruited 202 white people from across the country. We divided them into three groups. One group read excerpts from a New York Times article on the projected <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/14/washington/14census.html">minority-majority population shift</a> in America. Another read excerpts from a New York Times article on the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/us/politics/05elect.html">racial significance</a> of President Obama’s election in 2008. The last group – the control – didn’t read anything. <br />
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Next, we had participants complete a test of implicit racial bias. This means that we didn’t just ask people about their racial attitudes; we had them take a computerized reaction time test to assess their biases. <br />
<br />
When it comes to sensitive topics like racial attitudes, people are often reluctant to admit their biases. Sometimes they’re <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/12/08/across-america-whites-are-biased-and-they-dont-even-know-it/?utm_term=.bc7572079d65">not even aware</a> what biases they have. The <a href="https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html">Implicit Association Test</a>, the most frequently used measure of implicit attitudes, requires people to quickly categorize words (for example, good and bad) and pictures (such as faces of black people and white people) into categories.<br />
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The stronger the associations we have between categories, the quicker we’re able to perform the categorizations. For instance, if a participant has more positive associations with black people than white people, they’ll be able to more quickly pair positive words with black faces. <br />
<br />
Our results indicated that reminding white people of the increasing size or increasing political power of racial minority groups in America – whether it was via the majority-minority projection article or the article about President Obama’s election – led them to show more implicit racial bias against black people. <br />
<br />
These findings are consistent with a concept known as <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2096296">Group Threat Theory</a>, which is the idea that when minority groups grow in size or power, the majority group feels threatened. This, in turn, increases intergroup prejudice. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0146167214524993">Other recent studies</a> about the growth of minority populations reported similar findings. But group threat doesn’t just increase intergroup bias. It also seems to make people more politically conservative. <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797614527113">Psychological research</a> shows that reminding white Americans of the shifting racial demographics of the U.S. increases support for the Republican Party and political conservatism. <br />
<br />
<h2>
The role of minorities in Trump’s victory</h2>
So what can this research tell us about the success of Donald Trump, a politician who made – and continues to make – appeals to xenophobia?<br />
<br />
Obama’s presidency could be seen as a threat to the power and privilege historically held by whites. On the heels of the first black president, Trump may have tried to capitalize on that threat to white power and privilege by promising to “<a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-freedomfest-you-cant-be-great-if-you-dont-n390546">take our country back</a>” and “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/when-was-america-great/">make America great again</a>.” <br />
Trump was also able to exploit the threat borne out of the increasingly large racial and ethnic minority population in the United States. As a presidential candidate, Trump hurled some of his <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/us/politics/donald-trump-black-voters.html?_r=0">most offensive and xenophobic insults</a> at immigrants, stoking fear against Latinos and Muslims (or those from majority Muslim countries) in particular. <br />
<br />
This isn’t to say that all Trump voters are racist or xenophobic. But for reasons stated earlier – growing diversity, a black president – many may have been more open to these appeals (or willing to overlook them). Trump certainly played on group threat, <a href="http://time.com/4386240/donald-trump-immigration-arguments/">telling his supporters</a> that immigrants were stealing their jobs, exhausting public benefits and challenging the American way of life. From a psychological perspective, we know these reminders will cause people to feel threatened. <br />
<br />
Whether Trump did it knowingly or not, it was incredibly effective. And now other groups are following his lead. <br />
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<img alt="The Conversation" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/70509/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" width="1" /><em>Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article first published on Jan. 4, 2017.</em><br />
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/allison-skinner-292904">Allison Skinner</a>, Psychology Researcher, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/northwestern-university-1259">Northwestern University</a></em><br />
This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com/">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/are-americans-becoming-more-xenophobic-70509">original article</a>.<br />
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Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-15712188302026834312018-06-21T15:22:00.001-04:002018-06-21T15:22:49.603-04:00The World on a Billionaire's Budget<figure><img alt="File 20180118 158519 1gjdav5.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202482/original/file-20180118-158519-1gjdav5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=14%2C0%2C4888%2C2257&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" />
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Jeff Bezos is now the richest person in the world.
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Amazon-Kindle/f65fc7c03c2e4d5d8eb5436257b970c2/1/1">Reed Saxon/AP Photo</a></span>
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By <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/andrew-d-hwang-397731">Andrew D. Hwang</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/college-of-the-holy-cross-1730">College of the Holy Cross</a></em><br />
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<i><br /></i>
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The world’s wealthiest are prospering. As of February 2017, there were <a href="https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/">about 2,000 billionaires in the world</a>. This micro-elite <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2017/03/20/forbes-2017-billionaires-list-meet-the-richest-people-on-the-planet/">controls over US$7.6 trillion</a>, an increase of 18 percent from 2016.<br />
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A billionaire’s spending power is difficult to grasp, both because <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12028">most people do not correctly intuit large numbers</a>, and because a billion dollars far outstrips most people’s experience.<br />
What does a household budget look like to a billionaire? To find out, let’s scale down a billionaire’s income to $50,000, the <a href="https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/cps-pinc.html">median American income</a>, adjusting budget items proportionally. <br />
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<h2>
A year in the life of Joe Billionaire</h2>
To start, we need to estimate a billionaire’s annual income. <br />
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In the 30 years from 1987 to 2016, Bill and Melinda Gates amassed about $120 billion. This figure represents $80 billion in net worth and $40 billion controlled by their charitable foundation. The Gates’ average annual income for these years is $120 billion divided by 30, or $4 billion. (The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a strategic partner of The Conversation US and provides funding for The Conversation internationally.)<br />
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<a href="https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#version:realtime">According to Forbes</a>, the wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos increased last year from $72.8 billion to $108.7 billion. Despite billion-dollar hiccups caused by daily stock price fluctuations, Bezos’ 2017 wealth increase was at least $32 billion, over $1,000 per second around the clock.<br />
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<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202316/original/file-20180117-53310-1sfg53h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202316/original/file-20180117-53310-1sfg53h.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" /></a>
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<span class="caption">One cube represents the median U.S. worker’s income.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrew D. Hwang</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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The Gates and Bezos are extremes. But what about a more typical billionaire’s income?<br />
Let’s assume a new fortune has been acquired over about one decade. Since the median worth on <a href="https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#version:realtime">Forbes’ list</a> is about $2 billion, a ballpark estimate of annual income is one-tenth of this, or $200 million. <br />
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In absolute terms, $200 million per year is over $6 per second around the clock, equal to the <a href="http://news.gallup.com/poll/166211/worldwide-median-household-income-000.aspx">global median annual income</a> every eight minutes. Each year, Joe Billionaire amasses 4,000 median American incomes. <br />
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In 2017, Jeff Bezos raked in 150 times more than Joe Billionaire – the equivalent of 600,000 median incomes.<br />
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<h2>
A billionaire’s household budget</h2>
Because Joe Billionaire accumulates 4,000 median American incomes, a $4,000 expenditure for Joe Billionaire is the same fraction of income as $1 for a median American earner.<br />
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Let’s call $4,000 one “Joe buck,” or J$1. Joe Billionaire’s annual income is J$50,000. Thus, a $2,000-vacation package costs J$0.50, proportional to a half-dollar from a middle-class income. At this scale, a generous annual food budget comes to J$3. One year’s tuition at a prestigious university costs J$15. An extended stay in a top-quality hospital might run J$50. For J$150, Joe Billionaire can pick up a large middle-class home in most parts of the United States. If that’s too modest, a week’s income buys a <a href="https://www.trulia.com/CA/Rancho_Palos_Verdes/">mansion in Rancho Palos Verdes, California</a>. Who needs student loans, health care and mortgages?<br />
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Joe Billionaire can and does purchase goods and services not available to the rest of us. J$2,500 <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2016/12/02/robert-mercer-trump-donor-bannon-pac-523366.html">builds a media mouthpiece</a>. Comparable political donations may be <a href="https://www.snopes.com/devos-family-campaign-contributions/">followed by a Cabinet appointment</a>.<br />
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Unlike a tithing purchase for you or me, a one-time J$5,000 donation for Joe Billionaire has no effect on spending power. We’re speaking of a scale where lavish living costs a few hundred Joe bucks. Next year will bring another J$50,000.<br />
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<h2>
Matters of perspective</h2>
Ronald Reagan fomented outrage at <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/12/linda_taylor_welfare_queen_ronald_reagan_made_her_a_notorious_american_villain.html">one welfare recipient cheating the government of $8,000</a>, or J$2. Unfortunately, we are not proportionally outraged by theft and losses dwarfing the human scale.<br />
<br />
By comparison, the Reagan-era <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis#Consequences">savings and loan scandal</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal#Aftermath">Enron scandal</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis#Impacts">mortgage-backed securities crisis</a> and the <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-06/offshore-havens-show-policy-failures-at-home">annual losses to offshore tax havens</a> cost ordinary taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of millions of times more than one welfare cheat. That’s enough to drain or break even Jeff Bezos’ bank.<br />
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Public services are inexpensive by comparison. The 2017 budget for the <a href="https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/budget">National Institutes of Health</a> was about $33 billion; for the <a href="https://www.nsf.gov/about/congress/115/highlights/cu17_0508.jsp">National Science Foundation</a>, $7.5 billion; for the <a href="https://www.arts.gov/open-government/national-endowment-arts-appropriations-history">National Endowment for the Arts</a>, $150 million. The 2017 <a href="https://budget.boston.gov/operating-budget/">Boston city budget</a> was just under $3 billion, including about $1 billion for public schools, $200 million for pensions and $78 million for the Public Health Commission.<br />
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Most Americans <a href="http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html">don’t understand</a> how inequitably <a href="https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM">American wealth is distributed</a>. Worldwide, wealth inequality is <a href="https://youtu.be/uWSxzjyMNpU">even more stark</a>.<br />
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<img alt="The Conversation" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88355/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" width="1" />We live in a world where two dozen of the wealthiest individuals could collectively fund health and science research for the United States, where any of the thousand billionaires could individually fund the NEA with no practical impact to their purchasing power. Participatory government may remain, but only the ultra-wealthy need apply.<br />
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/andrew-d-hwang-397731">Andrew D. Hwang</a>, Associate Professor of Mathematics, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/college-of-the-holy-cross-1730">College of the Holy Cross</a></em><br />
<br />
This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com/">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-world-on-a-billionaires-budget-88355">original article</a>.<br />
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Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-84199939207895976462018-06-21T15:19:00.000-04:002018-06-21T15:19:51.440-04:00Why Turning Homelessness Into a Crime is Cruel and Costly<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<h1>
<span style="font-size: small;">By <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/joseph-w-mead-344925">Joseph W. Mead</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/cleveland-state-university-1330">Cleveland State University</a></em> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/sara-rankin-487313">Sara Rankin</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/seattle-university-1605">Seattle University</a></em></span></h1>
Increasingly, local laws punish Americans who are homeless.<br />
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By severely restricting or even barring the ability to engage in necessary, life-sustaining activities in public, like sitting, standing, sleeping or asking for help, even when there’s no reasonable alternative, these laws are essentially persecuting homeless men, women and children.<br />
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As <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=qlW-Ku8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">law professors</a> who <a href="http://ssrn.com/author=1572922">study how laws can make homelessness better or worse</a>, we encourage cities, suburbs and towns to avoid punishing people who live in public and have nowhere else to go. One big reason: These “<a href="https://definitions.uslegal.com/v/vagrancy/">anti-vagrancy laws</a>” are counterproductive because they make it harder to escape homelessness. <br />
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<h2>
Many paths to not having a home</h2>
Why do at least <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-there-are-so-many-unsheltered-homeless-people-on-the-west-coast-96767">half a million Americans experience homelessness</a> at any time? <br />
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Researchers find that most people who become homeless have nowhere to live after <a href="https://www.nlchp.org/documents/Homeless_Stats_Fact_Sheet">being evicted</a>, losing their jobs or <a href="http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/domestic.html">fleeing an abusive partner</a>. Many emergency homeless shelters <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-los-angeles-shelter-shortage-20170929-htmlstory.html">are perpetually full</a>. Even those with beds to spare may enforce rules that exclude <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2776421">families, LGBTQ youth</a> and <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2776427">people with pets</a>. And when homeless people can stay in shelters, often they may only spend the night there. That means they have to <a href="https://law.yale.edu/system/files/area/center/schell/criminalization_of_homelessness_report_for_web_full_report.pdf">go somewhere else during the daytime</a>.<br />
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More laws</h2>
As the number of people facing homelessness increases, local residents are demanding that their elected officials do something about <a href="http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/crimreport/meanestcities.html">the homeless people they encounter in their daily lives</a>. The leaders of cities, towns and suburbs are often responsive.<br />
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But more often than not, municipalities don’t address the underlying problems that cause homelessness by, say, providing sufficient permanent housing, affordable housing or shelters with <a href="https://www.springsrescuemission.org/low-barrier-shelter-what-does-mean/">minimal barriers to entry</a>. Instead, <a href="https://law.seattleu.edu/centers-and-institutes/korematsu-center/initiatives/homeless-rights-advocacy-project/additional-resources">criminalizing homelessness</a> is growing more popular.<br />
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Over the last decade, city-wide bans on camping in public have increased by 69 percent while city-wide panhandling bans rose by 43 percent, according <a href="https://www.nlchp.org/documents/Housing-Not-Handcuffs">to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty</a>.<br />
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Advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union frequently <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/homeless/article208595844.html">challenge these laws in court</a>. Judges often strike down such laws on the grounds that they violate constitutionally protected rights, such as <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-panhandling-laws-are-overturned-cities-change-policies-1502204399">the freedom of speech</a> or <a href="https://www.nlchp.org/documents/Housing-Not-Handcuffs-Litigation-Manual">due process</a>.<br />
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Still, more and more communities keep trying to outlaw homelessness.<br />
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<h2>
Criminalizing homelessness is ineffective</h2>
Not only do <a href="http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/oslj/files/2015/10/Vol.-76-57-66-Mead-Essay.pdf">we and other legal experts</a> find these laws <a href="https://crosscut.com/2018/05/seattle-u-prof-city-cant-solve-homelessness-without-courage">to be unconstitutional</a>, we see ample evidence that they waste tax dollars.<br />
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Cities are aggressively deploying law enforcement to target people simply for the crime of existing while having nowhere to live. In 2016 alone, Los Angeles police arrested 14,000 people experiencing homelessness for everyday activities such as <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-homeless-arrests-20180204-story.html">sitting on sidewalks</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://sf.curbed.com/2016/6/3/11852832/homeless-san-francisco">San Francisco is spending some US$20 million</a> per year to enforce laws against loitering, panhandling and other common conduct against people experiencing homelessness. <br />
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Jails and prisons make extremely <a href="https://thecrimereport.org/2018/06/18/jail-is-no-place-for-the-homeless-say-police-chiefs/#">expensive and ineffective homeless shelters</a>. <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2602530&rec=1&srcabs=2602533&alg=1&pos=2">Non-punitive alternatives</a>, such as permanent supportive housing and mental health or substance abuse treatment, cost less and work better, according to research one of us is doing at the <a href="https://law.seattleu.edu/centers-and-institutes/korematsu-center/initiatives/homeless-rights-advocacy-project">Homeless Rights Advocacy Project</a> at Seattle University Law School and <a href="http://www.csh.org/supportive-housing-facts/evidence/">many other sources</a>.<br />
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But the greatest cost of these laws is borne by already vulnerable people who are ticketed, arrested and jailed because they are experiencing homelessness. Fines and court fees quickly add up to hundreds or thousands of dollars. A Sacramento man, for example, found himself facing <a href="https://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/sacramentos-100-000-homeless-man/content?oid=23694183">$100,000 in fines for convictions for panhandling and sleeping outside</a>. These costs are impossible to pay, since the “crimes” were committed by dint of being unable to afford keeping a roof over his head in the first place.<br />
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<img alt="The Conversation" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97290/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" width="1" />And since having a <a href="https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/opinion/the-city-is-not-keeping-my-stuff-after-an-arrest/">criminal record</a> makes getting jobs and <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1747-4469.2008.00092.x">housing much harder</a>, these laws are perpetuating homelessness.<br />
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/joseph-w-mead-344925">Joseph W. Mead</a>, Assistant Professor, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/cleveland-state-university-1330">Cleveland State University</a></em> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/sara-rankin-487313">Sara Rankin</a>, Professor of Lawyering Skills, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/seattle-university-1605">Seattle University</a></em><br />
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This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com/">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-turning-homelessness-into-a-crime-is-cruel-and-costly-97290">original article</a>.<br />
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<br />Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-70145612146642175662018-06-20T20:53:00.000-04:002018-06-20T20:53:43.955-04:00The Slippery Slope of Dehumanizing Language<figure><img alt="File 20180601 142102 1a52bzo.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221415/original/file-20180601-142102-1a52bzo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" />
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Roseanne Barr had her sitcom canceled on May 29, after calling former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett the child of an ape.
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/People-Roseanne-Barr/d098b8d701dc481ea0cd5d55da1feac0/101/0">Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File</a></span>
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By <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/allison-skinner-292904">Allison Skinner</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/northwestern-university-1259">Northwestern University</a></em><div>
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Comparing people to animals seems to increasingly be a part of our political discourse.<br />
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When Roseanne Barr tweeted that former White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett was the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/business/media/roseanne-barr-offensive-tweets.html">child of an ape</a>, it came only a couple of weeks after Donald Trump called immigrant gang members, “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/us/politics/trump-undocumented-immigrants-animals.html">animals</a>.” Trump has been a target himself: On the cover of its April 2 issue, New York magazine depicted the president <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/media/381205-ny-magazine-cover-depicts-trump-as-a-pig">as a pig</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-FtUAvQAAAAJ&hl=en">As a psychologist</a> who studies social attitudes and intergroup relations, I get a bit uneasy when I see these types of insults get normalized. At their core, they’re a way to dehumanize others – a practice that can have pernicious effects. In a range of studies, psychologists have been able to show how dehumanizing messages can influence how we think about and treat people.<br />
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<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.94.2.292">In one study</a>, after researchers subtly primed participants to associate black people with apes, the participants became more likely to tolerate aggressive, violent policing of black criminal suspects. <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09589236.2017.1411790">Another study</a> exposed participants to metaphors comparing women to animals. The participants subsequently showed a spike in hostile sexism.<br />
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Dehumanization has also been associated with an increased willingness to perpetrate violence. <br />
<a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0146167212436401">One set of studies</a> found that men who showed stronger automatic associations between women and animals reported a greater proclivity to sexually harass and assault women. <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000048">Other work has shown</a> that those who dehumanize Arab people are more supportive of violent counterterrorism tactics: torture, targeting civilians and even bombing entire countries.<br />
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At its most extreme, dehumanizing messages and propaganda can facilitate support for war and genocide. It’s long been used to justify violence and destruction of minorities. We famously saw it in the Holocaust, when <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781136275104">Nazi propaganda referred to Jewish people as vermin</a>, and we saw it during the Rwandan genocide, when the <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-0-387-72112-5_12">Tutsi people were referred to as cockroaches</a>. In fact, international nongovernmental organizations consider dehumanizing speech one of the <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Johanna_Vollhardt/publication/228431577_Deconstructing_hate_speech_in_the_DRC_A_psychological_media_sensitization_campaign/links/53ff4fc90cf2194bc29a4740/Deconstructing-hate-speech-in-the-DRC-A-psychological-media-sensitization-campaign.pdf">precursors to genocide</a>. <br />
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Why are dehumanization and violence so closely connected? As social creatures, we’re wired to empathize with our fellow human beings, and we get uncomfortable when we see someone suffering. <br />
Once someone is dehumanized, we usually deny them the consideration, compassion and empathy that we typically give other people. It can relax our instinctive aversion to aggression and violence.<br />
Studies have found that once a person has dehumanized another person or group, they’re less likely to consider their thoughts and feelings.<br />
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For example, Americans tend to <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01793.x">dehumanize homeless people</a>. <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-23524-007">In one study</a>, experimenters asked participants to describe a day in the life of a homeless person, a college student and a firefighter. Respondents were much less likely to mention the homeless person’s emotional state. <br />
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Dehumanization can even affect our brains: When we look at people we’ve dehumanized, <a href="https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/2/1/45/2362822">there’s less activity</a> in the medial prefrontal cortex, which is the area of the brain responsible for social processing.<br />
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Roseanne might have claimed her tweet was nothing more than a flippant <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/05/30/roseanne-barr-blames-ambien-zolpidem-drug-real-side-effects/654683002/">Ambien-induced</a> barb. Some may have chuckled at New York magazine’s caricature of Trump. <img alt="The Conversation" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97512/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" width="1" />But the pervasive use of dehumanizing language is a slippery slope that can ultimately cause tremendous harm – and that’s no joke.<br />
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/allison-skinner-292904">Allison Skinner</a>, Psychology Researcher, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/northwestern-university-1259">Northwestern University</a></em><br />
<br />
This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com/">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-slippery-slope-of-dehumanizing-language-97512">original article</a>.<br />
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Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-90952877520796062232018-06-20T20:30:00.000-04:002018-06-20T20:30:30.253-04:00Behind the Criminal Immigration Law: Eugenics and White Supremacy<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Moore/Getty Images<br /></td></tr>
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<h3>
Amid a bipartisan backlash, President Trump has tried repeatedly to shift blame to Democrats for his own administration’s <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1049751/download">“zero-tolerance” immigration policy</a>, which has resulted in <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/children-separated-from-parents-border-patrol-cbp-trump-immigration-policy">more than 2,300 migrant children being taken from their families</a> along the U.S.–Mexico border. “The Democrats have to change their law — that’s their law,” Trump <a href="https://apnews.com/969815d4f3ad4ebe9cef55535add4b0a">told reporters on Friday</a>.</h3>
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The president didn’t specify which law he was talking about. But the statute at the center of his administration’s policy is the work of Republicans — with origins dating back all the way to World War I — albeit with substantial Democratic support along the way. Known originally as the “Undesirable Aliens Act,” the statute would not exist without support from, respectively, a eugenicist and a white supremacist.<br />
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The law in question was the foundation of a <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1049751/download">memo</a> Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued in early April that laid out the administration’s new, zero-tolerance policy. In the memo, Sessions instructed federal prosecutors in the southwestern United States to file criminal charges against any adults caught entering the country illegally. His order stripped officials of discretion over whether to place migrant families seeking asylum into civil proceedings, which allow families to stay together. (Court rulings limit how long the government can detain migrants in civil proceedings. There’s also no guarantee they’ll return for future hearing dates once they’re let out, a phenomenon that has prompted the president’s complaints about “catch and release.”)<br />
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On Monday, ProPublica <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/children-separated-from-parents-border-patrol-cbp-trump-immigration-policy">published audio</a> recorded at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility in which a Border Patrol agent mocks the wails of migrant children as young as 4. Liberals and conservatives alike have condemned the policy, calling it <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/laura-bush-separating-children-from-their-parents-at-the-border-breaks-my-heart/2018/06/17/f2df517a-7287-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html?utm_term=.a8a595f5c7ee">“cruel,”</a> an <a href="https://twitter.com/SenFeinstein/status/1008756225813688322">“atrocity,”</a> and <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/full-transcript-face-the-nation-on-june-17-2018/">“inconsistent with our American values.”</a><br />
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Top Trump administration officials have held their ground. “We are enforcing the laws passed by Congress,” Secretary of Homeland Security <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/nielsen-defends-family-separation-simply-enforcing-law-apologize/story?id=55978997">Kirstjen Nielsen asserted</a> Monday. Her message echoed one Sessions had delivered to law enforcement officers in Indiana last week. “If you violate the law, you subject yourself to prosecution,” <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/sessions-cites-bible-defense-breaking-families-blames-migrant-parents-n883296">he said</a>.<br />
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The federal law they say they are enforcing makes it a crime for foreign citizens to cross (or attempt to cross) the border into the U.S. anywhere other than an official port of entry. A first offense is a misdemeanor; a second unlawful entry is a felony.<br />
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The law’s ancestry dates back to World War I. Till that point, U.S. immigration laws had tended to be all or nothing: either no limits at all — or blanket bans for certain groups, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act. Others were free to enter provided they weren’t <a href="http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/immigration/timeline.html">“lunatics,” polygamists, prostitutes, “suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease,” or so on</a>.<br />
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The result was floods of immigrants: Between 1901 and 1910, for example, close to 9 million came to the U.S. As that happened, anti-immigrant attitudes mounted, with mass influxes from parts of Europe associated in the popular imagination with a litany of social problems, like urban poverty and squalor.<br />
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In May 1918, after the U.S. had entered World War I, Congress passed a statute called the Passport Act that gave the president the power to restrict the comings and goings of foreign citizens during wartime. A few months later, however, the war ended — and with it, the restrictions on border crossings.<br />
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Federal officials saw potential in the criminal provisions of the Passport Act — a maximum 20-year sentence — as a tool for deterring immigration. So prosecutors ignored the expiration of the law and continued to indict migrants under the Passport Act for unlawful entry into the U.S.<br />
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Anti-immigration sentiment continued to climb and the rhetoric of the era has resonance today. One anti-immigration group at the time claimed that immigrants tended to be “vicious and criminal” — the “bootleggers, gangsters, and racketeers of large cities.” The war, Columbia University historian Mae Ngai has written, “raised nationalism and anti-foreign sentiment to a high pitch.”<br />
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In response, Congress began clamping down. With the Immigration Act of 1924, it capped the flow at about 165,000 people a year, a small fraction of previous levels The statute’s quotas curtailed migration from southern and eastern Europe severely. Another 1924 law — the Oriental Exclusion Act — banned most immigration from Asia. At the same time, Congress made it easier to deport non-citizens for immigration violations.<br />
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In 1925, a federal appeals court put a halt to the practice of indicting migrants under the Passport Act outside wartime. But immigration officials liked what they’d seen, and by 1927, they were working on a replacement.<br />
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Two men spearheaded the effort that would lead Congress to criminalize unlawful entry into the United States. They were motivated by eugenics and white supremacy.<br />
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The first was <a href="https://www.dol.gov/general/aboutdol/history/davis">James Davis</a>, who was Secretary of Labor from 1921 to 1930. A Republican originally appointed by President Warren Harding, Davis was himself an immigrant from Wales who went by “Puddler Jim,” a reference to his job as a youthful worker in the steel mills of western Pennsylvania. At the time, the Department of Labor oversaw immigration, and Davis had grown disturbed by what he’d seen.<br />
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Davis was a committed eugenicist, and he believed principles of eugenics should guide immigration policy, according to The Bully Pulpit and the Melting Pot by the historian Hans Vought. It was necessary to draw a distinction, Davis had written in 1923, between “bad stock and good stock, weak blood and strong blood, sound heredity and sickly human stuff.”<br />
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In November 1927, Davis proposed a set of immigration reforms in the pages of The New York Times. Among his goals: “the definite lessening and possibly, in time, the complete checking of the degenerate and the bearer of degenerates.” One “phase of the immigration problem,” Davis wrote, was the “surreptitious entry of aliens” into the United States in numbers that “cannot even be approximately estimated.”<br />
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Deportation alone wasn’t enough to deter illegal immigration, Davis wrote. There was nothing disincentivizing the migrant from turning around and trying again. “Endeavoring to stop this law violation” by deportation only, he wrote, “is like trying to prevent burglary with a penalty no severer than opening the front door of the burglarized residence, should the burglar be found within, escorting him to it, and saying ‘You have no right here; see that you don’t come in again.’”<br />
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An immigrant who enters the country unlawfully, he concluded, “should be treated as a law violator and punished effectively.”<br />
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To bring his vision to fruition, Davis teamed up with a senator from South Carolina. Coleman Livingston Blease, a Democrat, was “a proud and unreconstructed white supremacist,” UCLA history professor Kelly Lytle Hernández wrote in her 2017 book City of Inmates.<br />
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Migrants from Mexico were one group whose numbers the increasingly powerful nativist elements in Congress hadn’t managed to restrict. Mexican workers were key to the booming economy of the southwest. Regional employers, particularly in the agricultural sector, had successfully lobbied Congress to block any bill that would choke off their primary source of inexpensive labor. As a result, migration from Mexico soared, with many Mexicans making illegal border crossings to avoid the cost and inconvenience of customs stations.<br />
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Blease saw in Davis’s proposal for criminal penalties a way to advance his vision of a white America, and he believed it would bridge the gap between the nativists clamoring for quotas and southwestern congressmen resisting them. Large-scale farmers didn’t mind criminal penalties, Hernández writes, so long as the law was enforced once the harvest was over.<br />
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The legislation wasn’t without its opponents, as the UCLA law professor Ingrid Eagly documented in a 2010 study of immigration prosecutions. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union opposed the bill. The ACLU felt it was unfair and unlikely to deter migration. An immigrant “may be quite ignorant of this law before he starts on his journey,” the group told Congress.<br />
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Despite the ACLU’s objections, a Republican-controlled Congress passed Davis and Blease’s bill in 1929. A Republican president, Herbert Hoover, signed it into law. The law made it a crime to enter the United States unlawfully and, in so doing, “created the criminalization of the border,” Eagly said.<br />
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The statute was swiftly put to use. Between July 1929 and June 1930, according to <a href="https://archive.org/stream/annualreportofco1930unit/annualreportofco1930unit_djvu.txt">a Department of Labor report</a>, prosecutors brought more than 6,000 unlawful entry cases. “It is believed that it will prove an effective deterrent,” the report’s author wrote. (In his recent memo, Sessions made similar claims about the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy.)<br />
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But the law didn’t reduce migration. By 1933, <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32437011643034;view=1up;seq=59">the Labor Department concluded</a> that its rosy outlook had been wrong. The 1929 law “does not seem to have the deterrent effect expected,” noted a Labor Department report published that year.<br />
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It blamed budget limitations and judges wary of meting out serious sentences if a defendant was going to be deported anyway.<br />
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In the 1930s, the Great Depression achieved what prosecutions and deportations had not. Immigration plunged as the labor market in the United States dried up. Prosecutions for unlawful entry dropped to about 5,000 a year, according to a 2012 examination of the law by Doug Keller in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal.<br />
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A shortage of labor during World War II prompted the U.S. to reverse course and encourage migration of temporary workers from Mexico through what it called the <em>Bracero</em> program. (The word refers to manual laborers in Spanish.)<br />
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Despite the earlier lessons, federal prosecutors began to focus their attention on bringing unlawful entry cases against Mexican migrants to deter workers from going around the <em>Bracero</em> program. By 1951, there were 15,000 illegal entry and re-entry prosecutions a year.<br />
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At the same time, Congress was working to overhaul American immigration law. The effort was spearheaded by two Democrats: Sen. Patrick McCarran and Rep. Francis Walter. Both were staunch anti-Communists who saw immigration — particularly from Eastern Europe and Asia — as posing a risk that Soviet or Maoist agents would infiltrate the country.<br />
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Their law is best known for preserving a quota system that meant <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/immigration-act">about 85 percent</a> of immigration visas annually went to people from northern and western Europe. But it also made a crucial change in the unlawful entry law.<br />
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In a counterintuitive move, Congress decided to reduce the penalties for unlawful entry — to a maximum of six months in prison. (It also added a felony provision for any additional illegal entry convictions.)<br />
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The change wasn’t driven by compassion or a shift away from criminalizing unlawful immigration. Rather, it anticipated the creation of federal magistrate courts that would handle the cases, according to Eagly, the UCLA law professor. A defendant facing a misdemeanor charge punishable by six months or less generally doesn’t have a right to a grand jury indictment or a jury trial. Once Congress established federal magistrate courts, prosecutors could bring criminal charges against far larger numbers of defendants.<br />
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A Democratic-controlled Congress passed the law in 1952, but it was vetoed by President Harry Truman. His <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14175">veto message</a> decried “carrying over into this year of 1952 the isolationist limitations of our 1924 law.” Congress was unmoved and overrode his veto. (In this sense, Trump is correct that Democrats bear some responsibility for the unlawful entry law that underlies his administration’s new immigration policy.)<br />
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The unlawful entry statute has remained largely unchanged since 1952. In 1968, however, Congress finally passed a law establishing federal magistrate courts, allowing for a major expansion of charges under the unlawful entry law. Without the need to go through the grand jury process or deal with potential jury trials, immigration prosecutions — almost all for unlawful entry — shot up, Eagly found in her 2010 study: from 2,536 cases nationwide in 1968 to 17,858 in 1974.<br />
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The trend culminated in programs like Operation Streamline during the George W. Bush administration, in which magistrate judges along the border took simultaneous mass guilty pleas for unlawful entry. (An appeals court ended the practice in 2009.)<br />
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The use of the law hasn’t been a partisan matter. The number of such cases <a href="http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/430/">spiked to nearly 50,000</a> in the last year of the Bush administration, and it stayed in that range for most of the Obama administration, according to federal government data maintained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. By 2016, the number had fallen to <a href="http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/446/">about 35,000</a> — still higher than all but the last year of the Bush administration.<br />
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But the number of unlawful entry cases fell, the TRAC data shows, during Trump’s first year in office, <a href="http://tracfed.syr.edu/results/9x205b29783b4c.html">to 27,000</a>. (It had <a href="http://tracfed.syr.edu/results/9x205b29783b4c.html">begun to rise again</a> in recent months, however, even before Sessions announced the administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy.) Convictions for immigration crimes <a href="http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/480/">now account for</a> more than half of all federal criminal convictions.<br />
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<link href="https://www.propublica.org/article/behind-the-criminal-immigration-law-eugenics-and-white-supremacy" rel="canonical"></link><script async="" src="https://pixel.propublica.org/pixel.js" type="text/javascript"></script>Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-33567410996580427222018-06-20T15:37:00.000-04:002018-06-20T15:37:55.998-04:00Misinformation and Biases Infect Social Media, Both Intentionally and Accidentally<h1>
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<figure>
<img alt="File 20180615 85822 5fqwo4.png?ixlib=rb 1.1" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223361/original/file-20180615-85822-5fqwo4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" />
<figcaption><b>
People who share potential misinformation on Twitter (in purple) rarely get to see corrections or fact-checking (in orange).
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.06122">Shao et al.</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></b>
</figcaption><figcaption><b><br /></b></figcaption>
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By <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/giovanni-luca-ciampaglia-345979">Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/indiana-university-1368">Indiana University</a></em> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/filippo-menczer-317794">Filippo Menczer</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/indiana-university-1368">Indiana University</a></em><div>
<i><br /></i><div>
Social media are among the <a href="http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/">primary sources of news in the U.S.</a> and across the world. Yet users are exposed to content of questionable accuracy, including <a href="https://conspiracypsychology.com/2018/02/22/every-mass-shooting-produces-the-same-conspiracy-theories-more-or-less/">conspiracy theories</a>, <a href="https://www.polygon.com/2018/4/13/17231470/fortnite-strip-clickbait-touchdalight-ricegum-youtube">clickbait</a>, <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/online-anger-is-gold-to-this-junk-news-pioneer">hyperpartisan content</a>, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/looking-for-life-on-a-flat-earth">pseudo science</a> and even <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/age-old-problem-fake-news-180968945/">fabricated “fake news” reports</a>.<br />
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It’s not surprising that there’s so much disinformation published: Spam and online fraud <a href="https://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/dridex-financial-trojan-aggressively-spread-millions-spam-emails-each-day">are lucrative for criminals</a>, and government and political propaganda yield <a href="https://www.ned.org/issue-brief-distinguishing-disinformation-from-propaganda-misinformation-and-fake-news/">both partisan and financial benefits</a>. But the fact that <a href="http://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559">low-credibility content spreads so quickly and easily</a> suggests that people and the algorithms behind social media platforms are vulnerable to manipulation.<br />
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<figure>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BIv9054dBBI?wmode=transparent&start=0" width="440"></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Explaining the tools developed at the Observatory on Social Media.</span></figcaption>
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Our research has identified three types of bias that make the social media ecosystem vulnerable to both intentional and accidental misinformation. That is why our <a href="http://osome.iuni.iu.edu/">Observatory on Social Media</a> at Indiana University is building <a href="http://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/">tools</a> to help people become aware of these biases and protect themselves from outside influences designed to exploit them. <br />
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<h2>
Bias in the brain</h2>
Cognitive biases originate in the way the brain processes the information that every person encounters every day. The brain can deal with only a finite amount of information, and too many incoming stimuli can cause <a href="https://hbr.org/2009/09/death-by-information-overload">information overload</a>. That in itself has serious implications for the quality of information on social media. We have found that steep competition for users’ limited attention means that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/srep00335">some ideas go viral despite their low quality</a> – <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0132">even when people prefer to share high-quality content</a>.<br />
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To avoid getting overwhelmed, the brain uses a <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/simple-heuristics-that-make-us-smart-9780195143812">number of tricks</a>. These methods are usually effective, but may also <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201210/avoiding-emotional-traps-is-easier-you-think">become biases</a> when applied in the wrong contexts. <br />
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One cognitive shortcut happens when a person is deciding whether to share a story that appears on their social media feed. People are <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22309-9_5">very affected by the emotional connotations of a headline</a>, even though that’s not a good indicator of an article’s accuracy. Much more important is <a href="https://digitalliteracy.cornell.edu/tutorial/dpl3221.html">who wrote the piece</a>.<br />
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To counter this bias, and help people pay more attention to the source of a claim before sharing it, we developed <a href="http://fakey.iuni.iu.edu/">Fakey</a>, a mobile news literacy game (free on <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cnets.fakey">Android</a> and <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1386410642?mt=8">iOS</a>) simulating a typical social media news feed, with a mix of news articles from mainstream and low-credibility sources. Players get more points for sharing news from reliable sources and flagging suspicious content for fact-checking. In the process, they learn to recognize signals of source credibility, such as hyperpartisan claims and emotionally charged headlines. <br />
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<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222513/original/file-20180610-191951-l5i1yd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222513/original/file-20180610-191951-l5i1yd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" /></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Screenshots of the Fakey game.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mihai Avram and Filippo Menczer</span></span>
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<h2>
Bias in society</h2>
Another source of bias comes from society. When people connect directly with their peers, the social biases that guide their selection of friends come to influence the information they see.<br />
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In fact, in our research we have found that it is possible to <a href="http://doi.org/10.1109/PASSAT/SocialCom.2011.34">determine the political leanings of a Twitter user</a> by simply looking at the partisan preferences of their friends. Our analysis of the structure of these <a href="http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM11/paper/view/2847">partisan communication networks</a> found social networks are particularly efficient at disseminating information – accurate or not – when <a href="http://doi.org/10.1140/epjds6">they are closely tied together and disconnected from other parts of society</a>.<br />
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The tendency to evaluate information more favorably if it comes from within their own social circles creates “<a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/the-social-media-echo-chamber-is-real/">echo chambers</a>” that are ripe for manipulation, either consciously or unintentionally. This helps explain why so many online conversations devolve into <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/10/25/the-tone-of-social-media-discussions-around-politics/">“us versus them” confrontations</a>. <br />
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To study how the structure of online social networks makes users vulnerable to disinformation, we built <a href="http://hoaxy.iuni.iu.edu/">Hoaxy</a>, a system that tracks and visualizes the spread of content from low-credibility sources, and how it competes with fact-checking content. Our analysis of the data collected by Hoaxy during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections shows that Twitter accounts that shared misinformation were <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0196087">almost completely cut off</a> from the corrections made by the fact-checkers.<br />
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When we drilled down on the misinformation-spreading accounts, we found a very dense core group of accounts retweeting each other almost exclusively – including several bots. The only times that fact-checking organizations were ever quoted or mentioned by the users in the misinformed group were when questioning their legitimacy or claiming the opposite of what they wrote.<br />
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<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223109/original/file-20180613-32327-126thdk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223109/original/file-20180613-32327-126thdk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" /></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A screenshot of a Hoaxy search shows how common bots – in red and dark pink – are spreading a false story on Twitter.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hoaxy</span></span>
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<h2>
Bias in the machine</h2>
The third group of biases arises directly from the algorithms used to determine what people see online. Both social media platforms and search engines employ them. These personalization technologies are designed to select only the most engaging and relevant content for each individual user. But in doing so, it may end up reinforcing the cognitive and social biases of users, thus making them even more vulnerable to manipulation.<br />
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For instance, the detailed <a href="https://theconversation.com/solving-the-political-ad-problem-with-transparency-85366">advertising tools built into many social media platforms</a> let disinformation campaigners exploit <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-choice/201504/what-is-confirmation-bias">confirmation bias</a> by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-cybersecurity-202/2018/05/11/the-cybersecurity-202-the-facebook-ad-dump-shows-the-true-sophistication-of-russia-s-influence-operation/5af4733a30fb04258879944e/">tailoring messages</a> to people who are already inclined to believe them. <br />
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Also, if a user often clicks on Facebook links from a particular news source, Facebook will <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/take-back-your-facebook-news-feed/">tend to show that person more of that site’s content</a>. This so-called “<a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/05/12/the-filter-bubble/">filter bubble</a>” effect may isolate people from diverse perspectives, strengthening confirmation bias.<br />
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Our own research shows that social media platforms expose users to a less diverse set of sources than do non-social media sites like Wikipedia. Because this is at the level of a whole platform, not of a single user, we call this the <a href="https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.38">homogeneity bias</a>.<br />
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Another important ingredient of social media is information that is trending on the platform, according to what is getting the most clicks. We call this <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.00574">popularity bias</a>, because we have found that an algorithm designed to promote popular content may negatively affect the overall quality of information on the platform. This also feeds into existing cognitive bias, reinforcing what appears to be popular irrespective of its quality.<br />
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All these algorithmic biases can be manipulated by <a href="https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204021-the-rise-of-social-bots/fulltext">social bots</a>, computer programs that interact with humans through social media accounts. Most social bots, like Twitter’s <a href="https://twitter.com/big_ben_clock">Big Ben</a>, are harmless. However, some conceal their real nature and are used for malicious intents, such as <a href="https://newsroom.fb.com/InfoOps">boosting disinformation</a> or falsely <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/astroturfing-grassroots-movements-2011-9">creating the appearance of a grassroots movement</a>, also called “astroturfing.” We found <a href="http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM11/paper/view/2850">evidence of this type of manipulation</a> in the run-up to the 2010 U.S. midterm election.<br />
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<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222527/original/file-20180611-191940-17sdjut.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222527/original/file-20180611-191940-17sdjut.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" /></a>
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<span class="caption">A screenshot of the Botometer website, showing one human and one bot account.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Botometer</span></span>
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To study these manipulation strategies, we developed a tool to detect social bots called <a href="http://botometer.org/">Botometer</a>. Botometer uses machine learning to detect bot accounts, by inspecting thousands of different features of Twitter accounts, like the times of its posts, how often it tweets, and the accounts it follows and retweets. It is not perfect, but it has revealed that as many as <a href="https://aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM17/paper/view/15587">15 percent of Twitter accounts show signs of being bots</a>.<br />
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Using Botometer in conjunction with Hoaxy, we analyzed the core of the misinformation network during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. We found many bots exploiting both the cognitive, confirmation and popularity biases of their victims and Twitter’s algorithmic biases.<br />
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These bots are able to construct filter bubbles around vulnerable users, feeding them false claims and misinformation. First, they can attract the attention of human users who support a particular candidate by tweeting that candidate’s hashtags or by mentioning and retweeting the person. Then the bots can amplify false claims smearing opponents by retweeting articles from low-credibility sources that match certain keywords. This activity also makes the algorithm highlight for other users false stories that are being shared widely.<br />
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<h1>
Understanding complex vulnerabilities</h1>
Even as our research, and others’, shows how individuals, institutions and even entire societies can be manipulated on social media, there are <a href="http://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao2998">many questions</a> left to answer. It’s especially important to discover how these different biases interact with each other, potentially creating more complex vulnerabilities.<br />
<br />
<img alt="The Conversation" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97148/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" width="1" />Tools like ours offer internet users more information about disinformation, and therefore some degree of protection from its harms. The solutions will <a href="https://www.hewlett.org/newsroom/hewlett-knight-koch-foundations-with-other-funders-will-support-independent-research-on-facebooks-role-in-elections-and-democracy/">not likely be only technological</a>, though there will probably be some technical aspects to them. But they must take into account <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2017.07.008">the cognitive and social aspects</a> of the problem.<br />
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<br />
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/giovanni-luca-ciampaglia-345979">Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia</a>, Assistant Research Scientist, Indiana University Network Science Institute, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/indiana-university-1368">Indiana University</a></em> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/filippo-menczer-317794">Filippo Menczer</a>, Professor of Computer Science and Informatics; Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/indiana-university-1368">Indiana University</a></em><br />
This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com/">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/misinformation-and-biases-infect-social-media-both-intentionally-and-accidentally-97148">original article</a>.<br />
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Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-1087094457421428842018-06-19T20:47:00.000-04:002018-06-19T20:47:00.494-04:00Photographer on His Now Famous Photo From The Border <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgprn3OjNfRtaLz47a2edsoDwE5XBwl8fB6skmOSQ-z9U8KCbND0eBuS2yPGgKbehzNFbHAEZ6tKNOlIy3l3uRttykfLJXiR8NkmdkBOfj1O7_NCzin06wp5-b_IptdnON4hG_yZS1BnbJa/s1600/border.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1017" data-original-width="1600" height="406" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgprn3OjNfRtaLz47a2edsoDwE5XBwl8fB6skmOSQ-z9U8KCbND0eBuS2yPGgKbehzNFbHAEZ6tKNOlIy3l3uRttykfLJXiR8NkmdkBOfj1O7_NCzin06wp5-b_IptdnON4hG_yZS1BnbJa/s640/border.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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"This one was tough for me. As soon as it was over, they were put into a van. I had to stop and take deep breaths. All I wanted to do was pick her up. But I couldn't."<br />
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-Photographer John Moore on taking the now-famous image of a young child crying as her mother is searched by border security<br />
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<br />Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-43937063256619501152018-06-19T20:19:00.000-04:002018-06-19T20:19:58.833-04:00Schools Must Equip Students to Navigate Alt-right Websites That Push Fake News<br />
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More than 60 percent of America’s middle and high school students rely on alt-right internet sites as credible sources for their research papers. The students are using alt-right sites to write papers on topics that range from free speech and the Second Amendment to citizenship, immigration and the Holocaust.<br />
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These were among the key findings of a preliminary survey of 200 teachers I conducted recently to develop a snapshot of how common it was for middle and high school students to turn to alt-right websites.<br />
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As a researcher who specializes in teaching what is known as “<a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20180131/teaching-hard-history">hard histories</a>,” including slavery, the Holocaust and other genocides, this finding is of concern, particularly as the nation approaches the one-year anniversary of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/local/charlottesville-timeline/?utm_term=.ec9d01e0e2c6">tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia</a>.<br />
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<h2>
Who they are</h2>
The alt-right is a connected set of <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/groups">far-right groups</a>, <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology">beliefs</a> and <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual?f%5B0%5D=field_ideology%3A11495">individual people</a>. They believe in white supremacy, and that it is under attack by <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alt-right">multiculturalism, political correctness and social justice</a>. It was the alt-right that marched in Charlottesville, shouting Nazi slogans and invoking the KKK. One way the alt-right recruits new members is through social media and other online platforms.<br />
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Despite the link between the alt-right and the Charlottesville tragedy, students are still using alt-right websites for their research papers in school, according to teachers I surveyed in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York. The teachers reported that the students cite these websites in their bibliographies but often struggle to make sense of the information they obtained from the sites. <br />
These sites are increasingly prominent. In fact, it is interesting to note that the alt-right websites teachers list as being used most often by their students have all been started since 2005, with the exception of one, and many have come into existence in just the past five years.<br />
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<h2>
Examining alt-right websites</h2>
The question becomes, then, what should teachers do regarding these sites? Is it the responsibility of teachers to actually do anything?<br />
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Instead of ignoring these sites, I’d suggest teachers might do best to teach students how to critically examine the sites. In order to do that, however, teachers must know what is out there. While this is not an exhaustive list, the following six alt-right websites were most commonly cited by teachers as those that students use for their papers.<br />
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They are: National Policy Institute, Radix Journal, American Renaissance, Taki’s Magazine and Voat.<br />
In open-ended follow-up questions, teachers added that students find the information on these sites appealing but are unable to differentiate between fact and fiction. <br />
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In classroom spaces, teachers will inevitably teach students who come from a variety of backgrounds and who hold different beliefs, ideas and opinions. Still, it is a teacher’s job to encourage objective, fact-based thinking to the students in their care. Awareness of pseudo-scientific “White identity” sites like Radix and American Renaissance allows teachers to deconstruct those sites with students, encourage critical reading, and debate the validity and value of the content.<br />
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<h2>
Uncomfortable subject matter</h2>
Teachers responding to my survey report that they are uncomfortable teaching about these websites because they are certain they have “at least some” students who agree with the alt-right sites in question. The teachers also believe that teaching about these websites in class would lead to uncomfortable conversations. <br />
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As teachers, it is not our job to indoctrinate students to think as we do. However, it is our job to teach facts. Creating a safe classroom climate will allow for these uncomfortable conversations where close examinations of the opinions presented on these websites can be examined in a dispassionate way. For example, Radix Journal recently featured an article that “Martin Luther King Jr., a fraud and degenerate in his life, has become the symbol and cynosure of White Dispossession and the deconstruction of European civilization.” It is reasonable to expect heated student disagreement around an article like this one. This, then, opens up space to teach students how to engage in respectful and difficult conversations with one another.<br />
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Lessons of this sort would certainly involve countering misinformation that is put forward on these sites. For example, after looking at the Radix Journal article that attacks Martin Luther King Jr., it would be appropriate to have students consider “<a href="https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/memphis-1968/three-visions-achieving-equal-rights">Three Visions for Achieving Equal Rights</a>,” a lesson with primary sources from the organization Facing History and Ourselves. Beyond this point-counterpoint, students need to be given tools to evaluate the validity of the information they encounter while doing research. One excellent tool to do this, “Evaluating Online Resources,” comes from the project Teaching Tolerance, and helps students <a href="https://www.tolerance.org/classroom-resources/tolerance-lessons/evaluating-online-sources">evaluate online sources</a>. Regardless of the resource used, students need to be pushed to consider who the author is, his or her bias, and the purpose of the article. <br />
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What I am suggesting here might engender pushback but so did other proposals to introduce controversial subjects to students. Consider <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/brief-history-sex-ed-america-81001">sex education in the 1960s</a> or the <a href="https://dare.org/history/">DARE program in the 1980s</a>. Today, both are commonplace in schools, despite the idea that they expose students to controversial information they might not know, including information about safe sex and different drugs. <br />
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<h2>
Why it’s necessary</h2>
Fewer than 10 percent of teachers report doing any whole class teaching about, or discussion of, these alt-right websites, despite the fact that more than half of their students utilize these sites, according to responses to my survey. Instead, they speak to students individually and request that they find other sources, according to my survey.<br />
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<img alt="The Conversation" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97166/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" width="1" />Teachers need to help students learn to recognize credible sources and not fall victim to alt-right sites that put forth propaganda. In order to combat the darkness in the world and on the web, teachers must have the knowledge and courage to teach about it directly.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/jennifer-rich-485730">Jennifer Rich</a>, Assistant Professor, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/rowan-university-3458">Rowan University</a></em><br />
<br />
This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com/">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/schools-must-equip-students-to-navigate-alt-right-websites-that-push-fake-news-97166">original article</a>.<br />
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Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-68157101408592820622018-06-19T17:19:00.000-04:002018-06-19T17:19:49.926-04:00How the Case for Voter Fraud Was Tested — and Utterly Failed<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVjgxLMYl9oRT3RZ0T2TNsPt-MGPNfbuEcP7QkAMhxxM6P11W_a7A2AxdB-CAG0vyGJsuHvHoetVTTUfASqicY87rR906_JsOOFklOrBqq01pZH1AJtfrFkB3tQxHi6UEbMWYaKPad08so/s1600/kolbach.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="827" data-original-width="1600" height="330" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVjgxLMYl9oRT3RZ0T2TNsPt-MGPNfbuEcP7QkAMhxxM6P11W_a7A2AxdB-CAG0vyGJsuHvHoetVTTUfASqicY87rR906_JsOOFklOrBqq01pZH1AJtfrFkB3tQxHi6UEbMWYaKPad08so/s640/kolbach.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">AP Images</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<h1>
<span style="font-size: large; font-weight: normal;">In the end, the decision seemed inevitable. After a seven-day trial in Kansas City federal court in March, in which Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach needed to be tutored on basic trial procedure by the judge and was found in contempt for his “willful failure” to obey a ruling, even he knew his chances were slim. Kobach <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article206025749.html">told The Kansas City Star</a> at the time that he expected the judge would rule against him (though he expressed optimism in his chances on appeal).</span></h1>
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Sure enough, yesterday federal Judge Julie Robinson overturned the law that Kobach was defending as lead counsel for the state, dealing him an unalloyed defeat. The statute, championed by Kobach and signed into law in 2013, required Kansans to present proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. The American Civil Liberties Union sued, contending that the law violated the National Voter Registration Act (AKA the “motor voter” law), which was designed to make it easy to register.<br />
The trial had a significance that extends far beyond the Jayhawk state. One of the fundamental questions in the debate over alleged voter fraud — whether a substantial number of non-citizens are in fact registering to vote — was one of two issues to be determined in the Kansas proceedings. (The second was whether there was a less burdensome solution than what Kansas had adopted.) That made the trial a telling opportunity to remove the voter fraud claims from the charged, and largely proof-free, realms of political campaigns and cable news shoutfests and examine them under the exacting strictures of the rules of evidence.<br />
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That’s precisely what occurred and according to Robinson, an appointee of George W. Bush, the proof that voter fraud is widespread was utterly lacking. As the judge put it, “the court finds no credible evidence that a substantial number of noncitizens registered to vote” even under the previous law, which Kobach had claimed was weak.<br />
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For Kobach, the trial should’ve been a moment of glory. He’s been arguing for a decade that voter fraud is a national calamity. Much of his career has been built on this issue, along with his fervent opposition to illegal immigration. (His claim is that unlawful immigrants are precisely the ones voting illegally.) Kobach, who also co-chaired the Trump administration’s short-lived commission on voter fraud, is perhaps the individual most identified with the cause of sniffing out and eradicating phony voter registration. He’s got a gilded resume, with degrees from Harvard University, Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, and is seen as both the intellect behind the cause and its prime advocate. Kobach has written voter laws in other jurisdictions and defended them in court. If anybody ever had time to marshal facts and arguments before a trial, it was Kobach.<br />
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But things didn’t go well for him in the Kansas City courtroom, as Robinson’s opinion made clear. Kobach’s strongest evidence of non-citizen registration was anemic at best: Over a 20-year period, fewer than 40 non-citizens had attempted to register in one Kansas county that had 130,000 voters. Most of those 40 improper registrations were the result of mistakes or confusion rather than intentional attempts to mislead, and only five of the 40 managed to cast a vote.<br />
<br />
One of Kobach’s own experts even rebutted arguments made by both Kobach and President Donald Trump. The expert testified that a handful of improper registrations could not be extrapolated to conclude that 2.8 million fraudulent votes — roughly, the gap between Hillary Clinton and Trump in the popular vote tally — had been cast in the 2016 presidential election. Testimony from a second key expert for Kobach also fizzled.<br />
<br />
As the judge’s opinion noted, Kobach insisted the meager instances of cheating revealed at trial are just “the tip of the iceberg.” As she explained, “This trial was his opportunity to produce credible evidence of that iceberg, but he failed to do so.” Dismissing the testimony by Kobach’s witnesses as unpersuasive, Robinson drew what she called “the more obvious conclusion that there is no iceberg; only an icicle largely created by confusion and administrative error.”<br />
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By the time the trial was over, Kobach, a charismatic 52-year-old whose broad shoulders and imposing height make him resemble an aging quarterback, seemed to have shrunk inside his chair at the defense table.<br />
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But despite his defeat, Kobach’s causes — restricting immigration and tightening voting requirements — seem to be enjoying favorable tides elsewhere. Recent press accounts noted Kobach’s role in restoring a question about citizenship, abandoned since 1950, to U.S. Census forms for 2020. And the Supreme Court ruled on June 11 that the state of Ohio can purge voters from its rolls when they fail to vote even a single time and don’t return a mailing verifying their address, a provision that means more voters will need to re-register and prove their eligibility again.<br />
<br />
For his own part, Kobach is now a candidate for governor of Kansas, running neck and neck with the incumbent in polls for the Republican primary on Aug. 7. It’s not clear whether the verdict will affect his chances — or whether it will lead him and others to quietly retreat from claims of voter fraud. But the judge’s opinion and expert interviews reveal that Kobach effectively put the concept of mass voter fraud to the test — and the evidence crumbled.<br />
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Perhaps it was an omen. Before Kobach could enter the courtroom inside the Charles Evans Whittaker U.S. Courthouse each day, he had to pass through a hallway whose walls featured a celebratory display entitled “Americans by Choice: The Story of Immigration and Citizenship in Kansas.” Photographs of people who’d been sworn in as citizens in that very courthouse were superimposed on the translucent window shades.<br />
<br />
Public interest in the trial was high. The seating area quickly filled to capacity on the first day of trial on the frigid morning of March 6. The jury box was opened to spectators; it wouldn’t be needed, as this was a bench trial. Those who couldn’t squeeze in were sent to a lower floor, where a live feed had been prepared in a spillover room.<br />
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From the moment the trial opened, Kobach and his co-counsels in the Kansas secretary of state’s office, Sue Becker and Garrett Roe, stumbled over the most basic trial procedures. Their mistakes antagonized the judge. “Evidence 101,” Robinson snapped, only minutes into the day, after Kobach’s team attempted to improperly introduce evidence. “I’m not going to do it.”<br />
Matters didn’t improve for Kobach from there.<br />
<br />
Throughout the trial, his team’s repeated mishaps and botched cross examinations cost hours of the court’s time. Robinson was repeatedly forced to step into the role of law professor, guiding Kobach, Becker and Roe through courtroom procedure. “Do you know how to do the next step, if that’s what you’re going to do?” the judge asked Becker at one point, as she helped her through the steps of impeaching a witness. “We’re going to follow the rules of evidence here.” <br />
<br />
Becker often seemed nervous. She took her bright red glasses off and on. At times she burst into nervous chuckles after a misstep. She laughed at witnesses, skirmished with the judge and even taunted the lawyers for the ACLU. “I can’t wait to ask my questions on Monday!” she shouted at the end of the first week, jabbing a finger in the direction of Dale Ho, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs. Ho rolled his eyes.<br />
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Roe was gentler — deferential, even. He often admitted he didn’t know what step came next, asking the judge for help. “I don’t — I don’t know if this one is objectionable. I hope it’s not,” he offered at one point, as he prepared to ask a question following a torrent of sustained objections. “I’ll let you know,” an attorney for the plaintiffs responded, to a wave of giggles in the courtroom. On the final day of trial, as Becker engaged in yet another dispute with the judge, Roe slapped a binder to his forehead and audibly whispered, “Stop talking. Stop talking.”<br />
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Kobach’s cross examinations were smoother and better organized, but he regularly attempted to introduce exhibits — for example, updated state statistics that he had failed to provide the ACLU in advance to vet — that Robinson ruled were inadmissible. As the trial wore on, she became increasingly irritated. She implored Kobach to “please read” the rules on which she based her rulings, saying his team had repeated these errors “ad nauseum.”<br />
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Kobach seemed unruffled. Instead of heeding her advice, he’d proffer the evidence for the record, a practice that allows the evidence to be preserved for appeal even if the trial judge refuses to admit it. Over the course of the trial, Kobach and his team would do this nearly a dozen times.<br />
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Eventually, Robinson got fed up. She asked Kobach to justify his use of proffers. Kobach, seemingly alarmed, grabbed a copy of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — to which he had attached a growing number of Post-it notes — and quickly flipped through it, trying to find the relevant rule.<br />
The judge tried to help. “It’s Rule 26, of course, that’s been the basis for my rulings,” she told Kobach. “I think it would be helpful if you would just articulate under what provision of Rule 26 you think this is permissible.” Kobach seemed to play for time, asking clarifying questions rather than articulating a rationale. Finally, the judge offered mercy: a 15-minute break. Kobach’s team rushed from the courtroom.<br />
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It wasn’t enough to save him. In her opinion, Robinson described “a pattern and practice by Defendant [Kobach] of flaunting disclosure and discovery rules.” As she put it, “it is not clear to the Court whether Defendant repeatedly failed to meet his disclosure obligations intentionally or due to his unfamiliarity with the federal rules.” She ordered Kobach to attend the equivalent of after-school tutoring: six hours of extra legal education on the rules of civil procedure or the rules of evidence (and to present the court with a certificate of completion).<br />
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It’s always a bad idea for a lawyer to try the patience of a judge — and that’s doubly true during a bench trial, when the judge will decide not only the law, but also the facts. Kobach repeatedly annoyed Robinson with his procedural mistakes. But that was nothing next to what the judge viewed as Kobach’s intentional bad faith.<br />
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This view emerged in writing right after the trial — that’s when Robinson issued her ruling finding Kobach in contempt — but before the verdict. And the conduct that inspired the contempt finding had persisted over several years. Robinson concluded that Kobach had intentionally failed to follow a ruling she issued in 2016 that ordered him to restore the privileges of 17,000 suspended Kansas voters.<br />
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In her contempt ruling, the judge cited Kobach’s “history of noncompliance” with the order and characterized his explanations for not abiding by it as “nonsensical” and “disingenuous.” She wrote that she was “troubled” by Kobach’s “failure to take responsibility for violating this Court’s orders, and for failing to ensure compliance over an issue that he explicitly represented to the Court had been accomplished.” Robinson ordered Kobach to pay the ACLU’s legal fees for the contempt proceeding.<br />
That contempt ruling was actually the second time Kobach was singled out for punishment in the case. Before the trial, a federal magistrate judge deputized to oversee the discovery portion of the suit fined him $1,000 for making “patently misleading representations” about a voting fraud document Kobach had prepared for Trump. Kobach paid the fine <a href="http://www.cjonline.com/news/20180608/sos-kris-kobachs-office-paid-1000-fine-in-federal-case-with-state-issued-credit-card">with a state credit card</a>.<br />
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More than any procedural bumbling, the collapse of Kobach’s case traced back to the disintegration of a single witness.<br />
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The witness was Jesse Richman, a political scientist from Old Dominion University, who has written studies on voter fraud. For this trial, Richman was paid $5,000 by the taxpayers of Kansas to measure non-citizen registration in the state. Richman was the man who had to deliver the goods for Kobach.<br />
With his gray-flecked beard and mustache, Richman looked the part of an academic, albeit one who seemed a bit too tall for his suit and who showed his discomfort in a series of awkward, sudden movements on the witness stand. At moments, Richman’s testimony turned combative, devolving into something resembling an episode of The Jerry Springer Show. By the time he left the stand, Richman had testified for more than five punishing hours. He’d bickered with the ACLU’s lawyer, raised his voice as he defended his studies and repeatedly sparred with the judge.<br />
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“Wait, wait, wait!” shouted Robinson at one point, silencing a verbal free-for-all that had erupted among Richman, the ACLU’s Ho, and Kobach, who were all speaking at the same time. “Especially you,” she said, turning her stare to Richman. “You are not here to be an advocate. You are not here to trash the plaintiff. And you are not here to argue with me.”<br />
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Richman had played a small but significant part in the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump and others had cited his work to claim that illegal votes had robbed Trump of the popular vote. At an October 2016 rally in Wisconsin, the candidate cited Richman’s work to bolster his predictions that the election would be rigged. “You don’t read about this, right?” Trump told the crowd, before reading from an op-ed Richman had written for The Washington Post: “‘We find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in various close elections.’ Okay? All right?”<br />
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Richman’s 2014 study of non-citizen registration used data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study — an online survey of more than 32,000 people. Of those, fewer than 40 individuals indicated they were non-citizens registered to vote. Based on that sample, Richman concluded that up to 2.8 million illegal votes had been cast in 2008 by non-citizens. In fact, he put the illegal votes at somewhere between 38,000 and 2.8 million — a preposterously large range — and then Trump and others simply used the highest figure.<br />
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Academics pilloried Richman’s conclusions. Two hundred political scientists signed an open letter criticizing the study, saying it should “not be cited or used in any debate over fraudulent voting.” Harvard’s Stephen Ansolabehere, who administered the CCES, published his own peer-reviewed paper lambasting Richman’s work. Indeed, by the time Trump read Richman’s article onstage in 2016, The Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/10/24/could-non-citizens-decide-the-november-election/?utm_term=.abdf711273be">had already appended</a> a note to the op-ed linking to three rebuttals and a peer-reviewed study debunking the research.<br />
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None of that discouraged Kobach or Trump from repeating Richman’s conclusions. They then went a few steps further. They took the top end of the range for the 2008 election, assumed that it applied to the 2016 election, too, and further assumed that <em>all</em> of the fraudulent ballots had been cast for Clinton.<br />
Some of those statements found their way into the courtroom, when Ho pressed play <a href="http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/article118456498.html">on a video</a> shot by The Kansas City Star on Nov. 30, 2016. Kobach had met with Trump 10 days earlier and had brought with him a paper decrying non-citizen registration and voter fraud. Two days later, Trump tweeted that he would have won the popular vote if not for “millions of people who voted illegally.”<br />
On the courtroom’s televisions, Kobach appeared, saying Trump’s tweet was “absolutely correct.” Without naming Richman, Kobach referred to his study: The number of non-citizens who said they’d voted in 2008 was far larger than the popular vote margin, Kobach said on the video. The same number likely voted again in 2016.<br />
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In the courtroom, Ho asked Richman if he believed his research supported such a claim. Richman stammered. He repeatedly looked at Kobach, seemingly searching for a way out. Ho persisted and finally, Richman gave his answer: “I do not believe my study provides strong support for that notion.”<br />
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To estimate the number of non-citizens voting in Kansas, Richman had used the same methodology he employed in his much-criticized 2014 study. Using samples as small as a single voter, he’d produced surveys with wildly different estimates of non-citizen registration in the state. The multiple iterations confused everyone in the courtroom.<br />
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“For the record, how many different data sources have you provided?” Robinson interjected in the middle of one Richman answer. “You provide a range of, like, zero to 18,000 or more.”<br />
“I sense the frustration,” Richman responded, before offering a winding explanation of the multiple data sources and surveys he’d used to arrive at a half-dozen different estimates. Robinson cut him off. “Maybe we need to stop here,” she said.<br />
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“Your honor, let me finish answering your question,” he said.<br />
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“No, no. I’m done,” she responded, as he continued to protest. “No. Dr. Richman, I’m done.”<br />
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To refute Richman’s numbers, the ACLU called on Harvard’s Ansolabehere, whose data Richman had relied on in the past. Ansolabehere testified that Richman’s sample sizes were so small that it was just as possible that there were no non-citizens registered to vote in Kansas as 18,000. “There’s just a great deal of uncertainty with these estimates,” he said.<br />
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Ho asked if it would be accurate to say that Richman’s data “shows a rate of non-citizen registration in Kansas that is not statistically distinct from zero?”<br />
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“Correct.”<br />
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The judge was harsher than Ansolabehere in her description of Richman’s testimony. In her opinion, Robinson unloaded a fusillade of dismissive adjectives, calling Richman’s conclusions “confusing, inconsistent and methodologically flawed,” and adding that they were “credibly dismantled” by Ansolabehere. She labeled elements of Richman’s testimony “disingenuous” and “misleading,” and stated that she gave his research “no weight” in her decision.<br />
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One of the paradoxes of Kobach is that he has become a star in circles that focus on illegal immigration and voting fraud despite poor results in the courtroom. By ProPublica’s count, Kobach chalked up a 2–6 won-lost record in federal cases in which he was played a major role, and which reached a final disposition before the Kansas case.<br />
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Those results occurred when Kobach was an attorney for the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform from 2004 to 2011, when he became secretary of state in Kansas. In his FAIR role (in which he continued to moonlight till about 2014), Kobach traveled to places like Fremont, Nebraska, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Farmers Branch, Texas, and Valley Park, Missouri, to help local governments write laws that attempted to hamper illegal immigration, and then defend them in court. Kobach won in Nebraska, but lost in Texas and Pennsylvania, and only a watered down version of the law remains in Missouri.<br />
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The best-known law that Kobach helped shape before joining the Kansas government in 2011 was Arizona’s “show me your papers” law. That statute allowed police to demand citizenship documents for any reason from anyone they thought might be in the country illegally. After it passed, the state paid Kobach $300 an hour to train law enforcement on how to legally arrest suspected illegal immigrants. The Supreme Court gutted key provisions of the law in 2012.<br />
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Kobach also struggled in two forays into political campaigning. In 2004, he lost a race for Congress. He also drew criticism for his stint as an informal adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. Kobach was the man responsible for Romney’s much-maligned proposal that illegal immigrants “self-deport,” one reason Romney attracted little support among Latinos. Romney disavowed Kobach even before the campaign was over, telling media outlets that he was a “supporter,” not an adviser.<br />
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Trump’s election meant Kobach’s positions on immigration would be welcome in the White House. Kobach lobbied for, but didn’t receive, an appointment as Secretary of Homeland Security. He was, however, placed in charge of the voter fraud commission, a pet project of Trump’s. Facing a raft of lawsuits and bad publicity, the commission was disbanded little more than six months after it formally launched.<br />
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Back at home, Kobach expanded his power as secretary of state. Boasting of his experience as a law professor and scholar, Kobach convinced the state legislature to give him the authority to prosecute election crimes himself, a power wielded by no other secretary of state. In that role, he has obtained nine guilty pleas against individuals for election-related misdemeanors. Only one of those who pleaded guilty, as it happens, was a non-citizen.<br />
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He also persuaded Kansas’ attorney general to allow Kobach to represent the state in the trial of Kansas’ voting law. Kobach argued it was a bargain. As he <a href="http://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article198143494.html">told The Wichita Eagle</a> at the time, “The advantage is the state gets an experienced appellate litigator who is a specialist in this field and in constitutional law for the cost the state is already paying, which is my salary.”<br />
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Kobach fared no better in the second main area of the Kansas City trial than he had in the first. This part explored whether there is a less burdensome way of identifying non-citizens than forcing everyone to show proof of citizenship upon registration. Judge Robinson would conclude that there were many alternatives that were less intrusive.<br />
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In his opening, Ho of the ACLU spotlighted a potentially less intrusive approach. Why not use the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements System list, and compare the names on it to the Kansas voter rolls? That, Ho argued, could efficiently suss out illegal registrations.<br />
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Kobach told the judge that simply wasn’t feasible. The list, he explained, doesn’t contain all non-citizens in the country illegally — it contains only non-citizens legally present and those here illegally who register in some way with the federal government. Plus, he told Robinson, in order to really match the SAVE list against a voter roll, both datasets would have to contain alien registration numbers, the identifier given to non-citizens living in the U.S. “Those are things that a voter registration system doesn’t have,” he said. “So, the SAVE system does not work.”<br />
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But Kobach had made the opposite argument when he headed the voter fraud commission. There, he’d repeatedly advocated the use of the SAVE database. Appearing on Fox News in May 2017, shortly after the commission was established, Kobach said, “The Department of Homeland Security knows of the millions of aliens who are in the United States legally and that data that’s never been bounced against the state’s voter rolls to see whether these people are registered.” He said the federal databases “can be very valuable.”<br />
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A month later, as chief of the voting fraud commission, Kobach took steps to compare state information to the SAVE database. He sent a letter to all 50 secretaries of state requesting their voter rolls. Bipartisan outrage ensued. Democrats feared he would use the rolls to encourage states to purge legitimately registered voters. Republicans labelled the request federal overreach.<br />
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At trial, Kobach’s main expert on this point was Hans von Spakovsky, another member of the voter fraud commission. He, too, had been eager in commission meetings to match state voter rolls to the SAVE database.<br />
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But like Kobach, von Spakovsky took a different tack at trial. He testified that this database was unusable by elections offices. “In your experience and expertise as an election administrator and one who studies elections,” Kobach asked, “is [the alien registration number] a practical or even possible thing for a state to do in its voter registration database?” Von Spakovsky answered, “No, it is not.”<br />
Von Spakovsky and Kobach have been friends for more than a decade. They worked together at the Department of Justice under George W. Bush. Kobach focused on immigration issues — helping create a database to register visitors to the U.S. from countries associated with terrorism — while von Spakovsky specialized in voting issues; he had opposed the renewal of the Voting Rights Act.<br />
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Von Spakovsky’s history as a local elections administrator in Fairfax County, Va., qualified him as an expert on voting fraud. Between 2010 and 2012, while serving as vice chairman of the county’s three-member electoral board, he’d examined the voter rolls and found what he said were 300 registered non-citizens. He’d pressed for action against them, but none came. Von Spakovsky later joined the Heritage Foundation, where he remains today, generating research that underpins the arguments of those who claim mass voter fraud.<br />
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Like Richman, von Spakovsky seemed nervous on the stand, albeit not combative. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a severe, immovable expression. Immigration is a not-so-distant feature of his family history: His parents — Russian and German immigrants — met in a refugee camp in American-occupied Germany after World War II before moving to the U.S.<br />
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Von Spakovsky had the task of testifying about what was intended to be a key piece of evidence for Kobach’s case: a spreadsheet of 38 non-citizens who had registered to vote, or attempted to register, in a 20-year period in Sedgwick County, Kansas.<br />
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But the 38 non-citizens turned out to be something less than an electoral crime wave. For starters, some of the 38 had informed Sedgwick County that they were non-citizens. One woman had sent her registration postcard back to the county with an explanation that it was a “mistake” and that she was not a citizen. Another listed an alien registration number — which tellingly begins with an “A” — instead of a Social Security number on the voter registration form. The county registered her anyway.<br />
<br />
When von Spakovsky took the stand, he had to contend with questions that suggested he had cherry-picked his data. (The judge would find he had.) In his expert report, von Spakovsky had referenced a 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office that polled federal courts to see how many non-citizens had been excused from jury duty for being non-citizens — a sign of fraud, because jurors are selected from voter rolls. The GAO report mentioned eight courts. Only one said it had a meaningful number of jury candidates who claimed to be non-citizens: “between 1 and 3 percent” had been dismissed on these grounds. This was the only court von Spakovsky mentioned in his expert report.<br />
<br />
His report also cited a 2012 TV news segment from an NBC station in Fort Myers, Fla. Reporters claimed to have discovered more than 100 non-citizens on the local voter roll.<br />
<br />
“Now, you know, Mr. von Spakovsky, don’t you, that after this NBC report there was a follow-up by the same NBC station that determined that at least 35 of those 100 individuals had documentation to prove they were, in fact, United States citizens. Correct?” Ho asked. “I am aware of that now, yes,” von Spakovsky replied.<br />
<br />
That correction had been online since 2012 and Ho had asked von Spakovsky the same question almost two years before in a deposition before the trial. But von Spakovsky never corrected his expert report.<br />
<br />
Under Ho’s questioning, von Spakovsky also acknowledged a false assertion he made in 2011. In a nationally syndicated column for McClatchy, von Spakovsky claimed a tight race in Missouri had been decided by the illegal votes of 50 Somali nationals. A month before the column was published, a Missouri state judge ruled that no such thing had happened.<br />
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On the stand, von Spakovsky claimed he had no knowledge of the ruling when he published the piece. He conceded that he never retracted the assertion.<br />
<br />
Kobach, who watched the exchange without objection, had repeatedly made the same claim — even after the judge ruled it was false. In 2011, Kobach wrote a series of columns using the example as proof of the need for voter ID, publishing them in outlets ranging from the Topeka Capital-Journal to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. In 2012, he made the claim in an article published in the Syracuse Law Review. In 2013, he wrote an op-ed for the Kansas City Star with the same example: “The election was stolen when Rizzo received about 50 votes illegally cast by citizens of Somalia.” None of those articles have ever been corrected.<br />
<br />
Ultimately, Robinson would lacerate von Spakovsky’s testimony, much as she had Richman’s. Von Spakovsky’s statements, the judge wrote, were “premised on several misleading and unsupported examples” and included “false assertions.” As she put it, “His generalized opinions about the rates of noncitizen registration were likewise based on misleading evidence, and largely based on his preconceived beliefs about this issue, which has led to his aggressive public advocacy of stricter proof of citizenship laws.”<br />
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There was one other wobbly leg holding up the argument that voter fraud is rampant: the very meaning of the word “fraud.”<br />
<br />
Kobach’s case, and the broader claim, rely on an extremely generous definition. Legal definitions of fraud require a person to knowingly be deceptive. But both Kobach and von Spakovsky characterized illegal ballots as “fraud” regardless of the intention of the voter.<br />
<br />
Indeed, the nine convictions Kobach has obtained in Kansas are almost entirely made up of individuals who didn’t realize they were doing something wrong. For example, there were <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/21/kris-kobach-voter-fraud-investigation-prosecution-215164">older voters</a> who didn’t understand the restrictions and voted in multiple places they owned property. There was also <a href="https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/xw73j4/kris-kobach-wanted-this-20-year-old-to-go-to-jail-for-accidentally-voting-twice">a college student</a> who’d forgotten she’d filled out an absentee ballot in her home state before voting months later in Kansas. (She voted for Trump both times.)<br />
<br />
Late in the trial, the ACLU presented Lorraine Minnite, a professor at Rutgers who has written extensively about voter fraud, as a rebuttal witness. Her book, “The Myth of Voter Fraud,” concluded that almost all instances of illegal votes can be chalked up to misunderstandings and administrative error.<br />
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Kobach sent his co-counsel, Garrett Roe, to cross-examine her. “It’s your view that what matters is the voter’s knowledge that his or her action is unlawful?” Roe asked. “In a definition of fraud, yes,” said Minnite. Roe pressed her about this for several questions, seemingly surprised that she wouldn’t refer to all illegal voting as fraud.<br />
<br />
Minnite stopped him. “The word ‘fraud’ has meaning, and that meaning is that there’s intent behind it. And that’s actually what Kansas laws are with respect to illegal voting,” she said. “You keep saying <em>my</em> definition” she said, putting finger quotes around “my.” “But, you know, it’s not like it’s a freak definition.”<br />
<br />
Kobach had explored a similar line of inquiry with von Spakovsky, asking him if the list of 38 non-citizens he’d reviewed could be absolved of “fraud” because they may have lacked intent.<br />
“No,” von Spakovsky replied, “I think any time a non-citizen registers, any time a non-citizen votes, they are — whether intentionally or by accident, I mean — they are defrauding legitimate citizens from a fair election.”<br />
<br />
After Kobach concluded his questions, the judge began her own examination of von Spakovsky.<br />
“I think it’s fair to say there’s a pretty good distinction in terms of how the two of you define fraud,” the judge said, explaining that Minnite focused on intent, while she understood von Spakovsky’s definition to include any time someone who wasn’t supposed to vote did so, regardless of reason. “Would that be a fair characterization?” she asked.<br />
<br />
“Yes ma’am,” von Spakovsky replied.<br />
<br />
The judge asked whether a greater number of legitimate voters would be barred from casting ballots under the law than fraudulent votes prevented. In that scenario, she asked, “Would that not also be defrauding the electoral process?” Von Spakovsky danced around the answer, asserting that one would need to answer that question in the context of the registration requirements, which he deemed reasonable.<br />
<br />
The judge cut him off. “Well that doesn’t really answer my question,” she said, saying that she found it contradictory that he wanted to consider context when examining the burden of registration requirements, but not when examining the circumstances in which fraud was committed.<br />
“When you’re talking about … non-citizen voting, you don’t want to consider that in context of whether that person made a mistake, whether a DMV person convinced them they should vote,” she said. Von Spakovsky allowed that not every improper voter should be prosecuted, but insisted that “each ballot they cast takes away the vote of and dilutes the vote of actual citizens who are voting. And that’s —”<br />
<br />
The judge interrupted again. “So, the thousands of actual citizens that should be able to vote but who are not because of the system, because of this law, that’s not diluting the vote and that’s not impairing the integrity of the electoral process, I take it?” she said.<br />
<br />
Von Spakovsky didn’t engage with the hypothetical. He simply didn’t believe it was happening. “I don’t believe that this requirement prevents individuals who are eligible to register and vote from doing so.” Later, on the stand, he’d tell Ho he couldn’t think of a single law in the country that he felt negatively impacted anyone’s ability to register or vote.<br />
<br />
Robinson, in the end, strongly disagreed. As she wrote in her opinion, “the Court finds that the burden imposed on Kansans by this law outweighs the state’s interest in preventing noncitizen voter fraud, keeping accurate voter rolls, and maintaining confidence in elections. The burden is not just on a ‘few voters,’ but on tens of thousands of voters, many of whom were disenfranchised” by Kobach’s law. The law, she concluded, was a bigger problem than the one it set out to solve, acting as a “deterrent to registration and voting for substantially more eligible Kansans than it has prevented ineligible voters from registering to vote.”<br />
<br /></div>
<em>ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. </em><br />
<link href="https://www.propublica.org/article/kris-kobach-voter-fraud-kansas-trial" rel="canonical"></link><script async="" src="https://pixel.propublica.org/pixel.js" type="text/javascript"></script>Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-73500575984750047552018-06-19T16:44:00.000-04:002018-06-19T16:44:51.556-04:00More mental health care alone will not stop gun violence<h1>
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<img alt="File 20180613 32339 11rmhzz.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/223079/original/file-20180613-32339-11rmhzz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" />
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Gun safety advocates hold signs during a rally to honor victims of gun violence on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol in Denver, 2013.
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP/Brennan Linsley</span></span>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/jonathan-spiegler-457025">Jonathan Spiegler</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/michigan-state-university-1349">Michigan State University</a></em> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/jacob-smith-332490">Jacob Smith</a>, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-north-carolina-chapel-hill-1353">University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill</a></em>
<br />
Gun violence remains a highly controversial issue in the wake of school shootings in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/14/us/parkland-school-shooting.html">Parkland, Florida, and other communities</a>. At such times, politicians seem compelled to offer the public solutions.<br />
The two most prominent solutions put forth are <a href="https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/964185606803853314">stricter gun control laws</a> and <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/15/586095437/trump-calls-for-mental-health-action-after-shooting-his-budget-would-cut-program">addressing mental illness</a>. <br />
The frequency with which these two solutions are proposed might suggest that they are equally important. Yet, there is little research that directly tests the relative effectiveness of stricter gun control versus a mental illness solution.<br />
<a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=zGywYqIAAAAJ&hl=en">We are</a> <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PAgb8ugAAAAJ&hl=en">political scientists</a> who have studied this issue. In a forthcoming paper from <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/psj.12242">Policy Studies Journal</a>, we report on our study of stricter gun control laws versus greater access to mental health services. We examined the relative effectiveness of each policy approach on the number of gun-related deaths for each state during the years 2012 and 2013. <br />
What we find casts serious doubt on the ability of mental health care alone to reduce the rate of gun violence. <br />
<h2>
Testing each approach</h2>
Gun control refers to a wide variety of laws designed to reduce gun violence. These measures include restrictions on the types of guns that can be manufactured and sold, the size of ammunition magazines, where one can carry a firearm, and who can carry one. <br />
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<span class="caption">Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., speaks during a news conference in 2013 to introduce legislation on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition feeding devices.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta</span></span>
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There are two main rationales behind these types of restrictions. One, they make it less likely that someone intent on violence will be able <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091743512003295">to get</a> <a href="http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1661390?hc_location5ufi">a gun</a>. And two, by making the weapon less deadly, gun control laws reduce the danger that the victim of a <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783319337227">gun attack will die</a>.<br />
The other approach to reducing gun violence advocated by many politicians is the mental health approach. They argue that there is a link between mental illness and violence and say that addressing that link would <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-gun-debate-9780199338986?cc=us&lang=en&">reduce gun violence</a>. Since mental illness can often be managed by treatments including <a href="https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/abs/10.1027/0227-5910.26.3.128">psychotherapy and/or drug therapy</a>, proponents say that providing mental health services will make it less likely that those with a mental illness <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/30/politics/bernie-sanders-gun-control-2016/">will become violent</a>.<br />
We wanted to test whether these ideas were true. So we looked at both the strictness of gun control laws and access to mental health care for those who need it at the state level. We wanted to determine the relative effects of these two approaches on the number of gun-related deaths in each state. <br />
To do that, we used data on gun control from the <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170317191031/http://www.bradycampaign.org/2013-state-scorecard">Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence</a>, and data on mental health from the <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170517130723/mentalhealthamerica.net/issues/2016-state-mental-health-america-adult-data">federal government</a>.<br />
What we found was surprising. <br />
<h2>
Policy choices are real</h2>
While strict gun control laws alone were strongly correlated with fewer gun deaths (as expected), greater access to mental health services alone appeared to have no significant effect on the number of gun fatalities. <br />
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We also found evidence that a combination of both approaches was effective at reducing the rate of gun deaths. States that had both strict gun control laws and a high percentage of residents with access to mental health care experienced fewer gun deaths than the mental health care solution alone.<br />
The results of our study can be further broken down into two categories: suicides, which represent the majority of gun deaths, and non-suicides, which include mostly homicides and a few accidental shootings. <br />
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The results for non-suicides are the same as the overall results. Both strict gun control and the combination of gun control and mental health care were effective at preventing non-suicides. <br />
However, for just suicides, the combination approach was ineffective.<br />
The reason for this difference may result from the way that gun laws target those with mental illness. To legally <a href="http://www.ncsl.org/research/civil-and-criminal-justice/possession-of-a-firearm-by-thementally-.aspx">take away someone’s guns</a> due to mental illness, he or she must first be declared mentally incompetent by a court, or <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/03/25/red-flag-laws-allow-temporary-restrictions-access-guns-gain-momentum-across-nation/454395002/">committed to a mental institution</a>.<br />
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<span class="caption">U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, has advocated for greater access to mental health services as a way to prevent gun violence.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP/Charlie Neibergall</span></span>
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In practice, those with a mental illness that makes them more likely to be homicidal than suicidal – such as schizophrenia – are more <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2894594/">likely to be committed</a> or <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4194719/">declared mentally incompetent</a>. And greater access to mental health care likely leads to greater rates of commitment due to mental illness.<br />
So gun control laws related to mental health – such as those that allow law enforcement to take guns away from a person likely to harm others – are more likely to target those with a mental illness that makes one homicidal rather than suicidal. As a result, these laws reduce homicides committed by those with a mental illness, but are ineffective at reducing suicides.<br />
<img alt="The Conversation" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94201/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" width="1" />The implication of this for policymakers interested in reducing gun violence is that providing more mental health care alone is unlikely to significantly reduce gun deaths in the United States. Instead, any policy to reduce gun violence should include stricter gun control laws.<br />
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/jonathan-spiegler-457025">Jonathan Spiegler</a>, PhD Student in Political Science, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/michigan-state-university-1349">Michigan State University</a></em> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/jacob-smith-332490">Jacob Smith</a>, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, <em><a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-north-carolina-chapel-hill-1353">University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill</a></em><br />
This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com/">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/more-mental-health-care-alone-will-not-stop-gun-violence-94201">original article</a>.Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-1371284844949512442018-06-19T16:28:00.000-04:002018-06-19T16:28:18.832-04:00Conservatives’ Anti-Immigration Fervor Is Political: They Think Keeping the US White Will Save Them | TruthOut<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<br />
Donald Trump’s administration has the most extreme immigration policy in a century. Among his first acts as president was his theatrical Muslim ban. He’s beefed up the border patrol and ICE and told them all to “take off the gloves.” He put one of the most anti-immigration politicians in the country in charge of the Justice Department, and they are systematically deporting people, even those who have been here for 50 years. Trump backed out of a deal to legalize the DACA recipients at the last minute. Now they are separating children from their parents at the border and putting them into detention camps in order to “deter” Latino immigrants, even those who are seeking asylum from the rampant violence in their home countries.<br />
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It’s tempting to chalk all this up to simple Republican racism and nativism. That is certainly what fuels the emotion on this issue on the right. Conservative media pounds the message that “the illegals” are all on welfare (which isn’t true) and are ruining the culture with taco trucks on every corner. (If only.) But that isn’t the whole story.<br />
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<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/conservatives-anti-immigration-fervor-is-political-they-think-keeping-the-us-white-will-save-them/" target="_blank">Read more ></a><br />
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<br />Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-18443764376453961392018-06-18T22:42:00.001-04:002018-06-18T22:42:58.963-04:00The 14 Habits of Highly Miserable People <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>How to succeed at self-sabotage.</b><br />
By Cloe Madanes / Psychotherapy Networker<br />
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Most of us claim we want to be happy—to have meaningful lives, enjoy ourselves, experience fulfillment, and share love and friendship with other people and maybe other species, like dogs, cats, birds, and whatnot. Strangely enough, however, some people act as if they just want to be miserable, and they succeed remarkably at inviting misery into their lives, even though they get little apparent benefit from it, since being miserable doesn’t help them find lovers and friends, get better jobs, make more money, or go on more interesting vacations. Why do they do this? After perusing the output of some of the finest brains in the therapy profession, I’ve come to the conclusion that misery is an art form, and the satisfaction people seem to find in it reflects the creative effort required to cultivate it. In other words, when your living conditions are stable, peaceful, and prosperous—no civil wars raging in your streets, no mass hunger, no epidemic disease, no vexation from poverty—making yourself miserable is a craft all its own, requiring imagination, vision, and ingenuity. It can even give life a distinctive meaning.<br />
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It’s inevitable that as you make yourself miserable, you’ll be making those around you miserable also, at least until they leave you—which will give you another reason to feel miserable. So it’s important to keep in mind the benefits you’re accruing in your misery.<br />
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• When you’re miserable, people feel sorry for you. Not only that, they often feel obscurely guilty, as if your misery might somehow be their fault. This is good! There’s power in making other people feel guilty. The people who love you and those who depend on you will walk on eggshells to make sure that they don’t say or do anything that will increase your misery.<br />
• When you’re miserable, since you have no hopes and expect nothing good to happen, you can’t be disappointed or disillusioned.<br />
• Being miserable can give the impression that you’re a wise and worldly person, especially if you’re miserable not just about your life, but about society in general. You can project an aura of someone burdened by a form of profound, tragic, existential knowledge that happy, shallow people can’t possibly appreciate.<br />
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<b>Honing Your Misery Skills</b><br />
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Let’s get right to it and take a look at some effective strategies to become miserable. This list is by no means exhaustive, but engaging in four or five of these practices will help refine your talent.<br />
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<b>1.</b> <b>Be afraid, be very afraid, of economic loss</b>. In hard economic times, many people are afraid of losing their jobs or savings. The art of messing up your life consists of indulging these fears, even when there’s little risk that you’ll actually suffer such losses. Concentrate on this fear, make it a priority in your life, moan continuously that you could go broke any day now, and complain about how much everything costs, particularly if someone else is buying. Try to initiate quarrels about other people’s feckless, spendthrift ways, and suggest that the recession has resulted from irresponsible fiscal behavior like theirs.<br />
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Fearing economic loss has several advantages. First, it’ll keep you working forever at a job you hate. Second, it balances nicely with greed, an obsession with money, and a selfishness that even Ebenezer Scrooge would envy. Third, not only will you alienate your friends and family, but you’ll likely become even more anxious, depressed, and possibly even ill from your money worries. Good job!<br />
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Exercise: Sit in a comfortable chair, close your eyes, and, for 15 minutes, meditate on all the things you could lose: your job, your house, your savings, and so forth. Then brood about living in a homeless shelter.<br />
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<b>2. Practice sustained boredom.</b> Cultivate the feeling that everything is predictable, that life holds no excitement, no possibility for adventure, that an inherently fascinating person like yourself has been deposited into a completely tedious and pointless life through no fault of your own. Complain a lot about how bored you are. Make it the main subject of conversation with everyone you know so they’ll get the distinct feeling that you think they’re boring. Consider provoking a crisis to relieve your boredom. Have an affair (this works best if you’re already married and even better if you have an affair with someone else who’s married); go on repeated shopping sprees for clothes, cars, fancy appliances, sporting equipment (take several credit cards, in case one maxes out); start pointless fights with your spouse, boss, children, friends, neighbors; have another child; quit your job, clean out your savings account, and move to a state you know nothing about.<br />
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A side benefit of being bored is that you inevitably become boring. Friends and relatives will avoid you. You won’t be invited anywhere; nobody will want to call you, much less actually see you. As this happens, you’ll feel lonely and even more bored and miserable.<br />
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Exercise: Force yourself to watch hours of mindless reality TV programs every day, and read only nonstimulating tabloids that leave you feeling soulless. Avoid literature, art, and keeping up with current affairs.<br />
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<b>3. Give yourself a negative identity. </b>Allow a perceived emotional problem to absorb all other aspects of your self-identification. If you feel depressed, become a Depressed Person; if you suffer from social anxiety or a phobia, assume the identity of a Phobic Person or a Person with Anxiety Disorder. Make your condition the focus of your life. Talk about it to everybody, and make sure to read up on the symptoms so you can speak about them knowledgeably and endlessly. Practice the behaviors most associated with that condition, particularly when it’ll interfere with regular activities and relationships. Focus on how depressed you are and become weepy, if that’s your identity of choice. Refuse to go places or try new things because they make you too anxious. Work yourself into panic attacks in places it’ll cause the most commotion. It’s important to show that you don’t enjoy these states or behaviors, but that there’s nothing you can do to prevent them.<br />
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Practice putting yourself in the physiological state that represents your negative identity. For example, if your negative identity is Depressed Person, hunch your shoulders, look at the floor, breathe shallowly. It’s important to condition your body to help you reach your negative peak as quickly as possible.<br />
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Exercise: Write down 10 situations that make you anxious, depressed, or distracted. Once a week, pick a single anxiety-provoking situation, and use it to work yourself into a panic for at least 15 minutes.<br />
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<b>4. Pick fights.</b> This is an excellent way of ruining a relationship with a romantic partner. Once in a while, unpredictably, pick a fight or have a crying spell over something trivial and make unwarranted accusations. The interaction should last for at least 15 minutes and ideally occur in public. During the tantrum, expect your partner to be kind and sympathetic, but should he or she mention it later, insist that you never did such a thing and that he or she must have misunderstood what you were trying to say. Act injured and hurt that your partner somehow implied you weren’t behaving well.<br />
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Another way of doing this is to say unexpectedly, “We need to talk,” and then to barrage your partner with statements about how disappointed you are with the relationship. Make sure to begin this barrage just as your partner is about to leave for some engagement or activity, and refuse to end it for at least an hour. Another variation is to text or phone your partner at work to express your issues and disappointments. Do the same if your partner is out with friends.<br />
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Exercise: Write down 20 annoying text messages you could send to a romantic partner. Keep a grudge list going, and add to it daily.<br />
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<b>5. Attribute bad intentions.</b> Whenever you can, attribute the worst possible intentions to your partner, friends, and coworkers. Take any innocent remark and turn it into an insult or attempt to humiliate you. For example, if someone asks, “How did you like such and such movie?” you should immediately think, He’s trying to humiliate me by proving that I didn’t understand the movie, or He’s preparing to tell me that I have poor taste in movies. The idea is to always expect the worst from people. If someone is late to meet you for dinner, while you wait for them, remind yourself of all the other times the person was late, and tell yourself that he or she is doing this deliberately to slight you. Make sure that by the time the person arrives, you’re either seething or so despondent that the evening is ruined. If the person asks what’s wrong, don’t say a word: let him or her suffer.<br />
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Exercise: List the names of five relatives or friends. For each, write down something they did or said in the recent past that proves they’re as invested in adding to your misery as you are.<br />
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<b>6. Whatever you do, do it only for personal gain. </b>Sometimes you’ll be tempted to help someone, contribute to a charity, or participate in a community activity. Don’t do it, unless there’s something in it for you, like the opportunity to seem like a good person or to get to know somebody you can borrow money from some day. Never fall into the trap of doing something purely because you want to help people. Remember that your primary goal is to take care of Numero Uno, even though you hate yourself.<br />
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Exercise: Think of all the things you’ve done for others in the past that haven’t been reciprocated. Think about how everyone around you is trying to take from you. Now list three things you could do that would make you appear altruistic while bringing you personal, social, or professional gain.<br />
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<b>7. Avoid gratitude. </b>Research shows that people who express gratitude are happier than those who don’t, so never express gratitude. Counting your blessings is for idiots. What blessings? Life is suffering, and then you die. What’s there to be thankful for?<br />
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Well-meaning friends and relatives will try to sabotage your efforts to be thankless. For example, while you’re in the middle of complaining about the project you procrastinated on at work to your spouse during an unhealthy dinner, he or she might try to remind you of how grateful you should be to have a job or food at all. Such attempts to encourage gratitude and cheerfulness are common and easily deflected. Simply point out that the things you should be grateful for aren’t perfect—which frees you to find as much fault with them as you like.<br />
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Exercise: Make a list of all the things you could be grateful for. Next to each item, write down why you aren’t. Imagine the worst. When you think of the future, imagine the worst possible scenario. It’s important to be prepared for and preemptively miserable about any possible disaster or tragedy. Think of the possibilities: terrorist attacks, natural disasters, fatal disease, horrible accidents, massive crop failures, your child not getting picked for the varsity softball team.<br />
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<b>8. Always be alert and in a state of anxiety.</b> Optimism about the future leads only to disappointment. Therefore, you have to do your best to believe that your marriage will flounder, your children won’t love you, your business will fail, and nothing good will ever work out for you.<br />
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Exercise: Do some research on what natural or manmade disasters could occur in your area, such as earthquakes, floods, nuclear plant leaks, rabies outbreaks. Focus on these things for at least an hour a day.<br />
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<b>9. Blame your parents. </b>Blaming your parents for your defects, shortcomings, and failures is among the most important steps you can take. After all, your parents made you who you are today; you had nothing to do with it. If you happen to have any good qualities or successes, don’t give your parents credit. Those are flukes.<br />
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Extend the blame to other people from your past: the second-grade teacher who yelled at you in the cafeteria, the boy who bullied you when you were 9, the college professor who gave you a D on your paper, your first boyfriend, even the hick town you grew up in—the possibilities are limitless. Blame is essential in the art of being miserable.<br />
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Exercise: Call one of your parents and tell her or him that you just remembered something horrible they did when you were a child, and make sure he or she understands how terrible it made you feel and that you’re still suffering from it.<br />
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<b>10. Don’t enjoy life’s pleasures.</b> Taking pleasure in things like food, wine, music, and beauty is for flighty, shallow people. Tell yourself that. If you inadvertently find yourself enjoying some flavor, song, or work of art, remind yourself immediately that these are transitory pleasures, which can’t compensate for the miserable state of the world. The same applies to nature. If you accidentally find yourself enjoying a beautiful view, a walk on the beach, or a stroll through a forest, stop! Remind yourself that the world is full of poverty, illness, and devastation. The beauty of nature is a deception.<br />
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Exercise: Once a week, engage in an activity that’s supposed to be enjoyable, but do so while thinking about how pointless it is. In other words, concentrate on removing all sense of pleasure from the pleasurable activity.<br />
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<b>11. Ruminate. </b>Spend a great deal of time focused on yourself. Worry constantly about the causes of your behavior, analyze your defects, and chew on your problems. This will help you foster a pessimistic view of your life. Don’t allow yourself to become distracted by any positive experience or influence. The point is to ensure that even minor upsets and difficulties appear huge and portentous.<br />
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You can ruminate on the problems of others or the world, but make them about you. Your child is sick? Ruminate on what a burden it is for you to take time off from work to care for her. Your spouse is hurt by your behavior? Focus on how terrible it makes you feel when he points out how you make him feel. By ruminating not only on your own problems but also those of others, you’ll come across as a deep, sensitive thinker who holds the weight of the world on your shoulders.<br />
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Exercise: Sit in a comfortable chair and seek out negative feelings, like anger, depression, anxiety, boredom, whatever. Concentrate on these feelings for 15 minutes. During the rest of the day, keep them in the back of your mind, no matter what you’re doing.<br />
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<b>12. Glorify or vilify the past.</b> Glorifying the past is telling yourself how good, happy, fortunate, and worthwhile life was when you were a child, a young person, or a newly married person—and regretting how it’s all been downhill ever since. When you were young, for example, you were glamorous and danced the samba with handsome men on the beach at twilight; and now you’re in a so-so marriage to an insurance adjuster in Topeka. You should’ve married tall, dark Antonio. You should’ve invested in Microsoft when you had the chance. In short, focus on what you could’ve and should’ve done, instead of what you did. This will surely make you miserable.<br />
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Vilifying the past is easy, too. You were born in the wrong place at the wrong time, you never got what you needed, you felt you were discriminated against, you never got to go to summer camp. How can you possibly be happy when you had such a lousy background? It’s important to think that bad memories, serious mistakes, and traumatic events were much more influential in forming you and your future than good memories, successes, and happy events. Focus on bad times. Obsess about them. Treasure them. This will ensure that, no matter what’s happening in the present, you won’t be happy.<br />
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Exercise: Make a list of your most important bad memories and keep it where you can review it frequently. Once a week, tell someone about your horrible childhood or how much better your life was 20 years ago.<br />
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<b>13. Find a romantic partner to reform. </b>Make sure that you fall in love with someone with a major defect (cat hoarder, gambler, alcoholic, womanizer, sociopath), and set out to reform him or her, regardless of whether he or she wants to be reformed. Believe firmly that you can reform this person, and ignore all evidence to the contrary.<br />
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Exercise: Go to online dating sites and see how many bad choices you can find in one afternoon. Make efforts to meet these people. It’s good if the dating site charges a lot of money, since this means you’ll be emotionally starved and poor.<br />
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<b>14. Be critical.</b> Make sure to have an endless list of dislikes and voice them often, whether or not your opinion is solicited. For example, don’t hesitate to say, “That’s what you chose to wear this morning?” or “Why is your voice so shrill?” If someone is eating eggs, tell them you don’t like eggs. Your negativity can be applied to almost anything.<br />
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It helps if the things you criticize are well liked by most people so that your dislike of them sets you apart. Disliking traffic and mosquitos isn’t creative enough: everyone knows what it’s like to find these things annoying, and they won’t pay much attention if you find them annoying, too. But disliking the new movie that all your friends are praising? You’ll find plenty of opportunities to counter your friends’ glowing reviews with your contrarian opinion.<br />
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Exercise: Make a list of 20 things you dislike and see how many times you can insert them into a conversation over the course of the day. For best results, dislike things you’ve never given yourself a chance to like.<br />
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I’ve just listed 14 ways to make yourself miserable. You don’t have to nail every one of them, but even if you succeed with just four or five, make sure to berate yourself regularly for not enacting the entire list. If you find yourself in a therapist’s office—because someone who’s still clinging to their love for you has tricked you into going—make sure your misery seems organic. If the therapist enlightens you in any way or teaches you mind-body techniques to quiet your anxious mind, make sure to co-opt the conversation and talk about your misery-filled dreams from the night before. If the therapist is skilled in dream analysis, quickly start complaining about the cost of therapy itself. If the therapist uses your complaints as a launching pad to discuss transference issues, accuse him or her of having countertransference issues. Ultimately, the therapist is your enemy when trying to cultivate misery in your life. So get out as soon as possible. And if you happen upon a therapist who’ll sit quietly while you bring all 14 items on this list to life each week, call me. I’ll want to make an appointment, too.<br />
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Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4735636488053512330.post-3790391642091264422018-06-17T22:31:00.002-04:002018-06-17T22:31:55.806-04:00Your Gullible Brain And The Spread Of Fake News | YouTube<div style="text-align: center;">
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Ronhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03885310869403913651noreply@blogger.com0