So I said... #26 - For July 10-19

Another collection of my various comments on various topics over the past week and a half. I seem to have been unusually mouthy recently, as this one is somewhat longer than the norm for these roundups, but I can still hope you’ll find something of interest or insight in what’s here.

Remember that “==” separates comments on different topics while those separated by — are parts of threads.

And off we go.

2026-07-10
[“Why Some People Feel Like Trans People Are ‘Everywhere’”]

Dunno if anyone will care, but for the heck of it:

I’m reminded of something I came up with it must be over 40 years ago. I kept hearing people talk about “always getting the red lights” and the like, so I decided to consider the idea.

For a couple of months I tried to keep track as I drove of the red lights and green lights I got (those little thumb clickers proved invaluable) and where I was if I stopped.

The results were pretty much what you would expect: The ratio of green lights to red lights was high on the highways, very roughly 50-50 at side street intersections, and reversed on side streets crossing highways.

So why the perceptions of “always getting red?” I concluded, in what became generalized as my “red light hypothesis,” that we remembered red lights more because unlike green lights they required a change in our behavior - and it was the change that produced the impression.

Simply put, we are more sensitive to and more likely to remember change than continuity and any trans character, precisely because of their infrequency, is a change from the usual. I suppose it could be thought of as a part of or at least related to the frequency illusion.

==

2026-07-10
[Another anti-trans ruling arising from judge-shopping]

It is an affront to, a disgrace to, the very concept of equal justice before the law if any bigoted, jackassed, wanna-be dictator can just pick one district where some equally-bigoted wacko will give them whatever they want, run any legal errand they desire, and bring all their cases there and not get pushback because oh yeah, “trust the system” that allows it.

-

2026-07-14
[How did we get to this terrible situation in only 18 months? How do you get so many cowards in Congress?]

The only part of that I would dispute is “only 18 months.” This is the outgrowth of a decades-long, conscious program of the right-wing and their billionaire (nee millionaire) funders and beneficiaries to undermine the concept of government “of, by, and for the people” and replace it with a mating of plutocracy with oligarchy.

Beyond that, being an elected federal official has come to be seen less and less as public service and more and more as a line of work, as not a calling but a career, as just what you do for a living, just like any other job except with extraordinarily good perks. The result is an increased focus on one thing: staying elected - which means not displeasing the boss, in this case The Orange Overlord, who has shown his ability to raise a host of money and a horde of true believers and aim then at anyone who incurs his royal displeasure.

And here we are.

I, too, think history will not judge the enablers kindly.

==

2026-07-12
[A letter to three corporations that had blocked investor-advised funds from donating to the Southern Poverty Law Center.]

I became aware of the SPLC shortly after its founding in 1971. While I would get irritated by its sometimes overly-aggressive fundraising, I have admired and continue to admire its history of exposing and tracking hate groups and associated hate rhetoric.

Now it faces what it describes as “the very definition of a vindictive prosecution” at the hands of an administration that has demonstrated its own white-supremacist nature not only by its violent anti-immigrant behaviors but by cutting refugee admissions to 7,500 for all of 2026 (a 94% cut from the previous year), with most of those slots to be used by Afrikaners “fleeing” a non-existent “white genocide” in South Africa - followed by the White House announcing an additional 10,000 more slots, all of them for Afrikaners.

However, whatever you may think of the SPLC or the Trump administration, what can’t be denied is that accusation is not conviction and that by blocking donor-advised funds from making grants to the SPLC, you have unfairly and improperly denied the organization access to perhaps millions of dollars, some which it may need to defend itself against an administration that has made no secret of its desire to destroy it.

I urge you to stop blocking donations to the Southern Poverty Law Center immediately. If nothing else, “innocent until proven guilty” demands it.

==

2026-07-14
TERF is not a slur, but it is an incorrect term. There is not a single thing radical about the reactionary, narrow-minded, self-interested, “I got mine so screw you” bullshit they peddle.

In fact, not only are they not radicals, they are not even feminist. Feminism once celebrated opening opportunities for self-expression for everyone, not just women, because they recognized how the male-female binary we had built into our social structures and rules were oppressive to everyone. They were liberators.

Now, these non-radical, non-feminists have become oppressors, eager to impose that same old binary - provided that they get to decide where and how the lines are drawn.

==

2026-07-14
[“Anti-trans activity is a social panic fostered by powerful voices.”]

Spot on. We have seen any number of organic moral panics over the years, and they usually flare up, spread, and burn out in no more than a couple of years. The damage they can do and have done is real (consider the day care panic), but at least the panic is temporary and in retrospect they often look silly (e.g., comic books; rock’n’roll; going back further, dime novels).

This one is different. As you note, it is not organic, it was deliberately created and is being artificially maintained for selfish political purposes and it’s targets (bathrooms, women’s sports, “OMG! Save the Children!”) consciously chosen.

It occurs to me we might be wise to press that point.

==

2026-07-14
Any time a candidate of any party forces an opponent off the ballot in any election (primary or general) while going on about the “integrity” or “security” of the “process,” I get a strong odor of a heavily-used, poorly-tended barnyard.

==

2026-07-15
[A self-proclaimed Christian who was fired from his job after being warned about repeatedly misgendering and deadnaming a co-worker has filed suit, claiming religious discrimination.]

In one of these cases I would like to see the judge or an attorney insist the Christianity-claiming plaintiff cite the Christian doctrine that requires them to behave as they did. They would be hard pressed to do so.

For example, there is no bar on courtesy, indeed Proverbs 15:1 (KJV) says “A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.”

For another, Jesus told his disciples “I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” (Mathew 10:16, KJV) (Oh, and wasn’t the serpent “more subtil [sic] than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made?” (Genesis 3:1. KJV) Kind of hard to find a doctrine against lying for the sake of social peace in that.

Besides, how is his behavior not a sin of pride?

I could come up with more, but you get the idea.

It would be amusing at that point to have the Christian supremacists argue that doctrine is irrelevant because this is his true belief and be met with the counter-argument that they would have him be exempted from all standards of behavior in any context simply by claiming it was his “belief” that he should act that way, something which no society could accept.

I always find it frustrating that in cases like this the argument of “I’m a Christian, therefore” goes unchallenged.

==

2026-07-15
[Heritage Foundation releases report attacking Title IX as a “failed experiment” and saying women’s sports should be exchanged for more “non-competitive and lower-intensity activities.”]

BREAKING NEWS: The Heritage Foundation wants to go back to 1900!

MORE BREAKING NEWS: The Sun rose in the east!

Relevant quote, from conservative columnist George Will, January 2, 1995: “’Back to 1900’ is a serviceable summation of the conservative goal.”

Quote relevant to the relevant quote, from Maya Angelou: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

==

2026-07-16
[A commenter said they couldn’t find a source for an inflammatory meme saying JK Rowling posted an up-skirt photo of a transwoman then said “he” [sic] was asking for it.]

Damn, do I thank you for that. I was about to post a comment calling for a link to a source. I am sick to flipping death of memes that do not cite one and I am especially sick - as has happened to me on more than one occasion (not, I emphasize, here) - of requesting a source and getting some version of “find it yourself” in response.

If you don’t have a link to an actual source, don’t post the meme. And personally I will not link to, forward, or even believe any meme that lacks one.

-

2026-07-16
Okay, everybody, I did the work which shouldn’t have been necessary and found the source for this meme.

Someone on Bluesky said it was from a July 11 thread on The-platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter so after signing in to a platform I abandoned several years ago and scrolling down through a Trump-worthy pile of posts from JK Growling I found it.

It was a picture of an overweight transwoman at some conference or another. She was dressed in a blue top, short leather skirt, fishnets, and knee-high boots and was sitting in a cushioned chair on a stage with one leg crossed over another. Because the stage was of course elevated, that position game a somewhat revealing view above the tops of her stockings.

So did Growling post it? Yes.

Did she say she was “asking for it?” She said the woman (who she misgendered as “Fred” - I gather her name is Freda) chose the outfit and then labeled her an “paraphilic exhibitionist” who was having “the time of” her (because Growling didn’t say “her” but I refused to quote it exactly) “life.” So yes, she said it but not in the “blame the victim” sense we usually mean it. Rather, her bigot-befuddled brain pumped out her Psych 101 understanding of real (as opposed to fictional) people to declare that Freda was deliberately exposing herself because it sexually aroused her.

Notably, Growling said the above in response to being asked if she would have posted the same picture if it was of a cis woman. She never answered. Which I think is revealing.

Oh, and she couldn’t let pass the opportunity to body-shame, saying Freda “left an indelible impression on the audience. And the chair.”

Now everybody thank me for the detective work. :-)

==

2026-07-16
[The Democratic candidate for OH governor expressed support for banning trans girls from school sports.]

The bizarre thing is that I almost hope that she said this out of true conviction. That would make her anything from deeply ignorant to an outright transphobe, but at least it would be honest.

The alternative, that she said it thinking it will pick off some of those mythical “moderate Republicans” who supposedly only need a little nudge to abandon The Orange Overlord and all he represents, then she is not only a profound hypocrite, she is stooopid!

And while it’s possible to fix ignorant, stupid is generally incurable.

==

2026-07-17
[“Every interview, in fact almost every sentence should end with ‘Trump crime family’ or ‘corrupt.’”]

Exactly. One of my “Rules for Right-wingers” refers to “Sitzfleisch,” German for “sitting flash” and comes from chess, from a time before chess clocks, and people would sometimes try to win by just refusing to move until the other player just gave up in exhaustion or frustration. That is, winning not by the quality of your play (or in this case argument) but by pure unadulterated stubbornness.

The right is a past master at this, including taking some tag line or slogan and repeating it over and over and over…. That sort of insistent persistence and message consistency is something we should see a lot more of from our side of the divide.

==

2026-07-17
So after effectively winning on bans on trans athletes in school sports, the Heritage Foundation has taken aim at Title IX.

And the Newsom-Moulton playbook of “If we just give them this, everything will be better,” works out as we should have expected (and a lot of us did expect).

But c’mon, be fair, because after we let Germany have the Sudetenland, Hitler was satisfied and we had peace for our time.

==

2026-07-18
[Nosferatu aka Stephen Miller says antifa “rioters” are “deformed.”]

The language is that of eliminationism, a central part of which is making your enemies into something “other,” something not human, something sub-human. It’s why references to “insects,” to “vermin,” to “infections” are so very common among the fascists and their willing enablers - as are, as here, references to “deformities.”

The point in every case is to define some group as “not us, as “other,” as ones whose elimination from society, whether by imprisonment, expulsion, or death is for and to the benefit of those who remain.

We must be clear-eyed about what we facing. As Maya Angelou famously said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” And this is far from the first.

==

2026-07-19
[Contrary to the headline, Tom Tillis does not “rip apart” the SAVE Act.]

His complaint is that it can’t be done for this election cycle, not that it shouldn’t be done. Voter ID is a fraud because no matter what the standard of proof is, some people will be unable to meet it, meaning it’s main effect will be to exclude people, generally poor people, from voting. Considering how rare unlawful voting is, voter ID is a right-wing voter-suppressing “solution” to a non-existent problem.

==

2026-07-19
So Markie Mullin says there are 250,000 non-citizens on voter lists across four states: California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Okay, well, together those states have a breath under 40,000,000 registered voters. So even if his unproven figures based on data which doesn’t have were by some weird coincidence true, the voter rolls in those states would be 99.4% citizens.

Not exactly an “OMG! RUN FOR THE HILLS!” emergency.

==

2026-07-19
[”Apparently mainstream Dems don’t want or need progressive votes”]

It’s not that they don’t need or want our votes. It’s that they think they can take them for granted. Any hesitation or resistance is met with the manipulative outrage of “What, you want (the demon du jour) to win??!?”

==

2026-07-19
[A caucus of the OH Democratic Part was forced to delete a comment criticizing gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton for calling trans girls “boys.”]

“We of the Ohio Democrats Progressive Caucus wish to thank the upper echelons of the state party for instructing us regarding our recent misunderstanding of how things operate.

“To prevent such unfortunate misunderstandings in the future, we request that the party leadership supply us with a full list of statements we are not allowed to make and opinions we are not allowed to express.

“Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Enough for now!

047 The Erickson Report for February 3 to 16, Page 3: Police Training Needs Changing

047 The Erickson Report for February 3 to 16, Page 3: Police Training Needs Changing

Here's a tragedy about which you might have heard, which raises two things I have talked about before with regard to police training and encounters with police.

On January 27 on I-65 south of Nashville Tennessee, a state trooper saw a man named Landon Eastep on the shoulder and pulled over to get him off the highway. Eastep, according to police, pushed away and produced a box cutter which he refused to put down.

Another cop came and tried to de-escalate the situation. More cops arrived until Eastep faced a semicircle of nine cops, most if not all with their guns drawn.

After about a half-hour of this standoff, Eastep pulled from his pocket what police called "a cylindrical object" and held it out toward the cops. They shot him, killed him. The object was not a gun.

First off, I will say that I can't honestly blame the cops for shooting. Look a the picture to the right, a freeze frame from a body cam. You can see Eastep holding out his arms toward the line of cops. I guarantee you every one of those cops thought - and you too would think - "he's pulled out a gun and he's aiming." I would likely be thinking "Omigod he's going to kill me."

We can argue about did all nine of them have to shoot him, or did they have to shoot him more than once, which apparently they did, or a bunch of related questions about the intensity of the response, but I can't blame them for there being a response.

But given that, that's where's where my questions rise. One, why did they have to shoot him - by which I mean, why was that their only present alternative? Why have we devoted so little energy, so little research, so few resources, to the idea of truly non-lethal methods? And no, I don't mean tasers; they are not non-lethal - even the company now calls them "less lethal" or not "intended to be lethal" or some such blather - and really are for relatively close quarters.

Next, one of the cops tried to, again, "de-escalate" things. But in a true sense, he didn't; rather, he avoided further escalation. Which is not the same thing. Remember, this had already gone from one cop to two cops to nine cops with guns drawn. It had already escalated. De-escalating would mean lowering the existing tension, not just avoiding raising it further. What that cop was trying to do was convince Eastep to de-escalate by dropping the box cutter and cooperating.

He was saying all kinds of encouraging things, like "whatever it is, we can work it out; we can get help; I don't want to die, you don't want to die; you're not going to jail," and so on, all of which is good - but, and this is a serious failing, I think, with the training they get and okay maybe it did happen across the half-hour outside of time frame of the video that was released so if it did excellent, but what I noticed is that the cop never asked a question. It was never "what's going on; what would you like us to do for you; what do you hope will happen here." He was just making flat statements. Statements hoping to keep Eastep calm, yes, but still flat statements.

And if asking open questions isn't part of what they're taught in dealing with these kinds of situations, I think it's a terrible mistake. A terrible shortcoming.

Because again: Look at the picture: Where is Eastep going to go? What is he going to do? Unless he is truly clinically insane, so divorced from reality that he can't even comprehend what's going on around him, he can't think he is going to shoot his way out of this. He can't think he's going to fight his way out of this. If he wants to get away, his best, his only, chance is to hop that guardrail and run like hell, hoping either to outrun the cops or they'll decide he's just some vagrant and isn't worth pursuing. But he didn't. He stood there not cooperating for a half-hour and then pulled something from his pocket and held it like it was a gun.

I think we can even determine the critical moment that generated what followed. Remember, this started when a state trooper stopped to get Eastep off the highway. According to Don Aaron, a representative for the Metro Nashville Police Department, I'm quoting NBC News here, "as they approached the trooper’s car, Eastep 'pushed away' from the officer and produced a box cutter." Given that description and what followed, especially when combined with his window's acknowledgement that he was struggling with mental health issues and drug addiction and had relapsed just a few days earlier, I cannot help but think that he was sitting on that highway with a box cutter thinking about suicide and trying to get up the nerve to do it. But as he's approaching the cop's car, he thinks "If I get in that car there's going to be a lot of hassle for my wife and they're going to stop me. I can't let that happen." And then the flash, which may not have even been in words, "I know what I have to do."

In other words, I'm convinced that what we had here is a case of "suicide by cop" and it is a real thing. In fact, a survey of the research literature on the topic a few years ago¹ found that by various estimates, approximately 10 to 29 percent or more of officer-involved shootings involve suicide by cop incidents.

Consider that Eastep stood on that highway for a half-hour, just standing as if waiting, and again it just seems to me that at some point he realized the cops were not going to shoot him so he did something to provoke them - make them think he had a gun. Suicide by cop is a real thing.

And there are in fact training modules, good training modules, for cops on just that, including what it is, how to recognize that it's what you're facing, and ways to deal with it.

But those sorts of materials don't do a damn bit of good if they are not a routine - by which I mean a standard, in fact make that a required - part of police training.

So again again again I say that part of the whole problem with police violence, part of the whole issue of police actions, of what they should be doing, of what we should not expect them to be doing, of what we should not have them dealing with, and of what we should expect them not to be doing, is that the way we train police is deeply screwed up and leads to needless violence and needless death. It remains true that we can't deal with the problem of police violence until we deal with racism in policing and in society - but it is equally true that we can't deal with the problem of police violence until we deal with the way we are training police to think.

¹Patton, Christina L. and Fremouw, William J. “Examining ‘suicide by cop’: A critical review of the literature." Aggression and Violent Behavior, 27 (2016) 107-120. (I couldn't find a direct link.)

Footnote: A cop profile?

Footnote: A cop profile?

A thought that occurred to me as I was finishing the previous post, a thought that received no consideration there and will get only a once-over-lightly (well, maybe twice-over-lightly) here: It used to be asserted - with how much actual research backing, I don't know, which is why I won't press it too far here - it used to be asserted that the psychological profile of the kind of person who wanted to be a cop would include a preference for order and control, for clear social arrangements including deference to authority.

That may be so, or at least a version of it may be. An article from a few years ago at Officer.com refers to a 1975 study of police applicants which found statistically significant differences between successful and unsuccessful candidates in nine psychological aspects which collectively, it seems to me, describe someone who likes to be in charge, likes to be the boss, likes to be in the position of authority or power.  (You can see the specifics at the link.)

So if that's so, could that be part of the reason for the fear I see? Could the fact that our society is and has been changing be putting stress on the psychological profile of a typical cop? Making them feel that they're not in charge, that things are out of control and therefore threatening? (It certainly would tend to explain why cops so often react so strongly when they feel you have challenged their authority.)

Adding weight to that is the fact that the same article also refers to other research on what is called the "working personality" of cops: those attitudes that they take on in the course of doing their jobs. Those attitudes involved making cops "distrustful of outsiders," "cynical," "conservative" (in the sense of "resistant to change"), "suspicious," "pessimistic," "pragmatic," and "prejudicial."

I have long argued that a big force driving the rise of the right wing is that history says that in times of social change there is always a tendency to embrace the seeming stability and security of "the way it used to be." (There is some discussion of that at this post.) I'm suggesting here that a similar dynamic is at play as part of the reason cops seem to be so scared: They are having trouble dealing with a changing society. Which I expect is true for some of us all of the time and all of us some of the time.

On the other hand, very few of us can get away with killing an unarmed person because of our flash of unreasoned fear. As Mr. Spock famously noted, understanding does not mean approval.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.officer.com/article/10232697/just-a-typical-cop
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2004/11/dj-vu-vu-vu-part-two.html

Just wondering

Just wondering

I've just been wondering: Are cops nowadays taught to be scared? Are they trained to spend every moment of their working days in mortal fear for their lives?

No joke. No sarcasm. I'm serious. I genuinely wonder.

It seems that hardly a week can go by without hearing of some incident, some event where a cop shot someone or pulled a gun on someone or pointed a gun at the head of someone while screaming and threatening to shoot them under conditions that are let's just call them at least questionable. We have seen, we have heard about, we know about, the cases of unarmed people - usually young African-American men - shot and killed by police who "feared for their life" because the "suspect" gestured toward their waist (note well, did not show a gun, just "gestured" or "reached" toward their waist) or because they moved too fast or because they didn't move fast enough or because they moved toward the cop or because they ran away from the cop or because because because.

We all know the racial and racist aspects; the equation in the public mind of "black" (and even more "black male" and even more "young black male") with violence and criminality is not merely our assertion, it's been researched and demonstrated repeatedly over decades. And we know how much of a driving force that equation can be in how cops act and react, a fact known even to black cops reflecting on their experiences with white cops while out of uniform.

At the same time, the victims of mistreatment and police violence are not exclusively African-American (ask pretty much any white antiwar or anti-corporate protester), which only serves to re-raise the original question: Why does it seem that cops are so scared so much of the time?

It can't be that crime is up because it's not, it's going down. Most forms of crime peaked around the 1980s and have been declining for decades. How much of a decline? Try this, based on the FBI's Universal Crime Statistics Annual Crime Reports, which has been gathering these figures since 1960: In 2013,

the rate of violent crime was at its lowest level since 1970;
the rate of property crime was at its lowest level since 1966;
the rate of murder was the lowest that had been recorded across that time (i.e., since 1960);
the rate of forcible rape was at its lowest level since 1973;
the rate of robbery was at its lowest level since 1967;
the rate of aggravated assault was at its lowest level since 1974;
the rate of burglary was at its lowest level since 1963;
the rate of larceny-theft was at its lowest level since 1968;
the rate of vehicle theft was at its lowest level since 1964.

Put another way, it has been forty years or more since crime in any of those categories was lower than it was in 2013.

More importantly for our purposes here, it cannot be because police work has become more dangerous.

A total of 76 law enforcement officers died in the line of duty in 2013, the FBI reported. Of those, 49 died in accidents and 27 were killed as a result of felonious acts -- the lowest such figure in more than 50 years of FBI reporting, dating back to at least 1961.

Other compilations say the same. The Officer Down Memorial Page, which collects data on line-of-duty incidents, said the number of cops killed in 2013 was the fewest in more than 40 years. The National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund said 100 officers were killed in the line of duty that year, the fewest in nearly 70 years - and of those only 31 were killed by firearms, the lowest figure since 1887.

The figures vary somewhat because of different reporting techniques, but the trend is undeniable: police work, which doesn't even make the list of the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the US, is not getting more dangerous.

So why the hell do cops seem so damn scared? Because that's how they seem to me in so many of the recorded confrontations: genuinely frightened to the point of struggling to control themselves and stay calm or, sadly and often enough tragically, acting impulsively and irrationally - and violently. I ask again: Are they trained to be scared?

Yes, police work can be dangerous, no doubt, no question, but if you're not prepared to deal with danger, if you're going to take the attitude, one which seems to be the default stance of too many cops these days, that your personal safety outweighs any other considerations, then you shouldn't be a cop. Having certain powers and authorities, including the authority to use force, even deadly force, when the situation demands it, powers and authorities that are unavailable to the general public, are part of what it means to be a cop; they are necessary tools cops must have in order to do their jobs. But acceptance of genuine risk is another necessity without which the job is no longer that of a cop but that of an occupying military force, something too many police forces increasingly resemble and as which they are increasingly and not inaccurately perceived by the communities in which they operate.

Others look at the flak jackets, the riot helmets, the assault rifles, the armored vehicles, and the rest and they see menacing thugs. I look at the same things and I see people running on the adrenalin of fear and operating far more out of that fear than logic, data, or reality would direct. And that worries me as much as and maybe more than the image of thugs does - because thugs are at least usually in control of themselves and frightened people with guns too often are not.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/29/the-year-in-police-killings_n_6354696.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2015/01/1889-proof-as-if-proof-was-needed-of.html
http://www.mass.gov/eopss/docs/eops/faip/eberhardt-seeing-black.pdf
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/23/off-duty-black-cops-nypd_n_6373496.html
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/24/police-officers-killed-2013_n_6213940.html
http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/01/15/these-are-the-top-10-most-dangerous-jobs-in-the-u-s/

157.5 - Third anniversary: re-introducing myself

Third anniversary: re-introducing myself

This is show number 157 of Left Side of the Aisle, and for those of you who do the quick math, you might realize that this is the first show of year four; it's our third anniversary show.

So knowing that not all of you, in fact I imagine most of you, have not watched the show from the beginning, this seemed an appropriate time to re-introduce myself, so that what I say here can be put into a broader context of ethical, moral, and political convictions.

To do that, I'm going to start out by talking about a socio-psychological concept called "worldview."¹ Your worldview is your way of mentally organizing the world around you so that it makes sense, your way of putting order to what you perceive.

We all have a worldview. And not just individuals, cultures have a worldview. In fact, one of the things that defines a culture is a shared worldview, a generally-shared (but often implicit) understanding of how reality functions. That worldview can be radically different from one culture to another and can vary within a culture over time. For example, the worldview we hold today in this culture is dramatically different from the worldview held by the first wave of European settlers of North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. In fact, that also holds true for Native Americans, whose worldview now is quite different from that of the natives of that earlier time.

The point is, still, that no matter what the particular worldview is, every culture has one; without a shared worldview, a culture will fracture for lack of a bond to hold it together.

The same holds true for individuals: You have a worldview, you need to have a worldview as it is difficult if not impossible to function otherwise. Without a worldview, everything appears as chaos. Even something as seemingly basic and obvious as cause and effect is part of your worldview, a concept of how reality works. Imagine trying to function without any notion of cause and effect. That will give you a sense of trying to function without a worldview.

More important to my immediate purpose is that within your worldview, there is a more limited version of it which applies to political/moral/ethical considerations. That sort of worldview drives your sense of right and wrong, proper and improper; it informs your convictions about what should and shouldn't be.

For most people, forming that personal worldview is part of maturation. Again for most people, that worldview doesn't change much once it is formed. It can, but not usually or even then by very much. Even what appear to be such changes, for example in political beliefs, often enough are not changes in basic concepts that constitute a worldview but in the interpretation of events and experiences in light of that worldview. Your worldview, that is, is part of your basic psychological make-up - and that doesn't change easily once formed.

So having said that, what I want to do is lay out what I think are important elements of how I reached the final, you could say mature, form of my worldview.

Perhaps the most important thing to say is that I am, in many ways, "a child of the '60s," having come to political awareness during that brief (and, some would have it, mythical) interregnum marked at one end by the Sgt. Pepper summer² and at the other by Altamont - or, if you prefer a political description, by Flower Power and the Days of Rage.

For those of you who are less than about 55 and have no idea what those terms mean, you can look them up. For now, it's enough to know that we're talking about the period of say, 1967-1970.

Like most - at least male - members of my generation, it was Vietnam that initially drew me beyond vague "concern" into concrete involvement: Even for those of us "safe" with draft deferments - and again, that's something that folks now maybe can't relate to, the fact that there was a military draft, under which you could be required under pain of lengthy imprisonment to join the Army and go wherever they sent you, even into a war you thought criminal - but even for those of us with deferments, who could feel confident that at least for now you couldn't be drafted, the war was always there. It swirled around us like a mist, a fog, it tugged at us like an undertow, it threaded in and out of our lives, our future, our consciousness, and the only way you could ignore it was by making the conscious effort to do so.

In fact, I think that those of what I'll call the "Vietnam generation" have a greater understanding of the impact that World War II had on our parents than those of the "Iraq generation" have of the impact Vietnam had on us. Because no matter how you measure it, the Vietnam War - which is properly called the Indochina War because it involved Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia - was a much bigger war than Iraq or Afghanistan ever were.

For example, peak US troop strength in Iraq was 168,000 and the peak year for Iraq and Afghanistan troop strength combined was fiscal 2008, at 188,000. Peak US troop strength in Vietnam was over 536,000, nearly three times as many - and by the way, South Vietnam, where the vast majority of those troops were, was about 2/5 the size of Iraq.

US troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined, up to May 2 of this year, total 6,800. US troops killed in the Indochina War totaled over well over 58,000 - well over eight times as many. US wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan combined reached just under 50,000; those wounded in Indochina were over 300,000, over six times as many.

So yes, a much bigger war. Significantly more troops, significantly more wounded, significantly more dead. And for those of us who questioned the war, who asked our government about the whens, wherefores, and, most importantly, whys of the war, it seemed that each of the "answers" we got just raised at least two new questions.

I had been to that time what I now call a "right wing liberal," a type that is now commonly called a "liberal war hawk," that species of American political animal that's at least fairly liberal on domestic issues and clearly conservative on foreign policy, a type whose philosophy I later summed up as "hooray for justice, beauty, truth, and Kill Commies."

My personal breaking point came when I heard the man who was then the commander of US forces in the war, I don't remember which one it was, say "We're winning the war, just give us six more months" - and I recalled having heard exactly the same thing six months earlier.

And of course, the war didn't end in six months, it dragged on for years more amid repeated promises that it was, really, already over.

The sort of, the term was and is, increasing alienation that generated plus mounting evidence of what the governments we supported in South Vietnam were really like eventually prompted me to - very shyly - attend a meeting of a local peace group. That was, if memory serves, in the fall of 1968. I still remember walking into this room in a church basement and being greeted by a tall man with a beard and a not-inconsiderable resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. In fact, he later added a mustache because he got tired of the Lincoln jokes.

Okay, you can relax; it's over now. I've no intention of inflicting my autobiography on you. But knowing the roots of my involvement in the movement may help to some degree to explain where I've wound up: I'm an aging hippie, an educator, and a political activist, the terms' order of presentation depending on circumstances and my mood of the moment. I'm also a democratic socialist/green with an anarchist bent and a civil liberties absolutist who has, by both logical conclusion and moral compulsion, a commitment to active nonviolence both as political tactic and way of life. The only isms I wholeheartedly endorse are skepticism and eclecticism.

I have also flippantly described myself at times as a socialist-anarchist-communalist-capitalist-eclecticist-iconoclast. After people's eyes stop glazing over, I explain:

I'm a capitalist in that I believe in the "Ma and Pa" store, the community-level enterprise, the small factory, the two- or three-store chain.

I'm a communalist in that I believe that cooperative ventures are better than competitive ones.

I'm a socialist in that I believe that beyond a certain size, profit-seeking enterprises cannot be trusted to be responsible to the communities in which they operate and at that point the community as a whole has the right and the responsibility to step in to exercise control and make decisions, up to and including assuming ownership.

I'm an anarchist in that I believe in doing that with as little government as necessary and with individual freedom and civil liberties being at the maximum possible consistent with social justice.

I'm an eclecticist in that I believe you can put this together into a reasonably coherent social philosophy.

And I'm an iconoclast in that - well, you may have heard that the I Ching is based on the notion that "the only thing that doesn't change is the fact that everything else changes." My version of this is that I believe "the only ultimate answer is that there is no other ultimate answer" and so if we ever did build a society along the lines I envision the first thing I'd do is to try to figure out what was wrong with that one and how it could be improved.

In doing this show, I'm guided by four editorial principles:

1) "To thine own self be true." Which, as I expect you know, is a quote from Shakespeare.

2) "The US isn't the worst - but it is the biggest." That's a quote from Joan Baez.

3) "Sometimes a bit of humor contains more inner truth than the most serious seriousness." That's from a chess grandmaster named Aron Nimzovich.

4) "No one but no one, no matter their ideology, political perspective, or status as 'left' or 'right,' 'revolutionary' or 'counter-revolutionary' can be by that reason exempt from either criticism or praise." That's from me.

The bottom line point is that I have always believed that in any political movement, everyone has some skill they can use, some skill they can contribute to advance the cause. While my list of inadequacies on any compilation of useful skills is quite lengthy, I do have some skill with words. With writing. Talking. Giving speeches. And like that.

So this, ultimately, is just another way I think I can be of use, another way to try to advance the idea of justice, another attempt to maintain the hope that is the only thing that keeps us going. It is, if you will, another candle in the rain³.

Year four started. Let's go.

¹A lot of sources make it two words, "world view," but I think a one-word form is more appropriate because it is a single concept, one that is not "your view of the world" but, if you will, "the world of your view," the world (in the broadest sense) as you view it, as you comprehend it, including the limitations.

²Many sources refer to it as "the summer of love" but I prefer the term "Sgt. Pepper summer" because discussions of "the summer of love" often focus almost exclusively on Haight-Ashbury (San Francisco) without regard to the broader cultural shift of which "Hashbury" was merely the sharpest focus, not the source. With that limitation in mind, here are a couple of sources:
http://www.the60sofficialsite.com/Summer_of_Love.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Love
http://summeroflove.org/main.html
http://www.everything2.com/title/summer+of+love

³Little sisters of the sun
Lit candles in the rain
Fed the world on oats and raisins
Candles in the rain
Lit the fire to the soul who never knew it's friend
Meher Baba lives again
Candles in the rain
To be there was to remember
So lay it down again
Oh, lay it down Lay it down, lay it down again
Men can live as brothers
Candles in the rain
- Melanie

Sources cited in links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_view
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Free_Concert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_power
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/weatherunderground/film.html
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_orbat_es.htm
https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40682.pdf
http://www.americanwarlibrary.com/vietnam/vwatl.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Vietnam
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/iz.html
http://icasualties.org/Iraq/Index.aspx
http://www.icasualties.org/oef/
http://www.statisticbrain.com/vietnam-war-statistics/
http://icasualties.org/Iraq/USCasualtiesByState.aspx
http://www.icasualties.org/OEF/USCasualtiesByState.aspx
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJp7zbjn7Wo

154.1 - Outrage of the Week: Climate deniers suppress paper linking them to conspiracy nuts

Outrage of the Week: Climate deniers suppress paper linking them to conspiracy nuts

We're going to start off this week by plunging right into one of our regular features, the Outrage of the Week.

This involves something from about two weeks old but I'll include it here because I consider it a follow-up to my discussion last week of global warming and the latest report from the IPCC.

It starts with a 2012 research paper by Stephan Lewandowsky of the School of Psychology of the University of Western Australia and others. The paper showed a correlation between being a nanny-nanny naysayer on global warming and being a believer in a variety of conspiracy theories. That is, there is a connection between believing in conspiracies and refusing to accept the reality of climate change. As the title of the paper says, "NASA Faked the Moon Landing - Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science."

The paper was published in the journal "Psychological Science." It produced a tsunami of nasty comments from the nanny-nanny naysayers - who didn't like it being pointed out how similar to, and connected with, conspiracy nuts they are. This even though their arguments against the reality of climate change are almost invariably based on some version of a conspiracy among climate scientists who apparently are all left-wing radicals out to destroy our way of life.

In the blogosphere, the primary theory that emerged was that most of the people who took the survey the formed the basis of the study were people who accept the science - but, who, instead of answering honestly, somehow all decided to pretend to be climate kooks, giving the craziest possible answers so as to make the contrarians look like the whack jobs which they are.

That is, a paper about a tendency among this group to believe in conspiracy theories was met by, yes, a conspiracy theory.

The reactions were so many and so intense that they provided the basis for another paper by Lewandowsky, this one titled "Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation."

That paper was published in the journal "Frontiers in Psychology" in 2013.

Here's where the outrage comes in.

"Frontiers in Psychology" has formally retracted the paper after what the journal itself called "a small number of complaints" from the naysayers claiming the paper was defamatory.

The study was removed from the journal’s website last year while its editors evaluated the naysayers’ claims. And now they have retracted it, with a notice that says in effect that while they could find no academic or ethical problems with the study, they were not willing to risk a lawsuit.

Now, thanks to the University of Western Australia, the paper can still be found online, at least for now; if you want to see it, there is link below.

But the idea that "a small number of complaints" from people who dislike how they are described in a scientific paper can force that paper to be withdrawn through threats of lawsuits and that these threats are being wielded to hide the nature of much of the opposition to climate change, threats which thus serve only to protect the interests of the powerful, is nothing short of an outrage. It's the Outrage of the Week.

Sources:
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/5/622.short
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/unlocking-the-conspiracy-mindset/
http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/03/20/science-journal-retracts-paper-showing-how-climate-change-sceptics-were-conspiracy-theorists-after-sceptics-shout
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/21/academic_journal_bows_to_pressure_from_climate_deniers/
http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/Publications/LskyetalRecursiveFury4UWA.pdf

Link to Lewandowsky's second paper:
http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/Publications/LskyetalRecursiveFury4UWA.pdf

Left Side of the Aisle #154

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of April 10-16, 2014

This week:

Outrage of the Week: Climate deniers suppress paper linking them to conspiracy nuts
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/5/622.short
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/unlocking-the-conspiracy-mindset/
http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/03/20/science-journal-retracts-paper-showing-how-climate-change-sceptics-were-conspiracy-theorists-after-sceptics-shout
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/21/academic_journal_bows_to_pressure_from_climate_deniers/
http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/Publications/LskyetalRecursiveFury4UWA.pdf

Link to Lewandowsky's second paper:
http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/Publications/LskyetalRecursiveFury4UWA.pdf

Domestic spying: How they get away with it
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/03/27/fact-sheet-administration-s-proposal-ending-section-215-bulk-telephony-m
http://rt.com/usa/white-house-nsa-proposal-633/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/technology/between-you-and-me-4-74-degrees.html?_r=1&
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court
http://epic.org/privacy/wiretap/stats/fisa_stats.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation
http://theburglary.com/
http://news.yahoo.com/obamas-nsa-overhaul-may-require-phone-carriers-store-222010492--sector.html
http://rt.com/usa/nsa-overhaul-telecom-metadata-425/

Clown Award: District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/04/obama-drone-strikes_n_5093782.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_M._Collyer

Congressional Progressive Caucus proposes a budget, media ignores it
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2014/03/1507-clown-award-rep-paul-ryan.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/01/paul-ryan-budget_n_5069608.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/federal_government/gop-budget-would-amount-to-pay-cut-for-federal-employees/2014/04/01/906b47ec-b9a9-11e3-96ae-f2c36d2b1245_story.html
http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-paul-ryan-budget-20140401,0,2127070.story#axzz2xgALCyAS
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-01/paul-ryan-s-budgetary-fantasy
http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/hot-topics/progressive-caucus-unveils-the-better-off-budget1/
http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/uploads/The%20Better%20Off%20Budget.pdf
http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/uploads/Back%20to%20Work%20Budget%20-%20Executive%20Summary.pdf
http://www.thenation.com/blog/173348/truly-progressive-budget-vision
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117135/qa-rep-keith-ellison-cpcs-better-budget
http://truth-out.org/news/item/22921-ryan-vs-progressive-caucus-competing-visions-on-the-federal-budget
http://inthesetimes.com/article/16419/fighting_inequality_one_budget_at_a_time
http://www.ctj.org/taxjusticedigest/archive/2014/03/progressive_caucus_budget_we_c.php
http://www.foreffectivegov.org/node/12986
http://www.epi.org/publication/budget-analysis-congressional-progressive/
http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-79604810/?related=true
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/pat-garofalo/2014/03/12/finally-a-washington-plan-for-jobs-and-the-debt
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karen-dolan/want-to-be-better-off-get_b_4950896.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/common-sense-takes-courag_b_4948854.html?view=print&comm_ref=false
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/17/paul-ryan-budget-vs-congressional-progressive-caucus
http://www.msnbc.com/now-with-alex-wagner/watch/better-off-budget-set-for-release-193403971839
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/12/congressional-progressivecaucusbudget.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2012/10/left-side-of-aisle-76-part-4.html
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/28/revealed_the_u_s_militarys_next_shadow_war_partner/
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/2014/04/05/obama-exceeds-million-mark-deportations/7340419/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2012/09/left-side-of-aisle-75-part-4.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2012/09/left-side-of-aisle-73-part-4.html

Examples of the divide between us and them
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-09/gm-workers-who-built-defective-cars-fret-about-recall.html
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/03/must_see_morning_clip_it_took_gm_more_than_10_years_to_recall_a_deadly_malfunction/
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/major-events-gms-recall-26m-small-cars-23142695
http://time.com/54382/general-motors-ignition-switch-recall-fine/
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/ups-threatens-fire-250-protesting-workers
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/queens/exclusive-ups-dismisses-250-queens-drivers-protest-article-1.1742718
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/queens/ups-union-discuss-fate-250-fired-drivers-article-1.1750103
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/queens/ups-fires-17-queens-drivers-ongoing-labor-dispute-article-1.1749171

148.2 - How power corrupts - and wealth is power

How power corrupts - and wealth is power

Repeated psychological studies say that one of the main problems with authority, with power, is that it makes us less sympathetic to the concerns and emotions of others. People in positions of power are more likely to rely on stereotypes and generalizations when judging other people. They also spend much less time making eye contact, at least when a person withless power is talking.

That is, the very experience of having power removes us from connection with others. Put another way, power undermines empathy. It promotes acting on your own desires in a social context without considering the effects of your actions on others. It involves a heightened sensitivity to your own concerns and a reduced sensitivity to the interests, experiences, or needs of others. Power corrupts. And in our capitalistic society, wealth means power.

As one example, consider a series of experiments done four years ago by Joris Lammers of Tilburg University, the Netherlands, and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University.

Without getting too bogged down in procedural details, they essentially "primed" some people in the experiment to feel more powerful than others and then compared their responses to various tests and hypothetical situations. What they found, in sum, is that high-power people judged others more harshly but themselves more leniently and what was objectionable to them when done by others was significantly less so when done by themselves. The attitude seemed to be "It's okay for me but not for you."

Lammers and Galinsky argue that people with power think it's justified for them to break rules not only because their power means they can get away with it, but also because they feel at some level that they are entitled to take what they want. Because they are entitled to it in a way that lesser people are not. Because power corrupts. And wealth means power.

More recently, research published last year in "The Academy of Management Journal" found that giving someone a sense of power instills a black-and-white sense of right and wrong - especially wrong.

Scott Wiltermuth of the University of South Carolina Marshall School of Business and Francis Flynn of the Stanford Graduate School of Business set up four experiments in which they made some participants feel powerful, giving them the ability to control resources and administer rewards and punishments.

When presented with cases of transgressions, these participants, the "powerful" people, were found more likely to say flatly that a given action is either “yes, immoral” or “no, not immoral.” Less powerful people were far more likely to say “it depends.” And that same "moral clarity" led the “powerful” participants to propose harsher punishments for the same infractions. Interestingly and I say revealingly, this same certainty did not lead those "powerful" participants to propose greater rewards for good behavior. It was all about punishing the lessers. Because power corrupts. And wealth means power.

Kraus and Keltner also addressed this. Their experiments showed a connection between the social essentialist belief that our work ethic, intelligence, and ultimately our socioeconomic status are part of our genetic inheritance, fixed, unchanging, the idea that it's all from our genes, a connection between that and a preference for harsh punishments and a resistance to “restorative” punishments such as community service. Because power drenies empathy. Power denies understanding. Power denies the needs of others. Power corrupts. And wealth means power.

Being rich undermines your morals and makes you a self-absorbed, arrogant, condescending, bigot whose ethics and empathy have been corrupted by power, leaving you a vapid, amoral, sociopathic husk with a sense of entitlement surpassing that of a spoiled 6-year-old brat, often with an attitude to match.

And these are the people who are in charge of our society, who have the most power, the most economic power and political influence, in our society.

These are the people the media listen to, give a respectful hearing to no matter how outlandish or idiotic their ramblings and yes, I'm looking at you, Tom Perkins and the rest of your billionaire buddies, give a respectful hearing to them because these are also the people who own the media.

These are the people the government listens to, and that, too, is backed up by research:

For just one example, a study done by Thomas Hayes of Trinity University published in "Political Science Quarterly" showed that US senators respond almost exclusively to the interests of their wealthiest constituents.

Hayes compared a massive database of public opinion surveys to their senators’ voting records for the period 2001 through 2010. What he found was that from 2007 through 2010, senators were somewhat responsive to the interests of the middle class, but mostly responsive to the interests of the rich. During the first six years Hayes studied, the interests of the middle class didn't figure in - and the interests of the poor just never figured in at all at any point.

By the way, it's important to note that the Hayes' research showed that the neglect of the poor and working poor was a bipartisan affair, with Democrats no more responsive to the poor than Republicans.

So to sum up, the most powerful people in our society, the people the media listens to, the people the government listens to, are the same people that a mass of psychological and sociological research says are the most likely among us to be vapid, amoral, self-absorbed, arrogant, condescending, bigoted sociopaths. And we wonder why we're screwed.

And it's not going to change. It's not going to reverse on its own. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, who co-authored Why Nations Fail, says that this is "a general pattern throughout history. When economic inequality increases, the people who have become economically more powerful will often attempt to use that power in order to gain even more political power. And once they are able to monopolize political power, they will start using that for changing the rules in their favor.”

It's not going to reverse on its own. It's self-reinforcing, self-replicating. Wealth leads to power leads to more wealth leads to more power, leads to, it goes on, with fewer and fewer getting more and more. That's why the rich are in terms of wealth, running away from the rest of us. It's why they get more and more of the benefits of society and the economy, while the real income, the purchasing power, of the average worker is going effectively nowhere and is actually below where it was 35 years ago.

It's not going to change, it will only get worse and the single remaining question is how fast it will get worse - unless we make it change.

Frederick Douglass said it: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." Change is going to require struggle. It's going to require a genuine social revolution. It's going to require disruption. It's going to require people in the streets. It's going to require more, a lot more, than twitter feeds and Facebook posts and far more than "vote for Democrats!" It's going to require a combination of the intensity and determination of the labor movement of the 1930s, the fearlessness of the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s, the passion of the antiwar and counterculture movements of the '60s and '70s, and the creativity of the Occupy movement of this century.

Quoting Douglass again, "It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake." We are, I fear, approaching a time when there will be the stark choice: confront or capitulate. Not one of those movements I mentioned could fairly or even rationally be called violent. But each in their own way, in their impact, they brought the fire, the thunder, the whirlwind. We need that sort of storm again.

Back in 1995, George Will, who is what passes for an intellectual in the right wing, said in his syndicated column that "'Back to 1900' is a serviceable summation of the conservative goal." It's damn well about time we faced the fact that he wasn't exaggerating. We need the earthquake.

Sources:
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/06/rambling-meditation-about-power.html
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/rev/119/3/546/
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/130118_power
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/01/social_darwinism_and_class_essentialism_the_rich_think_they_are_superior.html
http://www.alternet.org/economy/you-can-buy-ice-cubes-750-each-new-york-city
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/19/oligarchic-tendencies-study-finds-only-the-wealthy-get-represented-in-the-senate/
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/power-concedes-nothing-without-a-demand-it-never/1273306.html

148.1 - How being rich can make you a sociopath

How being rich can make you a sociopath

This is going to be an unusual edition of Left Side of the Aisle in that it's going to address a single topic, something I've discussed in brief form the past couple of weeks: the sickness of being rich.

In fact, I have to start with a correction or more properly a clarification of something from last week:

Last week, I said that being rich is a sickness. That's not quite right. Rather, it's an unhealthy condition. It's the same sort of thing as being obese: Obesity is not itself a sickness; you can be fat and healthy your entire life. However, it is an unhealthy condition is that it does put you at greater risk for variety of ailments, such as problems with cholesterol or diabetes or heart problems.

In the same way, being rich is not itself a sickness: It's possible for you to be rich and yet a decent human being. But it puts you at much greater risk for a variety of social sicknesses, social pathologies, such that while in the end they may not be damaging to you individually, they can have severely damaging effects on the society around you.

Simply put, being rich puts you at risk of being a self-absorbed, selfish, conceited, narcissistic sociopath utterly convinced of your own inherent superiority, lacking a social conscience, and callously indifferent to the welfare of others not of your elevated social class - and perhaps indifferent even to them. And the richer you are, the greater the risk.

And no, that is not hyperbole. There is a mountain of sociological and psychological evidence backing it up. Don't believe me? Settle in; you're about to get a lesson. Here's some data:

Consider, for one example, a study published two years ago in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." Psychologist Paul Piff of UCal Berkeley and four colleagues from the University of Toronto conducted a series of seven studies which showed that, in the words of the title of their paper, "Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior."

The studies found that, compared to lower-class individuals, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making, more likely to take valued goods from others, more likely to lie in a negotiation, more likely to cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize, more likely to endorse unethical behavior at work, and to have more favorable attitudes toward greed. In sum, the fact is, being rich undermines your morals.

In a follow-up study, published in August 2013 in "Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin," Piff and some colleagues conducted five experiments which demonstrated that “higher social class is associated with increased entitlement and narcissism.”

The experiments involved several hundred undergraduates plus 100 adults recruited from online communities. They used multiple methods for measuring narcissism, entitlement, and social class in multiple populations. The strength of the study is that they approached the same basic question several different ways - and the results were consistent: Essentially, the richer you are, the more you tend to be a self-important twit.

For example, when asked to visually depict themselves as circles, with size indicating relative importance, richer people picked larger circles for themselves and smaller ones for others. They also looked in the mirror more frequently and spent more time looking when they did.

Another test measured how participants scored on a standard scale of “psychological entitlement” and found that those of a higher social class - the judgement of social class being based on income levels, education, and occupational prestige - those of a higher social class were more likely to feel they are, in words of one question, "just more deserving than others.” People further down the social ladder were likelier to say “I do not necessarily deserve special treatment.”

Significantly, the researchers asked college students in one experiment to report the educational attainment and annual income of their parents. Remember, these are students: They have not yet made their mark or achieved any success on their own. Even so, those with more highly educated and wealthier parents remained higher in their narcissism and self-reported feeling of entitlement.

This is important because it's often argued that, sure, there's a connection between being rich and being a narcissist, but that's because narcissistic people, self-involved people, are more likely to become successful and thereby become rich. But these results say the opposite: that the narcissism comes first, that it's the wealth that breeds the narcissism, not the other way around - which sounds odd, I realize, but what I mean is that the studies say that it's not that you're rich because you're narcissistic, it's that you're narcissistic because you're rich. And rich people justify their excesses by convincing themselves that they are more deserving of it. Which means being rich undermines your morals and makes you self-absorbed and selfish.

As a sidebar, that fact is reflected in the fact that statistics on charitable giving show that, measured as a portion of your income, the poorest among us donate early two and a-half times as much as the richest: 1.3% of income for the rich, 3.2% for the poor. And reflecting that narcissism, the rich are more likely to donate to things either that they use themselves, such as theater groups or symphonies, or to projects to which their names can be attached, such as at universities and museums, while the poor donate to things that actually benefit other people.

The narcissism that Piff and his colleagues uncovered relates to another study, also published last August, this one done by Michael Kraus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Dacher Keltner of UCal-Berkeley. The study appeared in the "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology."

Kraus and Keltner set out to examine social class essentialism. To understand this, you have to understand what essentialism is. Essentialism is the belief that surface differences between two groups of people or things can be explained by differences in their fundamental natures. More directly, that they are manifestations of their fundamental natures. An illustration often used is that dogs are dogs and have a certain dogness about them and cats are cats and have a certain catness and dogs and cats are separate things and will remain so.

It's a type of categorization. Categorization is natural and normal; in fact, it would be hard to see relationships among various things without establishing some categories. The thing is, essentialism sees such categories as natural - that is, they don't just exist in our heads, they are not just mental constructs created as a means of mentally organizing and making sense of the world, they actually exist in fact and what's more, these categories are both discrete and stable. Things that appear different on the surface look different because they are actually different in their essential nature.

Put simply, essentialism is categorization taken to the extreme. Which means that essentialism is the cause of bigotry, prejudice, and stereotyping because it defines surface differences as fundamental differences. People can hold essentialist beliefs about more biological categories such as gender, race, and sexuality, as well as more cultural ones such as nationality, religion, and political orientation. I've commented more than once that the fundamental, baseline requirement for justifying war is defining the target as "not us," as "other," as in some way discrete from us. That's essentialism.

Okay. Kraus and Keltner wanted to see if people regarded social class essentially. That is, did people view social class as natural, inherent, and fixed; did they view outward signs of different social classes as reflecting fundamental differences among the people occupying them. More simply put, did people think that your genes are what determine what social class you occupy.

First, they developed a scale for measuring essentialistic beliefs about class. People were asked the beliefs about statements such as “I think even if everyone wore the same clothing, people would still be able to tell your social class.”

Participants also gave a subjective rating of their own social class rank within their community; again, social class was based on education, income, and occupational status. Even after controlling for political orientation and objective measures of a participant’s income and education, the researchers found that higher social class was associated with greater social class essentialism. That is, overall, the higher a social class you were in, the higher a social class you thought of yourself as being in, the more you thought it was because you just deserved to be there. That you were supposed to be there. That you just deserved, by your very nature, to be of a higher status, to be elevated above, the people around you. Being rich undermines your morals and makes you self-absorbed and arrogantly condescending.

Kraus and Keltner looked deeper into the connection between social class and social class essentialism by testing participants’ belief in a "just world." "Just world" theory was developed in the 1960s. It says that people are motivated to believe that the world is a fair place because the alternative - bad things happen to good people for no reason - is too distressing. "Just world" theory is used to explain reactions such as blaming the victim for what happens to them: “She shouldn’t have dressed that way” and that sort of thing, finding a way to feel that what happened to the victim was in some way justified.

So in the tests, participants were asked their reactions to statements such as “I feel that people get what they are entitled to have.”

Kraus and Keltner found that the higher people perceived their social class to be, the more strongly they endorsed just-world beliefs. In other words, if you feel you’re doing well, you'll convince yourself that success comes to those who deserve it - which means, then, that those of lower status must not deserve it. They have less because they are supposed to have less, they are poor because they are supposed to be poor and by their very nature do not deserve to have any more. Put more bluntly, the upper classes think that the lower classes are not merely unfortunate, they are genetically inferior and the higher your class, the more likely you are to believe that. Being rich undermines your morals, it makes you self-absorbed and arrogantly condescending, and it makes you a bigot no different from those who insist that blacks are genetically inferior to whites.

This is where this work connects back to Piff's. Remember, Piff's research showed that it's not that narcissistic people are more likely to become rich but that being rich makes you narcissistic, makes you believe that you have more because you deserve to have more, that you simply are better than people who have less and they have less because they deserve less. What Kraus and Keltner's work means is that they approached the same question from a different direction - and got the same answer.

In summing up previous research done by others, Piff said that upper-class individuals also “showed reduced sensitivity to others’ suffering” as compared with working- and middle-class people. He suggested that was because lower-class individuals are more likely to spend time taking care of and interacting with others in a social network while upper-class individuals seek to differentiate themselves from others.

But there's another at least equally and I think more plausible explanation for this lack of empathy on the part of the rich. At least in our capitalistic society, wealth means power. It was Lord Acton who said, in it's popular form, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Over the years, psychologists have performed literally hundreds of experiments testing the concepts of power and its exercise and overwhelmingly they have come to the same conclusion: Lord Acton had it right. Power corrupts. And wealth means power. And that's what we'll talk about next at a post linked here.

Left Side of the Aisle #148

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of February 27 - March 5, 2014

This week:

How being rich can make you a sociopath
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sociopath
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/02/21/1118373109.full.pdf+html
http://psp.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/08/19/0146167213501699.full#aff-1
http://healthland.time.com/2013/08/20/wealthy-selfies-how-being-rich-increases-narcissism/
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/105/2/247/
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/01/social_darwinism_and_class_essentialism_the_rich_think_they_are_superior.html
http://www.alternet.org/economy/are-we-being-ruled-self-centered-jerks-what-new-studies-reveal-about-ultra-wealthy

How power corrupts - and wealth is power
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/06/rambling-meditation-about-power.html
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/rev/119/3/546/
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/130118_power
http://www.alternet.org/economy/you-can-buy-ice-cubes-750-each-new-york-city
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/19/oligarchic-tendencies-study-finds-only-the-wealthy-get-represented-in-the-senate/
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/power-concedes-nothing-without-a-demand-it-never/1273306.html

Left Side of the Aisle #109 - Part 5

The psychological shortcomings of the right wing

You know about the EF4 tornado that struck in Oklahoma on May 20, a massive storm that killed at least two dozen people and leveled a section of the town of Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City.

There are two things this raises that I wanted to address here.

The first is that this tragedy, as such tragedies often do, brought out the best in some among us. We've heard the stories of the help, the assistance, the donations, the surprise rescues, the grateful reunions with people or pets feared lost.

But such events sometimes also help to bring out or at least shine a light on the worst in some among us. And for an example of that, we need look no further than Oklahoma's joined-at-the-hip right wing bozo boy senators, James Inhofe and Tom Coburn.

These two have repeatedly tried to deny disaster relief aid to others. For example, in 2011 both of them opposed legislation that would have granted necessary funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which administers federal disaster relief. Coburn called the funding "unconscionable."

Last year, they both supported slashing disaster relief to victims of Hurricane Sandy because it included, Coburn claimed, "wasteful spending" such as a provision for "future disaster mitigation activities and studies" - that is, looking to make it less likely such levels of destruction would happen again. That, to Coburn, was "wasteful."

But when it comes to Oklahoma, when it comes to their interests, oh, well, that's totally different. They've been more than willing to ask for and take whatever federal disaster aid they can get. In January of 2007, Coburn wanted speedy disaster relief aid after Oklahoma faced a major ice storm. In 2008, Inhofe got emergency relief from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in response to the impact of some severe weather. Just last month, Obama signed a disaster declaration for the state following severe snowstorms.

In fact, despite ranking just 20th among states in area and 28th in population, Oklahoma ranks third in the number of federal disaster relief declarations, behind just Texas (second biggest, second most populous) and California (third biggest, most populous).

Now they not only want federal disaster relief in the wake of the tornado, they want it paid for by "offsets" from - that is, cuts in - other federal programs. So not only do they want the relief that they would deny to others, they want to pay for their relief by taking funds from other programs, monies that might benefit other people.

Now, of course the people of Oklahoma should get the aid. Of course they should. That's not the issue here. The issue is the selfish parochialism shown by Coburn and Inhofe in asking.

Which raises the thing I really wanted to bring up: We'd usually call this hypocrisy. But is it really hypocrisy or is it a psychological failing? Are right-wingers just psychologically limited, the poor dears?

I think I've mentioned in the past - I'm way too lazy to actually find out for sure - but I think I've mentioned in the past that I believe a real difference between the left and the right, and this goes right to the notion of psychological differences that lead to political and social differences, that lead you to be on the left of the right, a real difference between the left and the right revolves around reification, which is the ability to perceive something abstract as real.

An example I can use to illustrate the idea was found in healthcare debate, when people talked about 50 million or more people lacking any sort of health insurance. By the way, I'm not going to get into the important difference between having health insurance and having access to adequate health care, the latter of which is what's important and where Obamacare still fails for tens of millions, that's for another time.

The point is, for the right wing that figure of 50 million-plus is just that: a figure, a statistic. For the left, it's more than 50 million actual people just one serious illness away from - if they're lucky - bankruptcy. It's not just a number. It's real people feeling real effects. That's reification and it's an ability the right wing seems to lack.

The result is that right wingers can care about, feel sympathy and compassion for, people somehow close to them, people with who they identify directly, the idea of "me and mine." So when people from Delaware to New Jersey to New York to Connecticut get smashed by Hurricane Sandy, it's something "out there," the casualties and property damage just numbers. But when it's Oklahoma, then for Coburn and Inhofe it becomes "hey, wait, that's my state, that's my home, that's my people, those are places I've been, I might have met some of these people." In short, to them it's real, the effects are real, in a way the people and communities left in Sandy's wake would never be.

I think that difference explains a lot of things in disputes between left and right. And if you want to conclude from that that I think that those on the left are on the whole more psychologically evolved than those on the right, you go right ahead.

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/21/mary-fallin-oklahoma-tornado_n_3311789.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/21/oklahoma-tornado-aftermath-moore_n_3311361.html
http://www.boston.com/news/weather/2013/05/21/medical-examiner-dead-oklahoma-twister/ZG76wWq1hwWeY0AmgSWmlI/story.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/20/oklahoma-senators-disaster-relief_n_3309234.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_area