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James Goodman

Unfit To Report - 0 views

  • quite possibly the scummiest — Planet Money/This American Life propaganda piece for the financial industry, disguised as highbrow progressive journalism.
  • The piece was called "Unfit For Work: The Startling Rise of Disability in America" and it essentially argued — using wildly flawed research and straight-up lies — that our Social Security program is burdened by a glut of freeloader disability queens, faking their disabilities in order to live high on the Social Security disability insurance hog. Why would NPR run such a flawed, biased story? The answer takes us right to the heart of Wall Street’s plans to privatize government benefits, which Wall Street bond holders want to slash for their own profits. This battle pits powerful Wall Street interests and their media and political lackeys on the one side, versus an overwhelming majority of Americans — Republicans and Democrats both — on the other. In the middle stands a radio piece from a trusted source, NPR/This American Life/Planet Money, telling its progressive, educated audience that there is in fact a problem with Social Security, and that problem is a bunch of human parasites faking disability to suckle from the Social Security teat. It’s the sort of rancid old 1930s anti-New Deal propaganda that the American Liberty League or NAM or the Chamber of Commerce used to puke out on a regular basis. But this is 2013, meaning this time around, the battleground is on the putative left, pitting the Democratic Party leaders including Obama against the people who voted for him, and who have nowhere else to turn. On the Democratic Party’s side: their funders on Wall Street, and their neoliberal propagandists in pundit-land and in universities. The key isn’t winning over right-wing conservatives, but rather affluent progressives — i.e., Planet Money's and NPR’s audience. If they can flip that demographic, Social Security is privatized toast.
  • The good thing is that the piece was such obvious crap, so intellectually flawed and propaganda-soaked, that Ira Glass and the This American Life/Planet Money/NPR people were forced to respond to their critics. The downside is that the critics were far too respectful, basing their criticism on factual flaws rather than on the corruption that made the flawed reporting not just possible, but inevitable.
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  • As we reported last year at our SHAME Project and in my piece for the NSFWCORP, Planet Money has a serious conflict-of-interest problem when it reports on anything involving the banking sector. Planet Money’s sole sponsor, as of late last year, is Ally Bank (formerly GMAC), one of the world’s most toxic subprime lenders. Ally/GMAC preyed on Americans on the upside, then plundered taxpayers for over $17 billion in TARP bailout funds when their fraud schemes came crashing down. As we showed, the disturbing overlap between GMAC’s lobbying efforts against bank regulation bills, and Planet Money programs attacking that legislation and its promoters, means that Planet Money has essentially doubled as a sophisticated PR vessel targeting a key audience unaware of the Planet Money/NPR financial arrangement with the banking industry.
  • When you know that Planet Money’s sole sponsor is a predatory lender, this hit-piece on Social Security "disability queens" makes an appalling sort of sense. Social Security is actually a fully funded and well-managed program. That’s precisely why Wall Street has been trying to grab it for years. When furious NPR viewers objected to seeing their donations funding anti-Social Security propaganda, Ira Glass felt compelled to issue this statement standing by the reporting: "We know of no factual errors. We stand by the story." Yet, as a Wired reporter pointed out, Planet Money did alter the online version of the show after listeners raised a fuss. NPR finally admitted that the text had been altered, lamely explaining that "sentences were changed for clarity after publication."
  • Among the products that Lincoln Financial Group sells is, you guessed it, disability insurance. So unless it’s a complete coincidence that Lincoln Financial’s ads keep popping up as the Planet Money sponsor for the show about disability queens, it looks like once again, Planet Money, This American Life and NPR have the same "failure to communicate their conflict-of-interest and media corruption" problem that we wrote about last summer. They’ve done nothing to address the corruption in their editorial process. No one is holding Planet Money, This American Life or NPR accountable for clear conflict-of-interest.
  • But perhaps NPR doesn’t give a shit. In their corporate sponsors page, NPR openly boasts that paying NPR to read your company’s name has a "halo effect" —that is, having a harmless squeaky progressive-sounding NPR voice reading out your company’s name essentially helps to whitewash the corporate sponsor’s brand reputation. That can really come in handy if you’re one of the banks that pocketed billions in taxpayer money and now you’re lobbying to cut Social Security benefits
  • So, as the financial lobby and the DC political class close in for the kill on your Social Security, you should be aware that Planet Money, This American Life and NPR are key players on the left flank of the bankers’ propaganda war. If you’re one of their listeners or donors, you’re a target. Welcome to what passes for the "liberal" media.
James Goodman

Is Loneliness a Public Policy Problem? - Zach McDade - The Atlantic Cities - 0 views

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    Is Loneliness a Public Policy Problem? Zach McDade May 23, 2013 9 Comments Is Loneliness a Public Policy Problem? Shutterstock inShare3 Share Print Share on emailEmail Urban Institute MORE FROM THE URBAN INSTITUTE: The "Disconnected Youth" Paradigm Stemming the Tide of Federal Prison Growth The Continued Decline of North Korea Is a Case for Inclusive Politics A fascinating recent article in The New Republic reviewed a body of new science documenting the pernicious physiological effects of loneliness. Researchers have shown that loneliness-more formally, the want of intimacy-exacerbates a host of ailments, including Alzheimer's disease, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and even cancer. The share of Americans who report "not feeling close to people" at any given time is 30 percent and growing, and deemed by some a social health crisis. Should public policy researchers and practitioners care about something as intangible and inaccessible as loneliness? I'll give you three reasons why I think we should. First, some background… Feeling lonely actually sends misleading hormonal signals that physically change the molecular structure of the brain. According to the article, this "wrenches a whole slew" of bodily systems out of whack, causing loneliness to be seen by some as a risk factor for death as great as smoking. Who tends to be affected by loneliness, according to this research? Women more than men, blacks more than whites, the less-educated, the unemployed, the retired, anyone different. In other words, many of the same people affected by today's long-term unemployment and wealth disparities, persistent poverty, and isolation. If loneliness exacerbates these ills, it will further diminish people's ability to engage in economically and socially valuable and productive activities, which in turn could exacerbate loneliness. Three reasons why loneliness should be a p
James Goodman

The Nothing Cure | Whole Living - 0 views

  • Another way to enhance the body's response to cold-fighting remedies is to ensure that you feel loved: Social support reduces vulnerability to all types of illness, including colds and flu, by cutting stress. In fact, when exposed to a virus, parents are about half as likely to develop a cold as exposed non-parents. And the bigger a parent's brood, the stronger her resistance, a Psychosomatic Medicine report showed. (Scientists think that social support, not just increased immunity thanks to constant exposure, is behind the effect.) Even if you do succumb, feeling understood and cared for, either by your doctor or by family and friends, can reduce the severity of your symptoms. A study by Barrett and his colleagues found that people who felt that their physicians were more empathetic had slightly shorter, milder colds as well as greater immune responses.
  • "The kind of remedies and comfort measures your grandmother used -- in my family, it was honey and lemon juice in warm water -- has a big impact on cold symptoms," says Josephine Briggs, M.D., director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, in Bethesda, Maryland. Since these reassuring associations are built during childhood and are probably at least partly subconscious, it doesn't matter whether Mom or Grandma is actually there to administer the remedy. "Pills might help," she says, "but mind-body approaches are a critical tool in symptom management."
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    "Another way to enhance the body's response to cold-fighting remedies is to ensure that you feel loved: Social support reduces vulnerability to all types of illness, including colds and flu, by cutting stress. In fact, when exposed to a virus, parents are about half as likely to develop a cold as exposed non-parents. And the bigger a parent's brood, the stronger her resistance, a Psychosomatic Medicine report showed. (Scientists think that social support, not just increased immunity thanks to constant exposure, is behind the effect.) Even if you do succumb, feeling understood and cared for, either by your doctor or by family and friends, can reduce the severity of your symptoms. A study by Barrett and his colleagues found that people who felt that their physicians were more empathetic had slightly shorter, milder colds as well as greater immune responses. "The kind of remedies and comfort measures your grandmother used -- in my family, it was honey and lemon juice in warm water -- has a big impact on cold symptoms," says Josephine Briggs, M.D., director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, in Bethesda, Maryland. Since these reassuring associations are built during childhood and are probably at least partly subconscious, it doesn't matter whether Mom or Grandma is actually there to administer the remedy. "Pills might help," she says, "but mind-body approaches are a critical tool in symptom management.""
James Goodman

Charles Shaw: Chasing Amy: Prohibition & the Infantilization Of Addiction - 0 views

  • huff.use('threeup', function(t){ t.init({ frame: '#threeup_top_wrapper', content: '#threeup_content', node: '.threeup_entries', left: '#threeup_left_nav', right: '#threeup_right_nav', vertical: 'Culture', entry: '912044', version: '2' }); }) Charles Shaw Author, 'Exile Nation' GET UPDATES FROM Charles Shaw Like 5 Chasing Amy: Prohibition & the Infantilization Of Addiction Posted: 7/31/11 02:00 PM ET React HPFacebookVoteV2.init(912044, 'Chasing Amy: Prohibition & the Infantilization Of Addiction', 'I did not know Amy Winehouse. I never met her, never heard any of her music, and was not a \\\"fan.\\\" None of that seemed to matter when forming an opinion of her. What I did know about her was what I felt I was permitted to know, that she was a prodigious musical talent who, not surprisingly, had an even more prodigious penchant for substances, and her life was a 24-hour train wreck that was parsed out neatly in...', 'http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-shaw/chasing-amy-prohibition-t_b_912044.html', 'http:///images/icons/huffpostbigicon.jpg', 'Please join me at <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/">Huffington Post</a>!', 'blog', ["Amazing","Inspiring","Funny","Scary","Hot","Crazy","Important","Weird"]); Amazing Inspiring Funny Scary Hot Crazy Important Weird Read more Amy Winehouse , Addiction , Prohibition , Culture News #news_entries #ad_sharebox_260x60 img {padding:0px;margin:0px} if(typeof ad_overrides == 'undefined' || ad_overrides.spots && jQuery.inArray('sharebox_260x60',ad_overrides.spots) > -1) { htmlAdWH("93315635", "260", "60","f"); var debugadcode = ''; document.write(debugadcode); } if(typeof social_campaign != 'undefined' && jQuery('.print-link')[0].href.indexOf(social_campaign) == -1 ) { var _print_href = jQuery('.print-link')[0].href; jQuery('.print-link').attr( 'href' , _print_href + '&comm_ref=' + social_campaign ) } share this story http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?action=like&api_key=4d965afccc4d86c598dbf5d94fb34a7c&amp
  • This attitude, and paradigm, has got to change if we are ever to get to a saner, more compassionate (and yes, potentially profitable) Post-Prohibition society. The first step, as Amy's friend, the British actor Russell Brand, wrote in the Guardian, is to end the criminalization of use: We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care. We need to look at the way our government funds rehabilitation. It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalisation doesn't even make economic sense. Not all of us know someone with the incredible talent that Amy had but we all know drunks and junkies and they all need help and the help is out there. All they have to do is pick up the phone and make the call. Or not. Either way, there will be a phone call. Addiction is not "a crime or a romantic affection," Brand concludes, "but a disease that will kill." Let's speak frankly here. Prohibition is as guilty for the death of Amy Winehouse as her addiction. Because when Amy used drugs she wasn't just indulging, she was breaking the law. There's a huge social stigma behind breaking the law, and it usually means unwanted attention, fear, hiding and lying. In The Exile Nation Project: An Oral History of the War on Drugs, Dr. Julie Holland, a psychatrist and emergency physician, explains that the hiding and lying of illegal and prohibited drug use leads to a pervasive feeling of shame, and that shame creates more of the intensely negative feelings and emotional states that lead to self-medication as a means of escape. This cycle is then reinfoirced over and over until it becomes hard-wired. "The way our drug policy is set up," she concludes, "it's turning us into addicts." Now imagine the pressure borne down upon a celebrity of Amy Winehouse's stature, struggling with a very public addiction. How can anyone in her position find the peace and solace, or simply the space, necessary to heal? Addiction takes years to overcome, you can't just stuff someone in rehab for 30 days, and then send them back out on tour, and expect them to be cured. Perhaps we still shove addicts into our collective shadow because we're afraid of addiction and we're afraid of losing control, and as a means of reinforcing control in ourselves, we project this fear onto those who we perceive as having lost control, and thus, are in violation of the social contract and deserving of punishment. We warehouse them so we don't have to look at them, and thus, don't have to look at ourselves.
  • We can stop this from happening. When those who are suffering are finally viewed with the compassion they deserve, rather than with the derision they receive. And when there is no longer any profit to be gained from their immiseration, then we will have taken that final necessary step to break the nefarious back of Prohibition, and move us slowly along into a saner, more rational world, one that would have helped Amy Winehouse and millions like her, instead of recklessly chasing her into her own grave.
James Goodman

Bookworm as Social Butterfly: The Effects of Reading on Our Social Skills - Mind & Body... - 0 views

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    "The seemingly solitary act of holing up with a book . . . is actually an exercise in human interaction," Oatley writes. "It can hone your social brain, so that when you put your book down you may be better prepared for camaraderie, collaboration, even love."
James Goodman

Shareable: Hacking Home: Coliving Reinvents the Commune for a Networked Age - 0 views

  • In today’s America, almost 50 percent of adults in the United States are single, and more than a quarter of “households” are just an individual living alone. An increasing amount of social interaction happens online, rather than face-to-face. Living alone may allow us to focus on our own goals without distraction, but it robs us of the type of communication that only happens when people are relaxed and at home together. The spaces between work and life — which, in decades past, would have been filled with conversations over the dinner table — are collapsing. Coliving hacks this trend, infusing the blurring boundaries of work and leisure with new opportunities for inspiration, learning, and social innovation. Here, “home” is reinvented with a new purpose. It’s a community, an ethos, a series of opportunities for collaboration. And while most young professionals are flocking to urban centers like San Francisco to live in modest apartments, some are building a new American dream in once empty suburban McMansions and luxury downtown digs. In this new scheme, your network isn’t just your Facebook friends or business contacts; It includes your friends, influencers, ad hoc family, and your shared home.
  • The coliving movement may freely use terms like “commune” and “cooperative”, but this ain’t your grandma’s commune. Contemporary coliving builds on communal living practices, embracing a networked tech, business and science-fueled culture built upon innovation and realizing a better world through collaborative design.
  • Coliving has clear similarities to traditional communes and co-ops. Langton Labs, in particular, bears a strong resemblance to 20th-century cooperative living. It has a flat organizational structure, and most decisions are made on a group email list. “In building a community, we didn't pick an existing model and emulate it,” says Todd Huffman. “We designed everything from the ground up, and in doing so, have ended up evolving in parallel and developing mechanisms that are very similar to cooperatives or communes.” Unlike many prior communal living experiments, coliving spaces are externally oriented. They’re generally located in urban areas, often open to the public on a regular basis, and easy to move in and out of. The ideas brewing behind these doors are quickly realized and implemented in the world outside. Much of this is related to the 21st-century vision of sharing, which allows for a high level of individualism and experimentation. Previous community models were focused on equality, with participants renouncing privileges to adopt a group-oriented mentality. In today’s open-source world, collaboration relies on contributions from a diverse pool of individuals, and welcomes exceptionality.
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  • This phenomenon occurs across human culture: As our social organization has morphed from tight-knit groups to loose, technology-driven networks, we are supporting each other more and competing less. Sociologist Barry Wellman calls this networked individualism: our newfound ability to work together without losing sight of our internal goals. Accordingly, the coliving movement seeks out exceptional people, asking them not to give themselves up to a single cause, but to support each other’s exceptionality. This may be the key to a new definition of “home,” one which provides comfort and friends along with inspiration and innovation. As our social and professional landscapes shift, our concept of home is shifting too. By rebuilding their homes on a foundation of creative collaboration, coliving participants may next redefine the world by the same terms.
James Goodman

Philip Pilkington: Debt and the Decay of the Myth of Liberal Individualism « ... - 0 views

  • The myth of the unbounded individual, the lone merchant with the devil-may-care attitude toward his fellow men allowed Smith to conceive of a society in which men might live without close ties to one another and yet a society which would not descend into barbarism. Emotional distance, a lack of love or compassion, need not descend into violence and murder, according to Smith, because of the principles of disinterested commerce and exchange which he thought that he had uncovered in Man.This is the legacy that Smith has left us today. Not just in the field of economics, but also as a sort of moral or mythic code by which we arrange our social intercourse in mass society. When we step into a shop and purchase a good or a service we are acting as Smithian individuals. We see ourselves as unbounded to those around us and free to make whatever decisions we please. And we believe that once the transaction is complete we can wash our hands of it.The problem is that this is not true and it probably never has been. Today, instead, we see all too clearly the importance of debt. Debt is what ties us together. We may be in the position of creditor or in the position of debtor – or we may even be in the position of neither – but debt affects all of us. Even those of us that balance our books perfectly and do not engage in any form of lending nevertheless rely on banking systems and systems of government founded on the simple and timeless principles of debt. And it is these principles that bind us together.
  • We are not, in any way, “men who owe no obligation to one another”. Our entire social system is founded on obligation and interconnectedness. This was likely true even in Smith’s time, but his genius was to have hidden it from view and in doing so to construct the founding myth of liberal individualism as it exists in modern times.Yet today the debt issue explodes once more. And because Smith’s mythology cannot contain it we see all around us anxiety together with its attendant primitive emotions such as envy, anger, spite and malice and, in countries such as Greece, a general collapse of the entire social economy. We see politicians obsessed over government debt sending their countries into ruin simply because they adhere to a redundant mythology. In short, we see the chaos that terrified Smith of a society in which, in his words, injustice prevails.
  • What Smith gave to humanity in his founding of economics was a great lie with which to structure our newly forming nation-states and mass societies. But it was a lie that was in many ways quite fragile. And it is this lie that we see cracking up all around us today. The question is whether we, as a species, will continue to live within this crumbling fiction or whether we can construct a different mythological system founded on principles that are a closer fit to our really existing circumstances.Almost every moral pillar of our contemporary societies – from the discipline of economics, to ideas that dominate about what constitutes good statesmanship – militates against the formation of such a new mythology. And, as psychopathology teaches us well, people are quite stubborn in their giving up of their mythologies, despite their possibly high degree of dysfunction. But given that the stakes are rather high and humans are a fairly adaptive species, we may surprise ourselves yet.
James Goodman

Occupy Wall Street's 'Political Disobedience' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Our language has not yet caught up with the political phenomenon that is emerging in Zuccotti Park and spreading across the nation, though it is clear that a political paradigm shift is taking place before our very eyes. It’s time to begin to name and in naming, to better understand this moment. So let me propose some words: “political disobedience.”Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of what could be called “political disobedience,” as opposed to civil disobedience, that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that we inherited from the Cold War.
  • Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.
  • Occupy Wall Street, which identifies itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many … political persuasions,” is politically disobedient precisely in refusing to articulate policy demands or to embrace old ideologies. Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver. Similarly, those who want to push an ideology onto these new forms of political disobedience, like Slavoj Zizek or Raymond Lotta, are missing the point of the resistance.
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  • One way to understand the emerging disobedience is to see it as a refusal to engage these sorts of  worn-out ideologies rooted in the Cold War. The key point here is that the Cold War’s ideological divide — with the Chicago Boys at one end and the Maoists at the other — merely served as a weapon in this country for the financial and political elite: the ploy, in the United States, was to demonize the chimera of a controlled economy (that of the former Soviet Union or China, for example) in order to prop up the illusion of a free market and to legitimize the fantasy of less regulation — of what was euphemistically called “deregulation.” By reinvigorating the myth of free markets, the financial and political architects of our economy over the past three plus decades — both Republicans and Democrats — were able to disguise massive redistribution toward the richest by claiming they were simply “deregulating” when all along they were actually reregulating to the benefit of their largest campaign donors.
  • This ideological fog blinded the American people to the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a colossal late-modern economy and that necessarily distribute wealth throughout society — and in this country, that quietly redistributed massive amounts of wealth to the richest 1 percent. Many of the voices at Occupy Wall Street accuse political ideology on both sides, on the side of free markets but also on the side of big government, for serving the few at the expense of the other 99 percent — for paving the way to an entrenched permissive regulatory system that “privatizes gains and socializes losses.”
  • The central point, of course, is that it takes both a big government and the illusion of free markets to achieve such massive redistribution. If you take a look at the tattered posters at Zuccotti Park, you’ll see that many are intensely anti-government and just as many stridently oppose big government.Occupy Wall Street is surely right in holding the old ideologies to account. The truth is, as I’ve argued in a book, “The Illusion of Free Markets,” and recently in Harper’s magazine, there never have been and never will be free markets. All markets are man-made, constructed, regulated and administered by often-complex mechanisms that necessarily distribute wealth — that inevitably distribute wealth — in large and small ways. Tax incentives for domestic oil production and lower capital gains rates are obvious illustrations. But there are all kinds of more minute rules and regulations surrounding our wheat pits, stock markets and economic exchanges that have significant wealth effects: limits on retail buyers flipping shares after an I.P.O., rulings allowing exchanges to cut communication to non-member dealers, fixed prices in extended after-hour trading, even the advent of options markets. The mere existence of a privately chartered organization like the Chicago Board of Trade, which required the state of Illinois to criminalize and forcibly shut down competing bucket shops, has huge redistributional wealth effects on farmers and consumers — and, of course, bankers, brokers and dealers.
  • The semantic games — the talk of deregulation rather than reregulation — would have been entertaining had it not been for their devastating effects. As the sociologist Douglas Massey minutely documents in “Categorically Unequal,” after decades of improvement, the income gap between the richest and poorest in this country has dramatically widened since the 1970s, resulting in what social scientists now refer to as U-curve of increasing inequality. Recent reports from the Census Bureau confirm this, with new evidence last month that “the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.” Today, 27 percent of African-Americans and 26 percent of Hispanics in this country — more than 1 in 4 — live in poverty; and 1 in 9 African-American men between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated.
  • On this account, the fundamental choice is no longer the ideological one we were indoctrinated to believe — between free markets and controlled economies — but rather a continuous choice between kinds of regulation and how they distribute wealth in society. There is, in the end, no “realistic alternative,” nor any “utopian project” that can avoid the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a complex late-modern economy — and that’s the point. The vast and distributive regulatory framework will neither disappear with deregulation, nor with the withering of a socialist state. What is required is constant vigilance of all the micro and macro rules that permeate our markets, our contracts, our tax codes, our banking regulations, our property laws — in sum, all the ordinary, often mundane, but frequently invisible forms of laws and regulations that are required to organize and maintain a colossal economy in the 21st-century and that constantly distribute wealth and resources.
  • In the end, if the concept of “political disobedience” accurately captures this new political paradigm, then the resistance movement needs to occupy Zuccotti Park because levels of social inequality and the number of children in poverty are intolerable. Or, to put it another way, the movement needs to resist partisan politics and worn-out ideologies because the outcomes have become simply unacceptable. The Volcker rule, debt relief for working Americans, a tax on the wealthy — those might help, but they represent no more than a few drops in the bucket of regulations that distribute and redistribute wealth and resources in this country every minute of every day. Ultimately, what matters to the politically disobedient is the kind of society we live in, not a handful of policy demands.
James Goodman

Looting after Hurricane Sandy: Disaster myths and disaster utopias explained. - Slate M... - 0 views

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    "Westerners have internalized certain value systems-capitalism, individualism-that in some ways contradict our social wiring. Disruptive events recalibrate us to a "default setting," which is "altruistic, communitarian [and] resourceful." Solnit does not seek to minimize the grief and suffering crises can cause. Yet she believes that dealing with extreme situations helps us access a satisfying depth of feeling. Perhaps that's one reason why people farther from a disaster often are more terrified by it. (Another explanation may be that onlookers can spare the emotional bandwidth for fear, while those at the epicenter simply do what they must.) But meanwhile, the disaster myths persist. We expect anarchy when an emergency hits and get confused when civilization doesn't come apart at the seams. Part of the blame lies with the media. Sociologists Kathleen Tierney, Christine Bevc, and Erica Kuligowski have outlined "reporting conventions that lead media organizations … to focus on dramatic, unusual, and exceptional behavior, which can lead audiences to believe such behavior is common and typical."* Anomaly or not, a theft caught on tape makes for more compelling viewing than endless footage of rain. What's more, they argue, news outlets narrate disasters through a "looting frame." "
James Goodman

Gabor Maté: Why We're a Culture of Addicts | Spirituality & Health Magazine - 0 views

  • Addiction, says Maté, is nothing more than an attempt to self-medicate emotional pain.
  • The only difference between the identified addict and the rest of us is a matter of degrees.
  • Maté points to a host of studies that clearly show how neural circuitry is developed in early childhood. Human babies, more than any other mammals, do most of their maturing outside the womb, which means that their environment plays a larger role in brain development than in any other species. Factor in an abusive, or  at least  stressful, childhood environment and you’ve produced impaired brain circuitry – a brain that seeks the feel-good endorphins  and stimulating dopamine that it is unable or poorly able to produce on its own. A brain that experiences the first rush of heroin as a “warm, soft hug,” as a 27-year-old sex trade worker described it to Maté.
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  • It’s the adversity that creates this impaired development, says Maté, not the genetics emphasized by the medical community.
  • And our response to addicts – criminalization, marginalization, ostracism – piles on that adversity, fueling the addictive behavior.
  • “[Prevention] needs to begin in the crib, and even before then,” Maté writes in Hungry Ghosts, “in the social recognition that nothing is more important for the future of our culture than the way children develop.”
  • What’s more, Maté, unlike many of his medical counterparts, factors into our potential for recovery – even transformation – “something else in us and about us: it is called by many names, ‘spirit’ being the most democratic and least denominational.”
  • The Illusion of choice We’d like to think that addicts have a choice, that they can just choose to stop—even if it’s hard. But Maté insists that the ability to choose is limited by the addict’s physiology and personal history.
  • “The more you’re driven by unconscious mechanisms, because of earlier defensive reaction to trauma, the less choice you actually have,” he says. “Most people have much less choice in things than we actually recognize.”
  • But, he writes, “I’ve come to see addiction not as a discrete, solid entity – a case of Either you’ve got it or you don’t got it – but as a subtle and extensive continuum.” Unless we become fully aware of the drivers of our addiction, he says, we’ll continue to live a life in which “choice” is an illusion.
  • “All addictions, whether to drugs or to behaviors such as compulsive sexual acting out, involve the same brain circuits, the same brain chemicals and evoke the same emotional dynamics,” he says. “Behavior addictions trigger substances internally. So (behavior addicts) are substance addicts.”
  • Or, as he writes in Hungry Ghosts, “Passion creates, addiction consumes.”
  • Compassion for the addict — and ourselves Responding to addiction requires us not only to care for the body and mind but also the soul, Maté says. The spiritual element of his practice is critical, he says, not only to understand the  hard-core street addict but also our own struggle.
  • “We lack compassion for the addict precisely because we are addicted ourselves in ways we don’t want to accept and because we lack self-compassion,” he says. And so we treat the addict as an “other” – this criminal, this person making poor choices – to whom we can feel superior.
  • “Compassion is understanding,” he says. “And to understand is to forgive.” We need, he says, to turn compassion into policy. “To . . . point the finger at that street-corner drug addict who’s in that position because of that early trauma is blind to say the very least,” Maté said in a 2010 talk at Reed College. “I think that if we developed a more compassionate view of addiction and a more deep understanding of the addict and if we recognized the similarities between the ostracized addict at the social periphery and the rest of society and if we did so with compassion both for them and for the rest of us we would not only have more efficient, more successful drugtreatment programs, we would also have a better society.”
James Goodman

From global warming to fluoride: Why do people deny science? - Salon.com - 0 views

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    "Sadly, following a century of intense focus on the value of science for society, we are even facing a growing and dangerous antiscience movement that appears to originate from adherence to a variety of social, political, and religious doctrines that favor alternate realities. New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter addresses this new and widespread fear of science and the consequences of this reality denial for individuals and for the planet in his 2009 book, "Denialism." He expresses concern over the fact that both political leaders and the public seem to mistrust science more than ever before. So irrational and unfounded fears about everything from childhood vaccines to genetically modified grains abound, even while dietary supplements and ―natural‖ cures with no proven value are gaining many followers. As Specter sees it, this war against science amounts to a war on progress itself, and it's occurring at a time when we actually need science more than ever to chart our future in a rational fashion."
James Goodman

How People and Animals in Isolation Die Sooner - Lindsay Abrams - The Atlantic - 0 views

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    "ingle, widowed, and divorced people have as high as twice the mortality rate of married people, which is a trend that's held true in studies across countries and time periods. Unmarried peoples' tendencies to die seems to tell us about the relative strength of social bonds, which is supported by similar trends seen among ants, bees, and even cells, described in a fascinating paper in Cornell's quantitative biology archive. "
James Goodman

Where is the Self in Treatment of Mental Disorders? | World of Psychology - 0 views

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    "Mental health professionals across all professions - psychiatry, psychology, social work, etc. - should be more aware that this loss of self identity is a very real component of some people's mental illness and subsequent treatment. It should be addressed as a regular component of mental health treatment, especially when the loss is acutely felt. Because across all of healthcare, we are quick to dehumanize patients and focus only on the treatment of symptoms. Maybe it's a way some professionals seek to keep their patients at arm's length - not to become too emotionally connected to them. But in doing so, it also sends a (perhaps unintentional) message to the patient - you are only a constellation of symptoms to me. That's all we'll focus on, that's all we'll treat. As professionals and clinicians, we can do better. We should do better to not turn someone in emotional pain into a simple diagnosis or label. If we think of Linda as simply "Oh, the bipolar woman in room 213," we've lost our humanity and our focus."
James Goodman

Chris Hedges: The Treason of the Intellectuals - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig - 0 views

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    "These liberal warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on their hands. The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told-the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren't safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again. "
James Goodman

Harold Meyerson: The party that truly believes in redistribution - The Washington Post - 0 views

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    Indeed, the United States has experienced an upward redistribution so profound that it affects far more than incomes. Whole sectors of the economy and regions of the country have been decimated by these economic changes. The descent in all manner of social indexes is most apparent among poorly educated whites. Conservative commentator Charles Murray has documented in his new book the decline in marriage rates and family stability within the white working class. And now, as the New York Times' Sabrina Tavernise has reported, that decline includes longevity as well. While other Americans' life expectancy has advanced, the life expectancy of whites without high school diplomas has declined since 1990 - by three years among men and five years among women. The market is not just redistributing income in the United States, then. It is redistributing life.
James Goodman

Human rights: The gay divide | The Economist - 0 views

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    "THERE was a teenager in Arizona in the 1970s who "could no more imagine longing to touch a woman than longing to touch a toaster". But he convinced himself that he was not gay. Longing to be "normal", he blamed his obsession with muscular men on envy of their good looks. It was not until he was 25 that he admitted the truth to himself-let alone other people. In 1996 he wrote a cover leader for The Economist in favour of same-sex marriage. He never thought it would happen during his lifetime. Yet now he is married to the man he loves and living in a Virginia suburb where few think this odd. The change in attitudes to homosexuality in many countries-not just the West but also Latin America, China and other places-is one of the wonders of the world (see article). This week America's Supreme Court gave gay marriage another big boost, by rejecting several challenges to it; most Americans already live in states where gays can wed. But five countries still execute gay people: Iran hangs them; Saudi Arabia stones them. Gay sex is illegal in 78 countries, and a few have recently passed laws that make gay life even grimmer. The gay divide is one of the world's widest (see article). What caused it? And will tolerance eventually spread? Two steps forward and one back The leap forward has been startlingly quick. In the 1950s gay sex was illegal nearly everywhere. In Britain, on the orders of a home secretary who vowed to "eradicate" it, undercover police were sent out to loiter in bars, entrap gay men and put them in jail. In China in the 1980s homosexuals were rounded up and sent to labour camps without trial. All around the world gay people lived furtively and in fear. Laws banning "sodomy" remained in some American states until 2003. Today gay sex is legal in at least 113 countries. Gay marriages or civil unions are recognised in three dozen and parts of others. In most of the West it is no longer socially acceptable to be homophobic. Gay life in C
James Goodman

Kid's Eating Problems Could Warn of Mental Issues | Psych Central News - 0 views

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    The presence of multiple mental health issues in association with an eating disorder is not a surprise. "Many factors are associated with the development and persistence of eating disorders," Meilleur said. The results of this study indicate that 22.7 percent of the children identify having been mocked or insulted for his or her appearance as a trigger event to the modification of their behaviors. "For some children, bullying can initiate or reinforce boy image preoccupations and possibly lead to a change in eating behavior." Indeed, 95 percent of the children in the study had restrictive eating behaviors, 69.4 percent were afraid of putting on weight, and 46.6 percent described themselves as "fat." "These behaviors reflect the clinical presentations we observe in adolescents and support findings that body image is a preoccupation for some children as early as elementary school," Meilleur explained. The study also proves that eating disorders are not a "girl problem" as boys in the same age group were found to be similar to girls in most cases. The one exception to the similarity between boys and girls is that social isolation was more prevalent and lasted longer among boys. "The profound similarity between boys and girls supports, in our opinion, the hypothesis that common psychological and physical factors linked, amongst other things, to the developmental period, are involved in the development of an eating disorder," Meilleur said.
James Goodman

New Trends in Eating Disorders - Eating Disorders Center - EverydayHealth.com - 0 views

  • Orthorexia: An Obsession With Healthy Food “Orthorexia is an obsession with eating healthy food — to such an extent that the person may restrict their diet very severely and limit their functioning, such as not socializing in situations where there is ‘unhealthy’ food,” says Sheela Raja, PhD, an assistant professor and clinical psychologist in the Colleges of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There has been no research into eating disorder statistics to know how widespread orthorexia is, but in general the idea of “good” and “bad” foods is relatively common in people with eating disorders. The advent of so many fad diets hasn’t helped matters either. No carbs, only raw food, macrobiotics — diets with such strict food rules can certainly lead to confusion about what really is healthy and what isn’t, and in turn can contribute to orthorexia. Warning signs can range from negative feelings about “impure” foods to trouble dealing with stress. Avoiding social situations or bringing your own food to restaurants or get-togethers can be another red flag, as can insisting that good health is totally dependent on the quality of the food you eat. It can also be more common in people who have obsessive or black-and-white thinking that a food is either all good or all bad. Orthorexia is not an official psychiatric diagnosis, given that the symptoms overlap significantly with diagnoses of other eating disorders. “No classic treatment plan is available, but I work with people to normalize food and take away magical thinking about the ‘right/perfect’ foods,” says Esther Kane, MSW, a registered clinical counselor in private practice in Courtenay, British Columbia, Canada, and author of It’s Not About the Food: A Woman’s Guide to Making Peace with Food and Our Bodies. Nutritional education and finding other ways to deal with stress and negative moods are important steps. Raja, for example, suggests participating in an activity unrelated to eating, such as going for a walk or taking a bath, when feeling stressed. Focusing on moderation is also key, as is emphasizing the idea that no food should be excluded from the diet.
James Goodman

Tendency Toward Egalitarianism May Have Helped Humans Survive - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • mong America’s top executives today, according to a study commissioned by The New York Times, the average annual salary is about $10 million and rising some 12 percent a year. At the same time, the rest of the tribe of the United States of America struggles with miserably high unemployment, stagnant wages and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Now, maybe the wealth gap is a temporary problem, and shiny new quarters will soon rain down on us all. But if you’re feeling tetchy and surly about the lavished haves when you have not a job, if you’re tempted to go out and insult a piece of corporate meat, researchers who study the nature and evolution of human social organization say they are hardly surprised.
  • Among America’s top executives today, according to a study commissioned by The New York Times, the average annual salary is about $10 million and rising some 12 percent a year. At the same time, the rest of the tribe of the United States of America struggles with miserably high unemployment, stagnant wages and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Now, maybe the wealth gap is a temporary problem, and shiny new quarters will soon rain down on us all. But if you’re feeling tetchy and surly about the lavished haves when you have not a job, if you’re tempted to go out and insult a piece of corporate meat, researchers who study the nature and evolution of human social organization say they are hardly surprised.
  • A sense of fairness is both cerebral and visceral, cortical and limbic.
James Goodman

Occupy Wall Street's Victory: It has shaken up American politics. Here's what it should... - 0 views

  • Occupy Wall Street Has Already Won
  • Occupy Wall Street has already won, perhaps not the victory most of its participants want, but a momentous victory nonetheless. It has already altered our political debate, changed the agenda, shifted the discussion in newspapers, on cable TV, and even around the water cooler. And that is wonderful.
  • And then OWS showed up. They brought something that had been in short supply: passion—the necessary ingredient that powers citizen activism. The tempered, carefully modulated, and finely nuanced statements of Beltway politicians and policy wonks do not alter the debate.
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  • Suddenly, the issues of equity, fairness, justice, income distribution, and accountability for the economic cataclysm–issues all but ignored for a generation—are front and center. We have moved beyond the one-dimensional conversation about how much and where to cut the deficit. Questions more central to the social fabric of our nation have returned to the heart of the political debate. By forcing this new discussion, OWS has made most of the other participants in our politics—who either didn’t want to have this conversation or weren’t able to make it happen—look pretty small.
  • Of course, the visceral emotions that accompany citizen activism generate not only an energy that can change politics but an incoherence that is easily mocked. OWS is not a Brookings Institution report with five carefully researched policy points and an appendix of data. It is a leaderless movement, and it can often be painfully simplistic in its economic critique, lacking in subtlety in its political strategies, and marred by fringe elements whose presence distracts and demeans. Yet, the point of OWS is not to be subtle, parsed, or nuanced. Its role is to drag politics to a different place, to provide the exuberance and energy upon which reform can take place.
  • The major social movements that have transformed our country since its founding all began as passionate grassroots activism that then radiated out. Only later do traditional politicians get involved. The history of the civil rights movement, women’s rights movement, labor movement, peace movement, environmental movement, gay rights movement, and, yes, even the Tea Party, follow this model. In every instance, visceral emotions about justice, right, and wrong ignited a movement. Precise demands and strategies followed later. So the critique of OWS as unformed and sometimes shallow may be correct, but it is also irrelevant. Just as importantly, most of those who are so critical of OWS have failed to recognize inflection points in our politics. They fail to recognize that the public is responding to OWS because it is desperate for somebody to speak with the passion, and even anger, that has filled the public since the inequities and failures of our economy have become so apparent.
  • There is much ground to cover before real reform, but as a voice challenging a self-satisfied, well-protected status quo, OWS is already powerful and successful.
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