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Other People's Suffering - NYTimes.com - 0 views

campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/...other-peoples-suffering
shared by Duncan H on 05 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • members of the upper class are more likely than others to behave unethically, to lie during negotiations, to drive illegally and to cheat when competing for a prize.“Greed is a robust determinant of unethical behavior,” the authors conclude. “Relative to lower-class individuals, individuals from upper-class backgrounds behaved more unethically in both naturalistic and laboratory settings.”
  • Our findings suggest that when a person is suffering, upper-class individuals perceive these signals less well on average, consistent with other findings documenting reduced empathic accuracy in upper-class individuals (Kraus et al., 2010). Taken together, these findings suggest that upper-class individuals may underestimate the distress and suffering in their social environments.
  • each participant was assigned to listen, face to face, from two feet away, to someone else describing real personal experiences of suffering and distress.The listeners’ responses were measured two ways, first by self-reported levels of compassion and second by electrocardiogram readings to determine the intensity of their emotional response. The participants all took a test known as the “sense of power” scale, ranking themselves on such personal strengths and weaknesses as ‘‘I can get people to listen to what I say’’ and ‘‘I can get others to do what I want,” as well as ‘‘My wishes do not carry much weight’’ and ‘‘Even if I voice them, my views have little sway,’’ which are reverse scored.The findings were noteworthy, to say the least. For “low-power” listeners, compassion levels shot up as the person describing suffering became more distressed. Exactly the opposite happened for “high-power” listeners: their compassion dropped as distress rose.
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  • Who fits the stereotype of the rich and powerful described in this research? Mitt Romney. Empathy: “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” Compassion: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” Sympathy for the disadvantaged: My wife “drives a couple of Cadillacs.” Willingness to lie in negotiations: “I was a severely conservative Republican governor.”
  • 48 percent described the Democratic Party as “weak,” compared to 28 percent who described the Republican Party that way. Conversely, 50 percent said the Republican Party is “cold hearted,” compared to 30 percent who said that was true of the Democrats.
  • This is the war that is raging throughout America. It is between conservatives, who emphasize personal responsibility and achievement, against liberals, who say the government must take from the wealthy and give to the poor. So it will be interesting this week to see if President Obama can rally the country to support his vision of a strong social compact. He has compassion on his side. Few Americans want to see their fellow citizens suffer. But the president does have that fiscal responsibility issue haunting him because the country remains in dire trouble.
  • For power holders, the world is viewed through an instrumental lens, and approach is directed toward those individuals who populate the useful parts of the landscape. Our results suggest that power not only channels its possessor’s energy toward goal completion but also targets and attempts to harness the energy of useful others. Thus, power appears to be a great facilitator of goal pursuit through a combination of intrapersonal and interpersonal processes. The nature of the power holder’s goals and interpersonal relationships ultimately determine how power is harnessed and what is accomplished in the end.
  • Republicans recognize the political usefulness of objectification, capitalizing on “compassion fatigue,” or the exhaustion of empathy, among large swathes of the electorate who are already stressed by the economic collapse of 2008, high levels of unemployment, an epidemic of foreclosures, stagnant wages and a hyper-competitive business arena.
  • . Republican debates provided further evidence of compassion fatigue when audiences cheered the record-setting use of the death penalty in Texas and applauded the prospect of a gravely ill pauper who, unable to pay medical fees, was allowed to die.Even Rick Santorum, who has been described by the National Review as holding “unstinting devotion to human dignity” and as fluent in “the struggles of the working class,” wants to slash aid to the poor. At a Feb. 21 gathering of 500 voters in Maricopa County, Ariz., Santorum brought the audience to its feet as he declared:We need to take everything from food stamps to Medicaid to the housing programs to education and training programs, we need to cut them, cap them, freeze them, send them to the states, say that there has to be a time limit and a work requirement, and be able to give them the flexibility to do those programs here at the state level.
  • President Obama has a substantial advantage this year because he does not have a primary challenger, which frees him from the need to emphasize his advocacy for the disempowered — increasing benefits or raising wages for the poor. This allows him to pick and chose the issues he wants to address.At the same time, compassion fatigue may make it easier for the Republican nominee to overcome the liabilities stemming from his own primary rhetoric, to reach beyond the core of the party to white centrist voters less openly drawn to hard-edged conservatism. With their capacity for empathy frayed by a pervasive sense of diminishing opportunity and encroaching shortfall, will these voters once again become dependable Republicans in 2012?
  • Duncan H on 05 Mar 12
     
    Do you agree with Edsall? I think he is definitely taking an anti-Republican stance, but the findings are interesting.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates's 'Letter to My Son' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...397619 race racism American dream American idea youth slavery white supremacy history culture psychology
shared by Javier E on 08 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me.
  • When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.
  • The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy
  • But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.
  • It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth
  • ou must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.
  • And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life.
  • The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.
  • I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood
  • The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.
  • To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body
  • I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies
  • here will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.
  • I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.
  • Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed
  • When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.
  • Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?
  • the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.
  • erious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped
  • this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?
  • now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.
  • “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
  • still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party
  • I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons
  • There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies
  • Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.
  • I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.
  • American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream.
  • I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
  • Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.
  • It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.
  • “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.
  • There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.
  • I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.
  • I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
  • You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have
  • I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.
  • “I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.
  • the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.
  • You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life
  • I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.
  • I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
  • I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
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Measles Cases Linked to Disneyland Rise, and Debate Over Vaccinations Intensifies - NYT... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-vaccinations-intensifies.html science denial vaccine
shared by Javier E on 22 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • This is a serious contagious disease that is preventable. The message is absolutely critical that if you are not vaccinated, you need to get vaccinated.”
  • The vaccination exemption rate among kindergarten students in California — cases in which parents said they did not want their children vaccinated for health, religious or other reasons — was 3.1 percent in the 2013-14 school year, according to the C.D.C. report. Oregon had an exemption rate of 7.1 percent, the nation’s highest, the report found. Health officials said the vaccination rate needed to be above 95 percent in all communities to prevent outbreaks.
  • Health officials said there were pockets across the state, including wealthy neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Orange Counties and enclaves in Northern California, where the exemption rate jumped into the double digits.
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  • “The problem is that there are these pockets with low vaccination rates,” said Dr. Jane Seward, the deputy director of the viral diseases division at the C.D.C. “If a case comes into a population where a lot of people are unvaccinated, that’s where you get the outbreak and where you get the spread.”
  • “It’s premature to blame the increase in reports of measles on the unvaccinated when we don’t have all the facts yet,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, the president of the National Vaccine Information Center, a group raising concerns about inoculations. “I do know this: Fifty-seven cases of measles coming out of Disneyland in a country with a population of 317 million people is not a lot of cases. We should all take a deep breath and wait to see and get more information.”
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Vaccine Critics Turn Defensive Over Measles - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...rn-defensive-over-measles.html vaccine science skepticism
shared by Javier E on 31 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • the parents at the heart of America’s anti-vaccine movement are being blamed for incubating an otherwise preventable public-health crisis.
  • officials scrambled to try to contain a wider spread of the highly contagious disease — which America declared vanquished 15 years ago, before a statistically significant number of parents started refusing to vaccinate their children.
  • The anti-vaccine movement can largely be traced to a 1998 report in a medical journal that suggested a link between vaccines and autism but was later proved fraudulent and retracted. Today, the waves of parents who shun vaccines include some who still believe in the link and some, like the Amish, who have religious objections to vaccines. Then there is a particular subculture of largely wealthy and well-educated families, many living in palmy enclaves around Los Angeles and San Francisco, who are trying to carve out “all-natural” lives for their children.
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  • “Sometimes, I feel like we’re practicing in the 1950s,” said Dr. Eric Ball, a pediatrician in southern Orange County, where some schools report that 50 to 60 percent of their kindergartners are not fully vaccinated and that 20 to 40 percent of parents have sought a personal beliefs exemption to vaccination requirements. “It’s very frustrating. It’s hard to see a kid suffer for something that’s entirely preventable.”
  • Dr. Ball said he spent many days trying to persuade parents to vaccinate their children. He tries to alleviate their concerns. He shows parents his own children’s vaccine records. But it has not worked, and lately, as worries and anger over this outbreak have spread, some families who support vaccines have said they do not want to be in the same waiting room as unvaccinated families. The clinic where Dr. Ball works has treated unvaccinated children for years, but its staff is meeting next week to discuss a ban.“Our patients are really scared,” Dr. Ball said. “Our nightmare would be for someone to show up at our door with the measles.”
  • Norm Warren, the manager of the supermarket in Kearny, Gordon’s IGA, has changed his thinking toward those who do not vaccinate their children.“Before, I thought, ‘If you think your child will become autistic, fine.’ But now they’re pushing their beliefs on everybody, and I feel differently,“ he said. “How many lives have been saved by vaccination?“
  • Members of the anti-vaccine movement said the public backlash had terrified many parents. “People are now afraid they’re going to be jailed,” said Barbara Loe Fisher, the president of the National Vaccine Information Center, a clearinghouse for resisters. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing. It’s gotten so out of hand, and it’s gotten so vicious.”
  • In San Geronimo, Calif., a mostly rural community of rolling hills and oak trees about 30 miles north of San Francisco, 40 percent of the students walking into Lagunitas Elementary School have not been inoculated against measles, according to the school’s figures. Twenty-five percent have not been vaccinated for polio. In all, the state says that 58 percent of Lagunitas kindergartners do not have up-to-date vaccine records.
  • “A lot of people here have personal beliefs that are faith based,” said John Carroll, the school superintendent, who sent a letter home to parents last week encouraging them to vaccinate their children. The faith, Mr. Carroll said, is not so much religious as it is a belief that “they raise their children in a natural, organic environment” and are suspicious of pharmaceutical companies and big business.
  • Some parents forgo shots altogether. Others split vaccine doses or stretch out their timeline, worried about somehow overwhelming their children’s immune system. Kelly McMenimen, a Lagunitas parent, said she “meditated on it a lot” before deciding not to vaccinate her son Tobias, 8, against even “deadly or deforming diseases.” She said she did not want “so many toxins” entering the slender body of a bright-eyed boy who loves math and geography.
  • Tobias has endured chickenpox and whooping cough, though Ms. McMenimen said the latter seemed more like a common cold. She considered a tetanus shot after he cut himself on a wire fence but decided against it: “He has such a strong immune system.”
  • “It’s good to explore alternatives rather than go with the panic of everyone around you,” she said. “Vaccines don’t feel right for me and my family.”
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Pepperoni Turns Partisan - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-pepperoni-turns-partisan.html political science politics parties interests discourse partisan
shared by Javier E on 08 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • If you want to know what a political party really stands for, follow the money
  • Major donors, however, generally have a very good idea of what they are buying, so tracking their spending tells you a lot.
  • what do contributions in the last election cycle say? The Democrats are, not too surprisingly, the party of Big Labor (or what’s left of it) and Big Law: unions and lawyers are the most pro-Democratic major interest groups.
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  • Republicans are the party of Big Energy and Big Food: they dominate contributions from extractive industries and agribusiness. And they are, in particular, the party of Big Pizza.
  • pizza partisanship tells you a lot about what is happening to American politics as a whole.
  • Why should pizza, of all things, be a divisive issue
  • The immediate answer is that it has been caught up in the nutrition wars
  • the pizza sector has chosen instead to take a stand for the right to add extra cheese.
  • The rhetoric of this fight is familiar. The pizza lobby portrays itself as the defender of personal choice and personal responsibility. It’s up to the consumer, so the argument goes, to decide what he or she wants to eat, and we don’t need a nanny state telling us what to do.
  • it doesn’t hold up too well once you look at what’s actually at stake in the pizza disputes.
  • Nobody is proposing a ban on pizza, or indeed any limitation on what informed adults should be allowed to eat. Instead, the fights involve things like labeling requirements — giving consumers the information to make informed choices — and the nutritional content of school lunches, that is, food decisions that aren’t made by responsible adults but are instead made on behalf of children.
  • Nutrition, where increased choice can be a bad thing, because it all too often leads to bad choices despite the best of intentions, is one of those areas — like smoking — where there’s a lot to be said for a nanny state.
  • diet isn’t purely a personal choice, either; obesity imposes large costs on the economy as a whole.
  • But you shouldn’t expect such arguments to gain much traction
  • For one thing, free-market fundamentalists don’t want to hear about qualifications to their doctrine
  • Also, with big corporations involved, the Upton Sinclair principle applies: It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it
  • nutritional partisanship taps into deeper cultural issues.
  • At one level, there is a clear correlation between lifestyles and partisan orientation: heavier states tend to vote Republican, and the G.O.P. lean is especially pronounced in what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call the “diabetes belt” of counties, mostly in the South, that suffer most from that particular health problem
  • At a still deeper level, health experts may say that we need to change how we eat, pointing to scientific evidence, but the Republican base doesn’t much like experts, science, or evidence. Debates about nutrition policy bring out a kind of venomous anger — much of it now directed at Michelle Obama, who has been championing school lunch reforms — that is all too familiar if you’ve been following the debate over climate change.
  • It is, instead, a case study in the toxic mix of big money, blind ideology, and popular prejudices that is making America ever less governable.
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Smart Buildings: Architects Turn to Brain Science | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...cts-turn-to-brain-science.html brain science architecture
shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The public middle school, which is part of a larger complex that includes Corona del Mar High School, now is attracting more students who would normally have gone to private school in this affluent Orange County district, said Principal Rebecca Gogel. “There has been a significant change in student behavior,” she said.
  • But what has gone into the design of this school goes much deeper than sheer aesthetics. Architects are now applying neuroscience to design schools, hospitals, community centers and even single-family homes.
  • meshing of architecture and brain science is starting to gain traction. Architects are studying the way the brain reacts to various environments through brain scanners and applying the findings to their designs.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The role of neuroscience in architecture is a contemporary concept that attaches scientific proof, measurement and research to the design of buildings.
  • The brain controls behavior, and genes control the design and structure of the brain. Science shows that environment can modulate the function of genes and, ultimately, the structure of the brain. So if changes in the environment change behavior, architectural design can change it too.
  • It has a direct impact on wellness issues and a direct influence on activity within that space.”
  • science has proved that natural lighting stimulates positive brain function and helps students learn. “Visual access to sky, trees and landscape stimulates brain function,”
  • The research argues that not only do we need order but our brain likes hearing stories
  • According to the book, humans are a wall-hugging species that avoids the center of open spaces. People who are outside seem more comfortable when buildings create a roomlike feel, surrounding them on several sides, Hollander said.
  • People also respond more positively when they can identify a “face” in building design — windows as the eyes, doors as the mouth and so on.
  • “Humans have a clear bias for curves over straight or sharp lines,” Hollander said. Studies have shown that curves elicit “feelings of happiness and elation, while jagged and sharp forms tend to connect to feelings of pain and sadness.”
  • because the seat of power of the American president — the Oval Office — is curved, the room may carry a psychological advantage for its occupant.
  • bilateral symmetry that humans prefer, with the desk centered on its longer axis.
  • Neuroscience shows that light triggers brain reactions far beyond vision. “It has an impact on heart rate,” she said
  • “This is a human condition that affects our well-being,” Dougherty said. “Why not take the utmost advantage of our capabilities? … Hopefully, the days of windowless classrooms to prevent vandalism and distraction are over.”
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Best, Brightest - and Saddest? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...est-brightest-and-saddest.html parenting adolescence status college standards achievement anxiety crisis
shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Between May 2009 and January 2010, five Palo Alto teenagers ended their lives by stepping in front of trains. And since October of last year, another three Palo Alto teenagers have killed themselves that way, prompting longer hours by more sentries along the tracks. The Palo Alto Weekly refers to the deaths as a “suicide contagion.”
  • the contagion has prompted an emotional debate about the kinds of pressures felt by high school students in epicenters of overachievement.
  • the situation isn’t so different in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., where a separate cluster of teen suicides in recent years forced educators and parents to re-examine the messages they give teenagers, intentionally and unintentionally, about what’s expected of them and what’s needed to get ahead in this world.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • the number of advanced-placement classes that local students feel compelled to take and the number of hospitalizations for depression rise in tandem.
  • They reflect a status consciousness that bedevils Americans at all income levels, and they underscore an economic trepidation that is sadly widespread and is seemingly intensified by the gaping divide between the haves and have-nots.
  • According to a 2013 survey by the C.D.C., 17 percent of American high school students had considered suicide in the previous year. Eight percent said they’d attempted it.
  • “There’s something about childhood itself in Palo Alto and in communities like Palo Alto that undermines the mental health and wellness of our children,
  • It reflects on the shortfalls of some modern parenting, which, in her view, can be not only overprotective but overbearing, micromanaging the lives of children, pointing them toward specific mile markers of achievement and denying them any time to flail or room to fail. They wind up simultaneously frazzled and fragile
  • “The suicides are tragic, but they are at the pointy head of the pyramid, the tippy top,” she said. “Beneath them is a larger number of kids who are really struggling and beneath them is an even larger number of kids who feel an amount of stress and pressure that they shouldn’t be made to and that’s untenable.”
  • while many Palo Alto parents are “wealthy and secure beyond imagining,” they’re consumed by fear of losing that perch or failing to bequeath it to their kids. “Maintaining and advancing insidiously high educational standards in our children is a way to soothe this anxiety,” he said
  • He recommended lightening children’s schedules, limiting the number of times that they take the SAT, lessening the message that it’s Stanford or bust.
  • “I will never be neutral on this issue,” he wrote. “The ‘Koala Dad’ is the far better parent than the ‘Tiger Mom.’ ”
  • “Want the best for your child, not for your child to be the best.”
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It's Time for a Real Code of Ethics in Teaching - Noah Berlatsky - The Atlantic - 3 views

www.theatlantic.com/...274722 ethics teaching cheating analysis education
shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • More 5inShare Email Print A defendant in the Atlanta Public Schools case turns herself in at the Fulton County Jail on April 2. (David Goldman/AP) Earlier this week at The Atlantic, Emily Richmond asked whether high-stakes testing caused the Atlanta schools cheating scandal. The answer, I would argue, is yes... just not in the way you might think. Tests don't cause unethical behavior. But they did cause the Atlanta cheating scandal, and they are doing damage to the teaching profession. The argument that tests do not cause unethical behavior is fairly straightforward, and has been articulated by a number of writers. Jonathan Chait quite correctly points out that unethical behavior occurs in virtually all professions -- and that it occurs particularly when there are clear incentives to succeed. Incentivizing any field increases the impetus to cheat. Suppose journalism worked the way teaching traditionally had. You get hired at a newspaper, and your advancement and pay are dictated almost entirely by your years on the job, with almost no chance of either becoming a star or of getting fired for incompetence. Then imagine journalists changed that and instituted the current system, where you can get really successful if your bosses like you or be fired if they don't. You could look around and see scandal after scandal -- phone hacking! Jayson Blair! NBC's exploding truck! Janet Cooke! Stephen Glass! -- that could plausibly be attributed to this frightening new world in which journalists had an incentive to cheat in order to get ahead. It holds true of any field. If Major League Baseball instituted tenure, and maybe used tee-ball rules where you can't keep score and everybody gets a chance to hit, it could stamp out steroid use. Students have been cheating on tests forever -- massive, systematic cheating, you could say. Why? Because they have an incentive to do well. Give teachers and administrators an incentive for their students to do well, and more of them will cheat. For Chait, then, teaching has just been made more like journalism or baseball; it has gone from an incentiveless occupation to one with incentives.
  • Chait refers to violations of journalistic ethics -- like the phone-hacking scandal -- and suggests they are analogous to Major-League steroid use, and that both are similar to teachers (or students) cheating on tests. But is phone hacking "cheating"
  • Phone hacking was, then, not an example of cheating. It was a violation of professional ethics. And those ethics are not arbitrarily imposed, but are intrinsic to the practice of journalism as a profession committed to public service and to truth.
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  • Behaving ethically matters, but how it matters, and what it means, depends strongly on the context in which it occurs.
  • Ethics for teachers is not, apparently, first and foremost about educating their students, or broadening their minds. Rather, ethics for teachers in our current system consists in following the rules. The implicit, linguistic signal being given is that teachers are not like journalists or doctors, committed to a profession and to the moral code needed to achieve their professional goals. Instead, they are like athletes playing games, or (as Chait says) like children taking tests.
  • Using "cheating" as an ethical lens tends to both trivialize and infantilize teacher's work
  • Professions with social respect and social capital, like doctors and lawyers, collaborate in the creation of their own standards. The assumption is that those standards are intrinsic to the profession's goals, and that, therefore, professionals themselves are best equipped to establish and monitor them. Teachers' standards, though, are imposed from outside -- as if teachers are children, or as if teaching is a game.
  • High-stakes testing, then, does leads to cheating. It does not create unethical behavior -- but it does create the particular unethical behavior of "cheating."
  • We have reached a point where we can only talk about the ethics of the profession in terms of cheating or not cheating, as if teachers' main ethical duty is to make sure that scantron bubbles get filled in correctly. Teachers, like journalists, should have a commitment to truth; like doctors, they have a duty of care. Translating those commitments and duties into a bureaucratized measure of cheating-or-not-cheating diminishes ethic
  • For teachers it is, literally, demoralizing. It severs the moral experience of teaching from the moral evaluation of teaching, which makes it almost impossible for good teachers (in all the senses of "good") to stay in the system.
  • We need better ethics for teachers -- ethics that treat them as adults and professionals, not like children playing games.
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'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia | Technol... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...iction-silicon-valley-dystopia dystopia distraction attention fb google manipulation advertising addiction psychology technology social media brain science
shared by Javier E on 06 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.
  • “It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.”
  • most concerned about the psychological effects on people who, research shows, touch, swipe or tap their phone 2,617 times a day.
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”
  • Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.
  • Without irony, Eyal finished his talk with some personal tips for resisting the lure of technology. He told his audience he uses a Chrome extension, called DF YouTube, “which scrubs out a lot of those external triggers” he writes about in his book, and recommended an app called Pocket Points that “rewards you for staying off your phone when you need to focus”.
  • “One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,” Rosenstein says. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, Pearlman and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls.
  • One morning in April this year, designers, programmers and tech entrepreneurs from across the world gathered at a conference centre on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. They had each paid up to $1,700 to learn how to manipulate people into habitual use of their products, on a course curated by conference organiser Nir Eyal.
  • Eyal, 39, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, has spent several years consulting for the tech industry, teaching techniques he developed by closely studying how the Silicon Valley giants operate.
  • “The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions,” Eyal writes. “It’s the impulse to check a message notification. It’s the pull to visit YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter for just a few minutes, only to find yourself still tapping and scrolling an hour later.” None of this is an accident, he writes. It is all “just as their designers intended”
  • He explains the subtle psychological tricks that can be used to make people develop habits, such as varying the rewards people receive to create “a craving”, or exploiting negative emotions that can act as “triggers”. “Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation,” Eyal writes.
  • The most seductive design, Harris explains, exploits the same psychological susceptibility that makes gambling so compulsive: variable rewards. When we tap those apps with red icons, we don’t know whether we’ll discover an interesting email, an avalanche of “likes”, or nothing at all. It is the possibility of disappointment that makes it so compulsive.
  • Finally, Eyal confided the lengths he goes to protect his own family. He has installed in his house an outlet timer connected to a router that cuts off access to the internet at a set time every day. “The idea is to remember that we are not powerless,” he said. “We are in control.
  • But are we? If the people who built these technologies are taking such radical steps to wean themselves free, can the rest of us reasonably be expected to exercise our free will?
  • Not according to Tristan Harris, a 33-year-old former Google employee turned vocal critic of the tech industry. “All of us are jacked into this system,” he says. “All of our minds can be hijacked. Our choices are not as free as we think they are.”
  • Harris, who has been branded “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”, insists that billions of people have little choice over whether they use these now ubiquitous technologies, and are largely unaware of the invisible ways in which a small number of people in Silicon Valley are shaping their lives.
  • “I don’t know a more urgent problem than this,” Harris says. “It’s changing our democracy, and it’s changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other.” Harris went public – giving talks, writing papers, meeting lawmakers and campaigning for reform after three years struggling to effect change inside Google’s Mountain View headquarters.
  • He explored how LinkedIn exploits a need for social reciprocity to widen its network; how YouTube and Netflix autoplay videos and next episodes, depriving users of a choice about whether or not they want to keep watching; how Snapchat created its addictive Snapstreaks feature, encouraging near-constant communication between its mostly teenage users.
  • The techniques these companies use are not always generic: they can be algorithmically tailored to each person. An internal Facebook report leaked this year, for example, revealed that the company can identify when teens feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”. Such granular information, Harris adds, is “a perfect model of what buttons you can push in a particular person”.
  • Tech companies can exploit such vulnerabilities to keep people hooked; manipulating, for example, when people receive “likes” for their posts, ensuring they arrive when an individual is likely to feel vulnerable, or in need of approval, or maybe just bored. And the very same techniques can be sold to the highest bidder. “There’s no ethics,” he says. A company paying Facebook to use its levers of persuasion could be a car business targeting tailored advertisements to different types of users who want a new vehicle. Or it could be a Moscow-based troll farm seeking to turn voters in a swing county in Wisconsin.
  • It was Rosenstein’s colleague, Leah Pearlman, then a product manager at Facebook and on the team that created the Facebook “like”, who announced the feature in a 2009 blogpost. Now 35 and an illustrator, Pearlman confirmed via email that she, too, has grown disaffected with Facebook “likes” and other addictive feedback loops. She has installed a web browser plug-in to eradicate her Facebook news feed, and hired a social media manager to monitor her Facebook page so that she doesn’t have to.
  • Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive. They were responding to the incentives of an advertising economy, experimenting with techniques that might capture people’s attention, even stumbling across highly effective design by accident.
  • It’s this that explains how the pull-to-refresh mechanism, whereby users swipe down, pause and wait to see what content appears, rapidly became one of the most addictive and ubiquitous design features in modern technology. “Each time you’re swiping down, it’s like a slot machine,” Harris says. “You don’t know what’s coming next. Sometimes it’s a beautiful photo. Sometimes it’s just an ad.”
  • The reality TV star’s campaign, he said, had heralded a watershed in which “the new, digitally supercharged dynamics of the attention economy have finally crossed a threshold and become manifest in the political realm”.
  • “Smartphones are useful tools,” he says. “But they’re addictive. Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things. When I was working on them, it was not something I was mature enough to think about. I’m not saying I’m mature now, but I’m a little bit more mature, and I regret the downsides.”
  • All of it, he says, is reward-based behaviour that activates the brain’s dopamine pathways. He sometimes finds himself clicking on the red icons beside his apps “to make them go away”, but is conflicted about the ethics of exploiting people’s psychological vulnerabilities. “It is not inherently evil to bring people back to your product,” he says. “It’s capitalism.”
  • He identifies the advent of the smartphone as a turning point, raising the stakes in an arms race for people’s attention. “Facebook and Google assert with merit that they are giving users what they want,” McNamee says. “The same can be said about tobacco companies and drug dealers.”
  • McNamee chooses his words carefully. “The people who run Facebook and Google are good people, whose well-intentioned strategies have led to horrific unintended consequences,” he says. “The problem is that there is nothing the companies can do to address the harm unless they abandon their current advertising models.”
  • But how can Google and Facebook be forced to abandon the business models that have transformed them into two of the most profitable companies on the planet?
  • McNamee believes the companies he invested in should be subjected to greater regulation, including new anti-monopoly rules. In Washington, there is growing appetite, on both sides of the political divide, to rein in Silicon Valley. But McNamee worries the behemoths he helped build may already be too big to curtail.
  • Rosenstein, the Facebook “like” co-creator, believes there may be a case for state regulation of “psychologically manipulative advertising”, saying the moral impetus is comparable to taking action against fossil fuel or tobacco companies. “If we only care about profit maximisation,” he says, “we will go rapidly into dystopia.”
  • James Williams does not believe talk of dystopia is far-fetched. The ex-Google strategist who built the metrics system for the company’s global search advertising business, he has had a front-row view of an industry he describes as the “largest, most standardised and most centralised form of attentional control in human history”.
  • It is a journey that has led him to question whether democracy can survive the new technological age.
  • He says his epiphany came a few years ago, when he noticed he was surrounded by technology that was inhibiting him from concentrating on the things he wanted to focus on. “It was that kind of individual, existential realisation: what’s going on?” he says. “Isn’t technology supposed to be doing the complete opposite of this?
  • That discomfort was compounded during a moment at work, when he glanced at one of Google’s dashboards, a multicoloured display showing how much of people’s attention the company had commandeered for advertisers. “I realised: this is literally a million people that we’ve sort of nudged or persuaded to do this thing that they weren’t going to otherwise do,” he recalls.
  • Williams and Harris left Google around the same time, and co-founded an advocacy group, Time Well Spent, that seeks to build public momentum for a change in the way big tech companies think about design. Williams finds it hard to comprehend why this issue is not “on the front page of every newspaper every day.
  • “Eighty-seven percent of people wake up and go to sleep with their smartphones,” he says. The entire world now has a new prism through which to understand politics, and Williams worries the consequences are profound.
  • g. “The attention economy incentivises the design of technologies that grab our attention,” he says. “In so doing, it privileges our impulses over our intentions.”
  • That means privileging what is sensational over what is nuanced, appealing to emotion, anger and outrage. The news media is increasingly working in service to tech companies, Williams adds, and must play by the rules of the attention economy to “sensationalise, bait and entertain in order to survive”.
  • It is not just shady or bad actors who were exploiting the internet to change public opinion. The attention economy itself is set up to promote a phenomenon like Trump, who is masterly at grabbing and retaining the attention of supporters and critics alike, often by exploiting or creating outrage.
  • All of which has left Brichter, who has put his design work on the backburner while he focuses on building a house in New Jersey, questioning his legacy. “I’ve spent many hours and weeks and months and years thinking about whether anything I’ve done has made a net positive impact on society or humanity at all,” he says. He has blocked certain websites, turned off push notifications, restricted his use of the Telegram app to message only with his wife and two close friends, and tried to wean himself off Twitter. “I still waste time on it,” he confesses, “just reading stupid news I already know about.” He charges his phone in the kitchen, plugging it in at 7pm and not touching it until the next morning.
  • He stresses these dynamics are by no means isolated to the political right: they also play a role, he believes, in the unexpected popularity of leftwing politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and the frequent outbreaks of internet outrage over issues that ignite fury among progressives.
  • All of which, Williams says, is not only distorting the way we view politics but, over time, may be changing the way we think, making us less rational and more impulsive. “We’ve habituated ourselves into a perpetual cognitive style of outrage, by internalising the dynamics of the medium,” he says.
  • It was another English science fiction writer, Aldous Huxley, who provided the more prescient observation when he warned that Orwellian-style coercion was less of a threat to democracy than the more subtle power of psychological manipulation, and “man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”.
  • If the attention economy erodes our ability to remember, to reason, to make decisions for ourselves – faculties that are essential to self-governance – what hope is there for democracy itself?
  • “The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will,” he says. “If politics is an expression of our human will, on individual and collective levels, then the attention economy is directly undermining the assumptions that democracy rests on.”
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Most Americans believe politicians' heated rhetoric can lead to violence, report finds ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ssive-rhetoric-violence-report dangerous speech language racism populism provocateur
shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • A report published by the Pew Research Center on Wednesday found that 78% of Americans believed such rhetoric from elected officials makes violence against targeted groups more likely. A similar majority, 73% of those surveyed, believed elected officials should avoid heated language because it encourages violence.
  • Among those surveyed, 55% said Trump had changed the tone and nature of political debate for the worse. Given a list of positive and negative sentiments, ranging from “hopeful” to “concerned”, a large majority said the president’s statements often or sometimes made them “concerned”, “confused” and “embarrassed”.
  • The most popular positive reaction, from 54% of those polled, was “entertained”.
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  • Recent studies have nonetheless pointed to an increase in crimes against some groups following Trump’s White House run and election victory. After years of falling, hate crimes have risen in the last three years. One analysis from the Washington Post found that counties that hosted a Trump rally in 2016 saw a 226% increase in hate crimes. Student surveys from Virginia found higher rates of bullying and teasing in areas that voted for Trump.
  • Benesch coined the term “dangerous speech” – meaning rhetoric that is used to turn one group of people violently against another – after years of studying speech used to instigate atrocities like the Holocaust.
  • “He absolutely uses the language of threat,” Benesch said. “He describes non-citizens as ‘invaders’ and as an ‘invasion’ – that is highly characteristic language of dangerous speech.
  • “It will be only when people have enough courage and love of country to call out dangerous rhetoric on their own side that we will see norms shifting in the right direction,” Benesch said. “It’s a very difficult thing to do.”
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Two L.A. sheriff's officials promoted to high ranks despite histories of serious discip... - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...discipline-20170430-story.html
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  • maxwellokolo on 01 May 17
     
    In his 27 years at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, James Tatreau Jr. has made plenty of headlines - often for the wrong reasons. As a lieutenant in Lakewood, he helped organize a contest among deputies to arrest the most people in a 24-hour period - a move that then-Sheriff Lee Baca publicly criticized.
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Trump Wants It Known: Grading 100 Days Is 'Ridiculous' (but His Were the Best) - The Ne... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...donald-trump-100-days.html new york times bias
shared by sissij on 25 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • “As with so much else, Trump is a study in inconsistency,” said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian. “One minute he says his 100 days have been the best of any president, and the next minute he decries the idea of measuring a president by the 100 days.”
  • Mr. Trump has already told supporters not to believe contrary assessments, anticipating more critical evaluations by journalists, not to mention partisan attacks by Democrats.
  • If nothing else, Mr. Trump’s first 100 days have certainly been eventful.
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  • Whether they have accomplished much is more a subject of debate.
  • Others were less weighty, like one officially naming a veterans’ health center in Butler County, Pa., the “Abie Abraham V.A. Clinic.”
  • To the extent that he is being held to a measurement he disdains, he has no one to blame but himself.
  • only one has even been introduced.
  • “It is hard to judge any of these other presidents after that, and I think all of them are cursing the idea that this got started,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of “No Ordinary Time,” a book about Roosevelt. “That’s the one thing they might all agree on, the post-F.D.R. presidents: ‘No way; this isn’t fair.’”
  • “I don’t think the first 100 days are by themselves that important,” he said. “The first year is critically important, and the first 100 days set the tone for the first year.”
  • sissij on 25 Apr 17
     
    I think there is a confirmation bias in Mr. Trump's argument. He was quoting the previous presidents to suggest that the first 100 days of presidency is not important. However, what the previous presidents meant by saying "100-days" is not a fair grading mark is because the time is too short to show anything. It's not that it is not important. I think Mr. Trump himself is not even convinced with that since he tried so hard to make his first hundred days look good. Quantity does not equal quality. --Sissi (4/25/2017)
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Businesses May Benefit From Sharing Covid Testing Resources, Study Suggests - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sting-universities-sabeti.html
shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Why It Pays to Think Outside the Box on Coronavirus Tests
  • Universities and other institutions looking to protect themselves from Covid-19 may benefit from sharing their testing resources with the wider community, a new study suggests.
  • Last year, when the National Football League decided to stage its season in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, it went all-in on testing
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Between Aug. 1 and the Super Bowl in early February, the N.F.L. administered almost one million tests to players and staff.
  • Many other organizations have sought safety in mass testing.
  • When the coronavirus closed down the country last spring, many colleges and universities sought her advice on how to safely reopen.
  • Now, a new analysis suggests that schools, businesses and other organizations that want to keep themselves safe should think beyond strictly themselves.
  • By dedicating a substantial proportion of their tests to people in the surrounding community, institutions could reduce the number of Covid-19 cases among their members by as much as 25 percent, researchers report in a new paper, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal.
  • “It’s natural in an outbreak for people to become self-serving, self-focused,”
  • “If you’ve been in enough outbreaks you just understand that testing in a box doesn’t makes sense. These things are communicable, and they’re coming in from the community.”
  • “really profound implications, especially if others can replicate it,” said David O’Connor
  • “We want to start using more sophisticated modeling and probably economic theory to inform what an optimal testing program would look like.”
  • Dr. Sabeti is an epidemic veteran, part of teams that responded to an Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 and a mumps outbreak in the Boston area a few years later.
  • The University of Illinois is testing its students, faculty and staff twice a week and has conducted more than 1.6 million tests since July.
  • At a time when testing resources were in short supply, many of these institutions were proposing intensive, expensive testing regimens focused entirely on their own members
  • ‘You’re in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,’” she recalled. “‘And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you’ll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it’s burning to the ground.’”
  • ‘You’re in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,’” she recalled. “‘And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you’ll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it’s burning to the ground.’”
  • Using real-world data from C.M.U., the researchers created a baseline scenario in which 1 percent of people at the school, and 6 percent of those in the surrounding county, were infected by the coronavirus, and the university was testing 12 percent of its members every day.
  • Under these conditions, the researchers found, if the university used all of its tests on its own members, it would have roughly 200 Covid-19 cases after 40 days
  • The researchers then tweaked the model’s parameters in various ways: What if the virus were more prevalent? What if students and staff did not report all their contacts? What if they were better about mask-wearing and social distancing? What if the university deployed more tests, or fewer?
  • Unsurprisingly, the more testing the university did, and the more information it had about its members’ close contacts, the fewer Covid-19 cases there were
  • But in virtually every scenario, sharing at least some tests with the broader community led to fewer cases than hoarding them.
  • Some universities are beginning to adopt this outlook.
  • “A virus does not respect geographic boundaries,” Dr. Pollock said. “It is ludicrous to think that you can get control of an acute infectious respiratory disease like Covid-19, in a city like Davis that hosts a very large university, without coordinated public health measures that connect both the university and the community.”
  • There are barriers to the more altruistic approach, including internal political pressure to use testing resources in house and concerns about legal liability.
  • the researchers hope that their model convinces at least some institutions to rethink their strategy, not only during this epidemic but also in future ones.
  • “An outbreak is an opportunity to buy a lot of community good will, or to burn a lot of community good will,” Dr. Sabeti said. “We could have spent an entire year building up that relationship between organizations and institutions and their communities. And we would have done all that hard work together, as opposed to everybody turning inward.”
  • anonymous on 26 Mar 21
     
    "'You're in a drought in a place with a lot of forest fires, and you have a shortage of fire alarms,'" she recalled. "'And if you run out and buy every fire alarm and install it in your own house, you'll be able to pick up a fire the moment it hits your house, but at that point it's burning to the ground.'"
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Half Of The Jury In The Chauvin Trial Is Nonwhite. That's Only Part Of The Story : Live... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...e-thats-only-part-of-the-story jury selection Minneapolis
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The jury chosen for the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with murder in the death of George Floyd, is notable because it is significantly less white than Minneapolis itself.
  • three Black men, one Black woman and two jurors who identify as multiracial.
  • 50% of the panel that will vote on Chauvin's fate will be Black or multiracial.
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  • Hennepin County, where the trial is being held, is only 17% Black or multiracial, while it is 74% white.
  • The jury's racial makeup will assuage some of the concerns that activists and others had expressed as jury selection got underway two weeks ago.
  • An insufficiently diverse jury, they believed, would undercut people's faith in the legitimacy of a trial seen as a critical moment in the racial justice movement that Floyd's killing helped reenergize last spring.
  • Two of the Black men on the jury are not African Americans but, rather, Black immigrants. During questioning, they expressed the kind of moderate views on policing and race relations
  • None of the Black jurors ultimately chosen for the panel spoke extensively about personal experiences with racism or about having had overtly negative interactions with police. Several said they had a healthy respect for law enforcement.
  • The fate of Juror 76 highlighted a tension that often exists in jury selection, especially in cases in which issues of race loom large. The experiences that come with being Black in America are often enough to get jurors struck from a case
  • That did not seem to be the case during jury selection for the Chauvin trial. Several jurors who expressed at least some support for the movement were seated on the jury — a sign of progress, Chakravarti said.
  • On one hand, that the defense would strike people with negative views of police is understandable, given Nelson's responsibility to seat a jury favorable to his client.
  • She said his fate was a reminder that the jury selection process should be reformed to ensure more African Americans have a fair shot to serve on juries."We should start," she wrote, "by recognizing that their lived experiences with racism are not justification to excuse them."
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Mexicans Travel To U.S. For COVID Vaccines As Mexico's Rollout Stumbles : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...their-countrys-rollout-stumble Mexico Covid-19 vaccine
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • less than 5% of the population has received a COVID-19 vaccine dose, the rich and well-connected have found a faster way to get their hands on one: travel north.
  • Some Mexicans with family ties or dual citizenship in the United States, or who just can afford the airfare, are heading to the U.S. to get vaccinated faster than the many months of waiting for one back home.
  • The phenomenon has sparked intense debate: between officials who believe U.S. residents should have priority and those who feel that, in a general sense, the more people vaccinated the better
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  • He said only those who have had the disease understand how he feels. He had to get his hand on a vaccine quickly. But most of Tijuana's limited supply was going to front-line hospital workers.
  • He insists that no one at the vaccination site checked whether he worked or resided in the county, the two requirements necessary to get a shot there.
  • But vaccine tourism has become a bit of a phenomenon in Mexico. It's easy to find testimonies and tips on social media and in chat groups about getting a vaccine in the U.S.
  • The Biden administration has said the United States will send Mexico more than 2 million COVID-19 vaccine doses.
  • Earlier this month, President Biden said, "We're going to start off making sure Americans are taken care of first and then we're going to help the rest of the world."
  • "In this particular case, amid a worldwide pandemic, life and health of everyone should be priority No. 1,"
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'Kid 90' and the Days When Even Wild TV Teens Had Privacy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...punky-brewster-real-world.html
shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • ‘Kid 90’ and the Days When Even Wild TV Teens Had Privacy
  • A documentary from Soleil Moon Frye, star of “Punky Brewster,” and a reunion of “The Real World” remind us that Gen X didn’t curate themselves for mass consumption.
  • Sometimes I remember the clunky devices of my youth — the boxy Polaroid cameras, the bricklike car phones, the shrill answering machines, the pagers that could be made to spell an angular, all-caps “BOOBS.”
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  • Revisiting your youth culture when your own youth has mostly fled is an exercise in estrangement and mild humiliation, like running into your therapist at Victoria’s Secret.
  • “We didn’t know what it was going to be,” the journalist and activist Kevin Powell, one of the original roommates, says in the first episode of “Homecoming.” “We were just ourselves.”
  • by agreeing to the constant presence of producers and cameras, were the harbingers of today’s culture, in which self-image is shaped in the expectation of a lens and personhood collates with brand identity.
  • Moon Frye seems to have known every other child star in Los Angeles and its outlying counties: Sara Gilbert, Emmanuel Lewis, Brian Austin Green, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Joey Lawrence, Jenny Lewis (hilarious) and at least a dozen more.
  • These were children valued less for who they were and more for the fandom and ads they could generate, the tickets they could sell
  • Today, that’s everyone with an Instagram account, potentially.
  • “Kid 90” also reminds us that until pretty recently, the dumb things teenagers wore and the dumber things they did and said didn’t have an afterlife, because there were few ways to record them and even fewer ways to disseminate those recordings.
  • I was, unconvincingly, so many people as a teenager — a rebel, a sophisticate, a drama nerd, a go-getter, a witch.
  • The comedy of adolescence is that it’s practice for adulthood. The tragedy is that adolescents practice on one another
  • I’m unutterably grateful that my own mortifications — lines like, “I’m not a feminist, I’m really more like a humanist,”
  • Moon Frye seems to have also struggled with her image and with how the industry treated her when her body began to diverge from Punky’s
  • In an agonizing section of the documentary, she talks about going through puberty, developing breasts and being seen, at 13 and 14 years old, only for bimbo-esque roles.
  • Peers called her Punky Boobster.
  • “It’s hard when you’ve got boobs and you can’t work in this business,”
  • What if the business is the problem and not children’s bodies?
  • She wanted serious roles, so at 15, she had breast reduction surgery.
  • A crucial aspect of adolescence is performance
  • I could try on a persona for size and then return it, tags on
  • There was no social media then and no one wanted me on any reality series, so I never had to curate a self before I had one.
  • What would I have done for likes? What would that have made me?
  • Like Moon Frye and a lot of girls with big feelings and poetic inclinations, I kept diaries as a teenager. I’ve never gone back and read them. Why? I’m afraid that I might be embarrassed by my younger self or that she might be embarrassed by boring, wine-mom me
  • But I hope we’d get along. And then we could take a kiss-face selfie together, filter it, Facetune it, post it with some cute caption and watch the little hearts roll in.
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Misogyny Fuels Violence Against Women. Should It Be a Hate Crime? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-against-women-hate-crime.html
shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Misogyny Fuels Violence Against Women. Should It Be a Hate Crime?
  • Experts say the everyday harassment women have learned to put up with — the catcalling and lewd gestures — connects directly with more serious abuses.
  • “Men who kill women do not suddenly kill women, they work up to killing women.”
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  • Sarah Everard in London. Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan and Daoyou Feng in Atlanta.
  • Eight women, two continents apart, killed in the space of two weeks. The suspects in both cases are men.
  • London, Ms. Everard disappeared while walking home from a friend’s house, and was found dead a week later. A police officer was charged with kidnapping and murdering her.
  • In Atlanta, a gunman stormed three massage parlors and shot and killed eight people — seven of them women, six of them Asian — raising speculation that the attack was racially motivated
  • In the days after Ms. Everard’s body was found and protests calling for deeper social change grew across the United Kingdom
  • the British government announced an experimental pilot program (though there is no fixed start date yet) that would categorize cases of gender-based violence and harassment motivated by misogyny as hate crimes.
  • “Across the country, women everywhere are looking to us not just to express sympathy with their concerns, but to act,”
  • “Stop telling them to stay at home and be careful, and start finding those responsible for the violence.”
  • In Atlanta, the arrested suspect told the police he had a “sexual addiction,” according to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, prompting some activists to call for him to be charged with a hate crime there, too.
  • “What can’t be forgotten is the hate crime statute says ‘because of gender’ as well,”
  • “The angle of misogyny has to be looked at.”
  • Do ‘sweat the small stuff’
  • As women around the world watched the two events unfold, they started sharing their own stories on social media of having been in similar situations that had the potential to escalate and turn similarly violent.
  • Women spoke of all of the things that they — like Ms. Everard — did “right,” including walking on well-lit streets, and talking on the phone or clutching their keys in their pockets while doing so — and described how they still ended up in dangerous situations.
  • Asian women spoke of all of the ways in which sexism and racism coalesce to expose them to a unique form of harassment that can lead to violence and abuse.
  • Their stories confirm that violence against women isn’t an aberration, but a “global public health” crisis of “epidemic proportions,”
  • In the United States, one online survey in 2018 found that 81 percent of women had experienced some kind of sexual harassment during their lifetimes. In the United Kingdom, 97 percent of women aged 18 to 24 said they had been sexually harassed, according to UN Women UK.
  • These numbers are all from before the coronavirus pandemic; with the onset of the health crisis, domestic abuse surged and public spaces became eerily empty, leaving women feeling increasingly worried about their safety.
  • Violence against women is consistently underreported because women are scared of retaliation for speaking out or they fear the stigma associated with sexual violence,
  • UN Women’s initiative to end gender-based violence.
  • “We’re not joining the dots, nobody is making connections,
  • “There is a big picture here that we are just repeatedly missing. There are connections between the normalized daily behaviors that we brush off and the more serious abuses.”
  • a woman recalls that when she was in school, at age 13 or 14, a few girls complained to a teacher that the boys in their class had been groping them and the teacher said that they were “being oversensitive.
  • In another example, a woman recalls waiting at a bus stop when a man walked up to her and grabbed her bottom but everyone around her who had witnessed the incident remained silent.
  • a woman recalls how a man sat directly opposite her on the train and touched himself and then got off the train on the next stop, as if nothing had happened.
  • There is plenty of evidence to suggest that misogyny and gender-based violence are also correlated with broader threats
  • a spike in gender-based violence — particularly domestic violence — correlates with “rising levels of insecurity in society more broadly.”
  • A sudden disappearance of girls from schools, for example, could point to a rise of fundamentalist views
  • “If only we were to listen to women and pay attention to the misogyny and aggression and violence that they deal with on a daily basis.”
  • As pervasive as sexism, misogyny and gender-based violence are, none are inevitable and they can be countered
  • “The term ‘violence against women’ is a passive construction — there’s no active agent, it’s a bad thing that happens to women,” he explained, but it’s as if “nobody’s doing it to them.”
  • “shifts the accountability off of men and the culture that produces them and puts it onto women.”
  • The second step is recognizing that male aggression against women is a manifestation of a broader systemic problem. “There’s this impulse to pathologize the individual perpetrators — that somehow the individual perpetrator is some monster who just kind of crawled out of the swamp,
  • “But if you accept the concept that it’s systemic, then there are policy implications and political implications and introspection that can be uncomfortable.
  • “And how that message plays in the community, how you talk about it, how you have police understand it.”
  • “Making misogyny a crime is like making racism a crime — it’s unfortunate, it’s ugly and we wish people wouldn’t do it, but you can’t punish somebody for saying something,” he said.
  • In other words, they’d have to show that the man assaulted her because she’s a woman, which is a tough standard to meet.
  • In the United States, a crime motivated by gender bias is considered a hate crime at the federal level and in 35 states.
  • Reporting hate crimes also requires a police force that is trained to appropriately respond to those complaints.
  • But that would only broaden the powers of law enforcement, which several women’s rights groups argue wouldn’t do much to prompt deeper cultural change.
  • . Many still felt, according to the survey, that incidents like name calling or groping seemed too normal for the police to take seriously.
  • “So what’s the point of me going to the police station and sitting there for two hours with a policeman who probably just thinks, ‘Why are you wasting my time?’”
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Farmers Are Feeling The Pain As Drought Spreads In The Northwest : NPR - 2 views

www.npr.org/...ought-spreads-in-the-northwest drought midwest wildfires
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Nicole Berg's stunted wheat field is so short and sparse she doesn't think the combine can even reach the wheat without, as she puts it, eating rocks.
  • Northwest farmers like Berg, and ranchers who depend on rain, are expecting what one farmer called a "somber harvest" this year.
  • Little moisture since February in wide swaths of the region is to blame. And drought is deepening across the West, with federal drought maps showing massive and growing areas of red.
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  • She says with all the Western wildfires in recent years, the wild grass and forage seeds have become expensive.
  • The region is parched from near the Canadian border clear to the edge of Nevada, with triple digit temps on the way making it worse.
  • Earlier this year, Oregon declared drought zones for eight counties, and six more have requested it since. Now the drought is rapidly expanding into usually cooler and wetter western Oregon, according to Ryan Andrews, a hydrologist for the state's Water Resources Department.
  • Jeff Marti, a drought expert for Washington's Department of Ecology, says it hasn't been this dry since the 1920s.
  • "It's the story of the irrigation haves and the have nots," he says. "Meaning those folks who get their water from rivers or storage, are probably going to be fine for their irrigation needs. But the dryland users and the folks that have cattle that depend on forage on the rangelands may be more challenged."
  • He says it's hard to lose animals and bloodlines that he's worked so hard to build up. He figures it could take him up to a decade to build his herd back up without going into debt.
  • Most ranchers say they don't have time to dwell on the trucked-off cattle or lost crops. They're busy applying for federal disaster aid. And they're also keeping an eye out for wildfires that are always top-of-mind in the dry, hot summer, but expected to be worse because of this year's terrible drought.
  • rhysrademaker22 on 07 Jun 21
     
    Farmers a dependent on Rain fall for the soil and for the crops and with this shortage especially in the mid-west it's hard for the farmers to make money.
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Pandemic caused 'staggering' economic, human impact in developing counties, research sa... - 1 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...210205150150.htm
shared by caelengrubb on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year led to a devastating loss of jobs and income across the global south, threatening hundreds of millions of people with hunger and lost savings and raising an array of risks for children,
  • , in the journal Science Advances, found "staggering" income losses after the pandemic emerged last year, with a median 70% of households across nine countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America reporting financial losses.
  • By April last year, roughly 50% or more of those surveyed in several countries were forced to eat smaller meals or skip meals altogether, a number that reached 87% for rural households in the West African country of Sierra Leone.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • In the early months of the pandemic, the economic downturn in low- and middle-income countries was almost certainly worse than any other recent global economic crisis that we know of, whether the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the Great Recession that started in 2008, or the more recent Ebola crisis,
  • The pandemic has produced some hopeful innovations, including a partnership between the government of Togo in West Africa and UC Berkeley's Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) on a system to provide relief payments via digital networks.
  • The new study -- the first of its kind globally -- reports that after two decades of growth in many low- and middle-income countries, the economic crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic threatens profound long-term impact: Reduced childhood nutrition could have health consequences later in life.
  • The study was launched in spring 2020, as China, Europe and the U.S. led global efforts to check spread of the virus through ambitious lockdowns of business, schools and transit. Three independent research teams, including CEGA, joined to conduct surveys in the countries where they already worked.
  • "COVID-19 and its economic shock present a stark threat to residents of low- and middle-income countries -- where most of the world's population resides -- which lack the social safety nets that exist in rich countries,
  • Reports early in the pandemic suggested that developing countries might be less vulnerable because their populations are so much younger than those in Europe and North America.
  • In Colombia, 87% of respondents nationwide reported lost income in the early phase of the pandemic. Such losses were reported by more than 80% of people nationwide in Rwanda and Ghana.
  • In the Philippines, 77% of respondents nationwide said they faced difficulty purchasing food because stores were closed, transport was shut down or food supplies were inadequate. Similar reports came from 68% of Colombians and 64% of respondents in Sierra Leone; rates were similar for some communities within other countries.
  • Food insecurity rose sharply.
  • : In Bangladesh, 69% of landless agricultural households reported that they were forced to eat less, along with 48% of households in rural Kenya
  • Between April and early July 2020, they connected with 30,000 households, including over 100,000 people, in nine countries with a combined population of 500 million: Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda and Sierra Leone in Africa; Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines in Asia; and Colombia in South America. The surveys were conducted by telephone.
  • The evidence we've collected shows dire economic consequences ... which, if left unchecked, could thrust millions of vulnerable households into poverty."
  • In North America and Europe, nations may be struggling with vaccination plans, but vaccines have barely arrived in most low-income countries, he said
  • If we can spread the wealth in terms of pandemic relief assistance and vaccine distribution, we're all going to get out of this hole faster."
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