Group items tagged

Some of the worst leadership decisions of our time can be traced to escalation of commitment. Many people lost their lives because American presidents pursued a futile war in Vietnam — and continued searching for weapons of mass destruction that weren’t in Iraq.

Escalation of commitment helps to explain why leaders are often so reluctant to loosen their grip on power. Losing a high-status position can make them feel as if they’re losing their place in the world. It leaves them with bruised egos and wounded pride.

we can’t know for sure which decisions will turn out to be good. But decades of research led by the organizational psychologist Barry Staw have identified a few conditions that make people especially likely to persist on ill-fated paths.

Escalation is likely when people are directly responsible for and publicly attached to a decision, when it has been a long journey and the end is in sight, and when they have reasons to be confident that they can succeed.

President Biden’s current situation checks all those boxes

the people closest to a leader are precisely the ones who are most susceptible to confirmation bias. They’re too personally invested in his success and too likely to dismiss warning signs.

What Mr. Biden needs is not a support network but a challenge network — people who have the will to put the country’s interests ahead of his and the skill to coldly assess his chances.

As violence continues to escalate, so too do fears that armed groups who oppose the military coup are positioning themselves to join the fray.

In a statement on Twitter, the U.S. Ambassador to Myanmar, Thomas L. Vajda, denounced what he described as "horrifying" bloodshed and called for "an immediate end to the violence and the restoration of the democratically elected government." "These are not the actions of a professional military or police force," Vajda said. "Myanmar's people have spoken clearly: they do not want to live under military rule."

This 76th Myanmar armed forces day will stay engraved as a day of terror and dishonour," wrote the bloc's delegation to the country.

"A failed state in Myanmar has the potential to draw in all the big powers - including the US, China, India, Russia, and Japan - in a way that could lead to a serious international crisis," he wrote on Twitter.

I discovered that thoughtful progressives and thoughtful conservatives each suffered from different, deep fears about our political future. Progressives feared minoritarian rule. Conservatives feared majoritarian domination. Ending the filibuster, perversely enough, makes both fears more real.

The Republican Party has won exactly one popular vote for president since 1988, George W. Bush’s narrow 2.4 percent edge over John Kerry in 2004. Yet it won three presidential elections in that span of time

Republicans not only have a present electoral college advantage over Democrats, they also have inherent advantages in both the House and the Senate.

Do away with the filibuster, and it’s entirely possible that the next Republican government could enjoy immense legislative power without a majority of the popular vote. In fact, they could lose voters by margins numbering in the millions, yet still exercise decisive control over the government.

The Democratic Party is seeking to pass laws that would introduce dramatic changes in American elections, transform free speech doctrine, and potentially limit religious liberty.

The GOP, for example, is currently in the grips of a Trumpist base that prioritizes angry opposition over compromise. The party largely lacks a positive agenda, so (with some notable exceptions) its priority is clear: No compromise, even when compromise might be prudent. Stop the Democrats. Some Republicans have gone further, descending into a fantasy world of dark conspiracies.

Yes, through decentralization, de-escalation, and strategic moderation.

That means most Americans live in jurisdictions where, for example, election rules, civil rights laws, gun laws, and a wide variety of economic and social policies are within their partisan control.

Gridlock in Washington does not have to mean gridlock in government,

Research demonstrates that a majority of Americans are exhausted by partisan politics. Motivated minorities drive most American polarization.

A combination of redistricting reform and voting reforms like ranked-choice voting can limit the powers of partisan extremists. Ranked-choice voting—which allows voters to list candidates in order of preference—most notably can reduce the chances of highly-partisan pluralities dominating political primaries.

The answer to polarization and gridlock is not partisan escalation. Ending the filibuster would only ramp up partisan acrimony and increase the level of fear and anxiety around American elections. There are better paths through American division. We should try those before we enable drastic measures like majoritarian dominance or minoritarian control.

What Ministry and other Robinson books do is make us slow down the apocalyptic highlight reel, letting the story play in human time for years, decades, centuries.

he wants leftists to set aside their differences, and put a “time stamp on [their] political view” that recognizes how urgent things are. Looking back from 2050 leaves little room for abstract idealism. Progressives need to form “a united front,” he told me. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation; species are going extinct and biomes are dying. The catastrophes are here and now, so we need to make political coalitions.”

he does want leftists – and everyone else – to take the climate emergency more seriously. He thinks every big decision, every technological option, every political opportunity, warrants climate-oriented scientific scrutiny. Global justice demands nothing less.

He wants to legitimize geoengineering, even in forms as radical as blasting limestone dust into the atmosphere for a few years to temporarily dim the heat of the sun

Robinson believes that once progressives internalize the insight that the economy is a social construct just like anything else, they can determine – based on the contemporary balance of political forces, ecological needs, and available tools – the most efficient methods for bringing carbon and capital into closer alignment.

We live in a world where capitalist states and giant companies largely control science.

Yes, we need to consider technologies with an open mind. That includes a frank assessment of how the interests of the powerful will shape how technologies develop

Robinson’s imagined future suggests a short-term solution that fits his dreams of a democratic, scientific politics: planning, of both the economy and planet.

it’s borrowed from Robinson’s reading of ecological economics. That field’s premise is that the economy is embedded in nature – that its fundamental rules aren’t supply and demand, but the laws of physics, chemistry, biology.

The upshot of Robinson’s science fiction is understanding that grand ecologies and human economies are always interdependent.

Robinson seems to be urging all of us to treat every possible technological intervention – from expanding nuclear energy, to pumping meltwater out from under glaciers, to dumping iron filings in the ocean – from a strictly scientific perspective: reject dogma, evaluate the evidence, ignore the profit motive.

Robinson’s elegant solution, as rendered in Ministry, is carbon quantitative easing. The idea is that central banks invent a new currency; to earn the carbon coins, institutions must show that they’re sucking excess carbon down from the sky. In his novel, this happens thanks to a series of meetings between United Nations technocrats and central bankers. But the technocrats only win the arguments because there’s enough rage, protest and organizing in the streets to force the bankers’ hand.

Seen from Mars, then, the problem of 21st-century climate economics is to sync public and private systems of capital with the ecological system of carbon.

Success will snowball; we’ll democratically plan more and more of the eco-economy.

Robinson thus gets that climate politics are fundamentally the politics of investment – extremely big investments. As he put it to me, carbon quantitative easing isn’t the “silver bullet solution,” just one of several green investment mechanisms we need to experiment with.

Robinson shares the great anarchist dream. “Everybody on the planet has an equal amount of power, and comfort, and wealth,” he said. “It’s an obvious goal” but there’s no shortcut.

In his political economy, like his imagined settling of Mars, Robinson tries to think like a bench scientist – an experimentalist, wary of unifying theories, eager for many groups to try many things.

there’s something liberating about Robinson’s commitment to the scientific method: reasonable people can shed their prejudices, consider all the options and act strategically.

The years ahead will be brutal. In Ministry, tens of millions of people die in disasters – and that’s in a scenario that Robinson portrays as relatively optimistic

when things get that bad, people take up arms. In Ministry’s imagined future, the rise of weaponized drones allows shadowy environmentalists to attack and kill fossil capitalists. Many – including myself – have used the phrase “eco-terrorism” to describe that violence. Robinson pushed back when we talked. “What if you call that resistance to capitalism realism?” he asked. “What if you call that, well, ‘Freedom fighters’?”

Robinson insists that he doesn’t condone the violence depicted in his book; he simply can’t imagine a realistic account of 21st century climate politics in which it doesn’t occur.

Malm writes that it’s shocking how little political violence there has been around climate change so far, given how brutally the harms will be felt in communities of color, especially in the global south, who bear no responsibility for the cataclysm, and where political violence has been historically effective in anticolonial struggles.

In Ministry, there’s a lot of violence, but mostly off-stage. We see enough to appreciate Robinson’s consistent vision of most people as basically thoughtful: the armed struggle is vicious, but its leaders are reasonable, strategic.

the implications are straightforward: there will be escalating violence, escalating state repression and increasing political instability. We must plan for that too.

maybe that’s the tension that is Ministry’s greatest lesson for climate politics today. No document that could win consensus at a UN climate summit will be anywhere near enough to prevent catastrophic warming. We can only keep up with history, and clearly see what needs to be done, by tearing our minds out of the present and imagining more radical future vantage points

If millions of people around the world can do that, in an increasingly violent era of climate disasters, those people could generate enough good projects to add up to something like a rational plan – and buy us enough time to stabilize the climate, while wresting power from the 1%.

Robinson’s optimistic view is that human nature is fundamentally thoughtful, and that it will save us – that the social process of arguing and politicking, with minds as open as we can manage, is a project older than capitalism, and one that will eventually outlive it

It’s a perspective worth thinking about – so long as we’re also organizing.

Daniel Aldana Cohen is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative. He is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal

What Arendt theorized is that a conscience is the byproduct of the process of thinking -- that thinking itself enables the power of judgment, to discern "right from wrong, beautiful from ugly."

"Thinking," she wrote, "always deals with objects that are absent, removed from direct sense perception." Once you are thinking about something, it is no longer the object itself, but the object in your mind. In that sense, thinking somehow vanquishes distance, forcing you, the thinker, to come into contact with the thing (or person) you are thinking about. And, perhaps, through that, a natural consequence is empathy, even just a drop of it.

Because in truth, there are no sentences that can justify the behavior of a troll, or that can explain it and make it make sense. The only response that demonstrates some closing of the gap between troll and trolled, that shows that the pain one has caused has finally entered one's thoughts, is an emotional reaction, one that says: I get it. I'm human like you.

While she says her parents are not overbearing, she relishes their praise for performing well. “Hearing my parents talk about me in a positive way, or hearing other parents talk about their kids doing well in academics or extracurriculars, that’s where I got some of the expectations for myself,” she said. “It was like self-fulfillment: I’d feel fulfilled and happy when other people were happy with what I’m doing, or expectations they have are met.”

Getting a B can cause some students to fall apart, she said. “What you and I would call disappointments in life, to them feel like big failures.”

a shift in how some young adults cope with challenges. “A small setback used to mean disappointment, or having that feeling of needing to try harder next time,” he said. Now? “For some students, a mistake has incredible meaning.”

The existential question “Why am I here?” is usually followed by the equally confounding “How am I doing?” In 1954, the social psychologist Leon Festinger put forward the social comparison theory, which posits that we try to determine our worth based on how we stack up against others.

In the era of social media, such comparisons take place on a screen with carefully curated depictions that don’t provide the full picture. Mobile devices escalate the comparisons from occasional to nearly constant.

When students remark during a counseling session that everyone else on campus looks happy, he tells them: “I walk around and think, ‘That one’s gone to the hospital. That person has an eating disorder. That student just went on antidepressants.’ As a therapist, I know that nobody is as happy or as grown-up as they seem on the outside.”

Madison Holleran’s suicide provided what might be the ultimate contrast between a shiny Instagram feed and interior darkness. Ms. Holleran posted images that show her smiling, dappled in sunshine or kicking back at a party. But according to her older sister, Ashley, Madison judged her social life as inferior to what she saw in the online posts of her high school friends

These cultural dynamics of perfectionism and overindulgence have now combined to create adolescents who are ultra-focused on success but don’t know how to fail.

Julie Lythcott-Haims watched the collision of these two social forces up close. In meetings with students, she would ask what she considered simple questions and they would become paralyzed, unable to express their desires and often discovering midconversation that they were on a path that they didn’t even like.

“They could say what they’d accomplished, but they couldn’t necessarily say who they were,”

She was also troubled by the growing number of parents who not only stayed in near-constant cellphone contact with their offspring but also showed up to help them enroll in classes, contacted professors and met with advisers (illustrating the progression from helicopter to lawn mower parents, who go beyond hovering to clear obstacles out of their child’s way). But what she found most disconcerting was that students, instead of being embarrassed, felt grateful. Penn researchers studying friendship have found that students’ best friends aren’t classmates or romantic partners, but parents.

Eventually she came to view her students’ lack of self-awareness, inability to make choices and difficulty coping with setbacks as a form of “existential impotence,” a direct result of a well-meaning but misguided approach to parenting that focuses too heavily on external measures of character.

“The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self.” In the book, published in 1979 and translated into 30 languages, Ms. Miller documents how some especially intelligent and sensitive children can become so attuned to parents’ expectations that they do whatever it takes to fulfill those expectations — at the expense of their own feelings and needs. This can lead to emotional emptiness and isolation

“In what is described as depression and experienced as emptiness, futility, fear of impoverishment, and loneliness,” she wrote, “can usually be recognized as the tragic loss of the self in childhood.”

I fear we’re facing a crisis in which a chunk of working-class America risks being calcified into an underclass, marked by drugs, despair, family decline, high incarceration rates and a diminishing role of jobs and education as escalators of upward mobility. We need a national conversation about these dimensions of poverty, and maybe Murray can help trigger it. I fear that liberals are too quick to think of inequality as basically about taxes. Yes, our tax system is a disgrace, but poverty is so much deeper and more complex than that.

to blame liberal social policies for the pathologies he examines. Yes, I’ve seen disability programs encourage some people to drop out of the labor force. But there were far greater forces at work, such as the decline in good union jobs.

Eighty percent of the people in my high school cohort dropped out or didn’t pursue college because it used to be possible to earn a solid living at the steel mill, the glove factory or sawmill. That’s what their parents had done. But the glove factory closed, working-class jobs collapsed and unskilled laborers found themselves competing with immigrants. There aren’t ideal solutions, but some evidence suggests that we need more social policy, not less. Early childhood education can support kids being raised by struggling single parents. Treating drug offenders is far cheaper than incarcerating them. A new study finds that a jobs program for newly released prison inmates left them 22 percent less likely to be convicted of another crime. This initiative, by the Center for Employment Opportunities, more than paid for itself: each $1 brought up to $3.85 in benefits.

Essentially, the “generalized friendship paradox” applies to all interpersonal networks, regardless of whether they’re set in real life or online.

Whenever we interact with other people, we glimpse lives far more glamorous than our own.

the men had “decided to find out which of them is a bigger fan of this philosopher, and a tempestuous argument escalated into a fistfight.” 

If they had stuck with Kant's philosophy of relying on reason over emotion, Kant's biggest fans might never have gotten so wound up in the first place.

Anxiety has always played a role in the developmental drama of a student’s life, but now more students experience anxiety so intense and overwhelming that they are seeking professional counseling.

Because of escalating pressures during high school, he and other experts say, students arrive at college preloaded with stress.

Studies have repeatedly emphasized the nexus between mental health and academic success.

the consensus among therapists is that treating anxiety has become an enormous challenge for campus mental health centers.

More students are seeking help partly because the stigma around mental health issues is lessening

Because of escalating pressures during high school, he and other experts say, students arrive at college preloaded with stress. Accustomed to extreme parental oversight, many seem unable to steer themselves. And with parents so accessible, students have had less incentive to develop life skills.

Social media is a gnawing, roiling constant. As students see posts about everyone else’s fabulous experiences, the inevitable comparisons erode their self-esteem. The popular term is “FOMO” — fear of missing out.

Anxiety is an umbrella term for several disorders, including social anxiety disorder and agoraphobia. It can accompany many other diagnoses, such as depression, and it can be persistent and incapacitating.

Students who suffer from this acute manifestation can feel their very real struggles are shrugged off, because anxiety has become so ubiquitous, almost a cliché, on campus.

More often, anxiety is mild, intermittent or temporary, the manifestation of a student in the grip of a normal developmental issue — learning time management, for example, or how to handle rejection from a sorority.

Mild anxiety is often treatable with early, modest interventions. But to care for rising numbers of severely troubled students, many counseling centers have moved to triage protocols.

at Penn State, who have tracked campus counseling centers nationwide for six years, have documented a trend that other studies have noted: Students are arriving with ever more severe mental-health issues

Half of clients at mental health centers in their most recent report had already had some form of counseling before college. One-third have taken psychiatric medication. One quarter have self-injured.

What’s happening in Ferguson is the result of several recent historical factors and deeply entrenched racial attitudes, as well as a breakdown in participatory democracy.

In Ferguson, the American public has awakened to images of local police, fully decked out in surplus military gear from our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who are deploying all that in accordance with a now widespread “broken windows” policy, which was established on the hypothesis that if small crimes and misdemeanors are checked in certain neighborhoods, more serious crimes will be deterred. But this policy quickly intersected with police racial profiling already in existence to result in what has recently become evident as a propensity to shoot first.

How does this “broken windows” policy relate to the tragic deaths of young black men/boys? N.Z.:People are now stopped by the police for suspicion of misdemeanor offenses and those encounters quickly escalate.

Young black men are the convenient target of choice in the tragic intersection of the broken windows policy, the domestic effects of the war on terror and police racial profiling.

Why do you think that young black men are disproportionately targeted? N.Z.: Exactly why unarmed young black men are the target of choice, as opposed to unarmed young white women, or unarmed old black women, or even unarmed middle-aged college professors, is an expression of a long American tradition of suspicion and terrorization of members of those groups who have the lowest status in our society and have suffered the most extreme forms of oppression, for centuries.

Police in the United States are mostly white and mostly male. Some confuse their work roles with their own characters. As young males, they naturally pick out other young male opponents. They have to win, because they are the law, and they have the moral charge of protecting.

So young black males, who have less status than they do, and are already more likely to be imprisoned than young white males, are natural suspects.

Besides the police, a large segment of the white American public believes they are in danger from blacks, especially young black men, who they think want to rape young white women. This is an old piece of American mythology that has been invoked to justify crimes against black men, going back to lynching. The perceived danger of blacks becomes very intense when blacks are harmed.

The term “white privilege” is misleading. A privilege is special treatment that goes beyond a right. It’s not so much that being white confers privilege but that not being white means being without rights in many cases. Not fearing that the police will kill your child for no reason isn’t a privilege. It’s a right. 

that is what “white privilege” is meant to convey, that whites don’t have many of the worries nonwhites, especially blacks, do.

Other examples of white privilege include all of the ways that whites are unlikely to end up in prison for some of the same things blacks do, not having to worry about skin-color bias, not having to worry about being pulled over by the police while driving or stopped and frisked while walking in predominantly white neighborhoods, having more family wealth because your parents and other forebears were not subject to Jim Crow and slavery.

Probably all of the ways in which whites are better off than blacks in our society are forms of white privilege.

Over half a century later, it hasn’t changed much in the United States. Black people are still imagined to have a hyper-physicality in sports, entertainment, crime, sex, politics, and on the street. Black people are not seen as people with hearts and minds and hopes and skills but as cyphers that can stand in for anything whites themselves don’t want to be or think they can’t be.

race is through and through a social construct, previously constructed by science, now by society, including its most extreme victims. But, we cannot abandon race, because people would still discriminate and there would be no nonwhite identities from which to resist. Also, many people just don’t want to abandon race and they have a fundamental right to their beliefs. So race remains with us as something that needs to be put right.

people in such circumstances would vote for political representatives on all levels of government who would be their advocates.

It’s too soon to tell, but “Don’t Shoot” could become a real political movement — or it could peter out as the morally outraged self-expression of the moment, like Occupy Wall Street.

But the value of money pales in contrast to the tragedy this country is now forced to deal with. A tragedy is the result of a mistake, of an error in judgment that is based on habit and character, which brings ruin

People are now stopped by the police for suspicion of misdemeanor offenses and those encounters quickly escalate. The death of Michael Brown, like the death of Trayvon Martin before him and the death of Oscar Grant before him, may be but the tip of an iceberg.

Exactly why unarmed young black men are the target of choice, as opposed to unarmed young white women, or unarmed old black women, or even unarmed middle-aged college professors, is an expression of a long American tradition of suspicion and terrorization of members of those groups who have the lowest status in our societ

Some colleagues, including people of color, immigrants and those without tenure, found it impossible to work under these conditions. The signs intimidated faculty into silence, just as intended, and these silenced professors’ lectures were quietly replaced by talks from people willing and able to carry on teaching in the face of these demonstrations.

I think obscuring these acts of silencing was a mistake that resulted in an escalation of the protesters’ tactics.

This academic year, the first lecture was to be a panel introduction of the course: Along with two colleagues, I was going to offer my thoughts on the course, the study of the humanities and the importance of students’ knowing the history of the education they were beginning.

We introduced ourselves and took our seats. But as we were about to begin, the protesters seized our microphones, stood in front of us and shut down the lecture.

Big Tech is easily associated with West Coast liberalism and Democratic politics, making it a fertile target for the right. And operational opacity at Facebook, Google and Twitter, which are reluctant to reveal details about their algorithms and internal policies, can leave them vulnerable, too.

“There’s not even a real basis to establish objective research about what’s happening on Facebook, because it’s closed.”

And former President Barack Obama said at an off-the-record conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last month that he worried Americans were living in “entirely different realities” and that large tech companies like Facebook were “not just an invisible platform, they’re shaping our culture in powerful ways.” The contents of the speech were published by Reason magazine.

“There are political activists in all of these companies that want to actively push a liberal agenda,” he said. “Why does it matter? Because these companies are so ubiquitous and powerful that they are controlling all the means of mass communication.”

He is also the president of the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative nonprofit organization. He and Mr. Bannon founded it with funding from the family of Robert Mercer, the billionaire hedge fund manager and donor to Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign.

Jeffrey A. Zucker, the president of CNN, derided Google and Facebook as “monopolies” and called for regulators to step in during a speech in Spain last month, saying the tech hegemony is “the biggest issue facing the growth of journalism in the years ahead.”

The panelists accused social media platforms of delisting their videos or stripping them of advertising. Such charges have long been staples of far-right online discourse, especially among YouTubers, but Mr. Schweizer’s project is poised to bring such arguments to a new — and potentially larger — audience.

The Facebook adjustment has affected virtually every media organization that is partly dependent on the platform for audiences, but it appears to have hit some harder than others. They include right-wing sites like Gateway Pundit and the millennial-focused Independent Journal Review, which was forced to lay off staff members last month.

The social news giant BuzzFeed recently bought ads on Facebook with the message, “Facebook is taking the news out of your News Feed, but we’ve got you covered,” directing users to download its app. Away from the political scrum, the viral lifestyle site LittleThings, once a top publisher on the platform, announced last week that it would cease operations, blaming “a full-on catastrophic update” to Facebook’s revised algorithms.

American companies in China who refuse to toe the line on Chinese policy issues (such as the status of Taiwan and the treatment of Uighurs); the devastating results of COVID-19 in the U.S. originating from a virus that first started to spread in Wuhan; and the freedom of Taiwan to decide whether or not to eventually unify politically with China.

If such an incident occurred, perhaps in the Taiwan Straits adding in the additional factor of extreme Chinese pride and nationalism over their view of Taiwan as a sovereign part of China, it could easily spark a far larger military exchange than the warning shots and close approaches we have seen thus far.

Larger strikes from either side could follow, as could a far broader cyberattack, perhaps against critical infrastructure. Carrier strike groups on both sides could deploy head-to-head. With even more significant losses, the temptation to employ a tactical nuclear weapons – perhaps at sea, thinking it could never then escalate to a strategic exchange – might rise.

The chances of the U.S. and China stumbling into a war are real and increasing.

Psychiatric patients were managed in the community, with short stay admissions to psychiatry wards if required. On average, patients had two to three weeks of hospitalisation in mixed-gender wards.

And the level of illicit drug and alcohol use in the inpatient population, both prior to and during hospitalisation, heightens the level of behavioural disinhibiton in this population.

In response to escalating assaults in inpatient units, the United Kingdom government adopted a strict policy of gender segregation on psychiatric wards in 2006.

The report does not detail how many incidents involved women, but comment is made that both men and women are vulnerable.

The latest plan to combat violence against women sets out important programs in primary prevention, white ribbon campaigns, work with Indigenous communities and employment-related policies. But has no mention of action to be taken to prevent violence against women in psychiatric wards.

For many decades, women with severe mental disorders were thought to be “too unreliable” to believe when they told their stories of harassment, assault and rape

Over the past years, we have seen improvement in the reporting systems implemented in mental health services and better management of violence against patients, with some shift in the culture of inpatient units; but it is still not good enough.

Investment in improved building designs of psychiatric wards is urgently needed, with special areas designated for women. Wards should be designed to be safe places of healing, with sensitivity for the traumatic backgrounds of many female patients.

Close monitoring of the situation by the general community and governments will ensure violence in psychiatry units is not tolerated.