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katherineharron

ACLU files suit on behalf of journalists in Minnesota - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 03 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • "The past week has been marked by an extraordinary escalation of unlawful force deliberately targeting reporters," the ACLU says in Wednesday's filing.
  • "We are facing a full-scale assault on the First Amendment freedom of the press," Brian Hauss, staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in a statement. "We will not let these official abuses go unanswered. This is the first of many lawsuits the ACLU intends to file across the country. Law enforcement officers who target journalists will be held accountable."
  • Reporters have been arrested by police from Florida to Nevada; pelted by police rubber bullets fired by police from Washington, D.C. to California; and attacked by protesters from Arizona to Pennsylvania. In one of the highest-profile examples, a CNN crew was briefly taken into custody on Friday by Minnesota State Police on live TV.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker said on Tuesday it has counted 211 "press freedom violations" since the start of the George Floyd protests last week, which in some cases have led to riots.
  • "In every case that we are aware of, there are strong indications that officers knew the journalist was a member of the press," the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press stated in a letter to Minnesota authorities on Tuesday.
  • This was the largest coalition to sign such a letter in the Reporters Committee's 50-year history. "We'll be sending similar letters to other jurisdictions around the country," a spokeswoman said.
  • Take swift action to discipline any officer who is found to have arrested or assaulted a journalist engaged in newsgathering."
  • "Inform your officers that they themselves could be subject to legal liability for violating these rights."
  • "Ensure that crowd control tactics are appropriate and proportional, and are designed to prevent collateral harm to journalists covering the protests.
  • "Continue to exempt members of the news media from mobility restrictions, including, and especially, curfews."
  • "Release all information about arrests of or physical interactions with the press to the public to allow it to evaluate the legitimacy of police conduct."
katherineharron

Tech-averse Supreme Court could be forced into modern era - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The coronavirus pandemic is forcing all courts to alter their procedures, but the US Supreme Court, imbued with an archaic, insular air and a majority of justices over age 65, will face a distinct challenge to keep operating and provide public access to proceedings.
  • The virus is bound to force Supreme Court justices into new territory. They may open their operations in more modern ways. Or, if they move in the opposite direction and shun any high-tech alternative, they might postpone all previously scheduled March and April oral argument sessions, a total 20 disputes, until next summer or fall.
  • This very practical dilemma comes as the justices already have one of the most substantively difficult slate of cases in years, testing abortion rights, anti-bias protections for LGBTQ workers, and the Trump administration's plan for deportation of certain undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children. (Those cases have already been argued, and the justices are drafting opinions to be released later this spring.)
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • If they are weighing a more sophisticated audio or visual connection -- to each other, and to the public -- the justices have the support of an on-site technology team and young law clerks, four per chamber. At the other end of the spectrum, they might weigh canceling the remaining argument sessions and resolve the cases based only on the written briefs filed. Those lengthy filings are more comprehensive than lawyers' presentations in hour-long oral sessions.
katherineharron

Supreme Court justices meet privately amid coronavirus outbreak - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The Supreme Court justices met privately on Friday to discuss pending cases and presumably how they will handle the rest of a blockbuster term as the nation and the world self-quarantine in the midst of a pandemic.
  • At the regularly scheduled conference a "number of justices" participated remotely by phone according to Kathy Arberg, the Court's public information officer. That's because six of them are 65 or older. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer are in their 80s -- well within the government's standard for individuals at a higher risk.
  • The move to postpone is exceedingly rare, but there is precedent. In 1918, arguments were postponed in response to the Spanish flu epidemic. The calendar was shortened in 1793 and 1798 in response to yellow fever outbreaks.
krystalxu

1.2 The Evolution of Psychology: History, Approaches, and Questions | Introduction to Psychology - 0 views

open.lib.umn.edu/...story-approaches-and-questions

Evolution Psychology

shared by krystalxu on 09 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Nature versus nurture. Are genes or environment most influential in determining the behavior of individuals and in accounting for differences among people? Most scientists now agree that both genes and environment play crucial roles in most human behaviors, and yet we still have much to learn about how nature (our biological makeup) and nurture (the experiences that we have during our lives) work together (Harris, 1998; Pinker, 2002). T
katherineharron

With Joe Biden off the trail, Democratic super PACs race to fill the void - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • With traditional campaigning abandoned and the Democrats' presidential front-runner hunkered down at home, deep-pocketed Democratic groups are racing to hit President Donald Trump over his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • "This crisis could be the defining issue of this election," Kyle Tharp, of the nonprofit group Acronym, said Wednesday. "Now more than ever, voters need to be made aware of how Trump's handling of this threat and downplaying of its impact has made it worse and has made Americans less safe."
  • "Crisis comes to every presidency. We don't blame them for that. What matters is how they handle it," the narrator says, before saying that Trump "let the virus spread unchecked across America."
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The pandemic, which had infected more than 64,000 and killed at least 900 in the US as of Wednesday evening, has upended American life and brought the economy to a halt a little more than seven months before the general election.
  • A new Gallup poll shows 60% of Americans approve of Trump's handling of the crisis, while 38% disapprove. A Monmouth University survey shows a tighter margin: 50% say the President has done a good job; 45% say he has done a bad job.
  • Perrine called Democrats' ads "disgusting" and a "politicization" of the pandemic.
  • "There'll be plenty of time for voters to judge @realDonaldTrump & his handling of the Coronavirus crisis, including the first weeks when he sent dangerously misleading signals by downplaying the threat," David Axelrod, a CNN contributor and former aide to President Barack Obama, wrote on Twitter as the first round of coronavirus advertising began to emerge last week.
  • Using Trump's own words and actions to remind people of his failures while he tries to rewrite history is essential," Plouffe tweeted.
katherineharron

Gavin Newsom takes new tone with Trump as he steers California during coronavirus crisis - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • For California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the call that triggered state's full crisis response came in the middle of the night on March 6, and he was waiting for it.
  • The state's lab had been working through the night, and one of his cabinet secretaries was on the line telling him 21 of the 42 crewmembers and passengers tested for coronavirus aboard the Grand Princess Cruise Ship, which was idling in international waters off California's coast, had tested positive.
  • Newsom hung up and immediately called Donald Trump, his frequent adversary, reaching the President around 4 a.m. PT to discuss the alarming results and their next steps, according to California aides involved in the response. By 6 a.m., Newsom had fully activated the Golden State's emergency operations center in the outskirts of Sacramento and begun orchestrating the unloading of more than 2,000 passengers -- diverting them to hospitals, into quarantine and back to their home countries.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • n the past, the pair has sparred in public over everything from the cause of California's wildfires to the state's stringent environmental regulations. Last year, Trump mocked the 52-year-old Newsom as the "do-nothing governor in California"; Newsom, for his part, has insisted his state will stand up to "a bully."
  • "We are clearly operating under a different set of assumptions," Newsom said when asked about Trump's desires during a recent briefing. He added that in their "many" conversations in recent weeks, it has been clear to him that the President understands the "unique challenges" faced by states like New York, California and Washington state.
  • As of 2 p.m. Wednesday, California had 3,006 cases of coronavirus and 65 dead. As the state has ramped up its testing capability the number of people who had been tested rose exponentially midweek, to 77,800, with results pending on more than 57,400 tests.
krystalxu

When You Fear Making the "Wrong" Decision - 0 views

tinybuddha.com/...fear-making-the-wrong-decision

decision making psychology brain science fear choice science

shared by krystalxu on 08 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • “Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”
  • mind resists all attempts to make any kind of decision at all.
  • immobilized, unable to push through the debilitating fear.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • I realized that the issue isn’t about being afraid to go to Korea. The real issue is that I have an overall fear of making the “wrong” decisions in my life.
  • Understand that there are no “wrong” decisions.
  • Listening closely to my fears about Korea made me aware of some pretty negative beliefs I held about myself and doubts I had in my abilities.
  • Make peace with your emotions.
  • I’m hearing the messages my mind, body, and spirit are trying to tell me because I’ve made a conscious decision to listen
  • It really takes the pressure off if you understand that every experience you have, whether you characterize it as “good” or “bad,” is exactly the experience you need to have at that moment. Some choices may lead to more painful lessons than others, but nothing hurts like living in fear.
  • Intuition can use fear to help you grow.
  • Fear is often described as a psychological response to a perceived threat.
  • It only makes sense to avoid things that can potentially harm you.
  • many of us have developed fear from negative experiences in our past.
  • We have built a protective fence around our emotional scars, and learned to ward off anybody or anything that triggers an unconscious fear.
  • The next time you feel fear, embrace it, examine it, and if guided to do so, move boldly toward it.
krystalxu

A psychology book that argues China is a "nation of infants" has been pulled from store shelves - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...is-book-nation-of-giant-babies

psychology China

shared by krystalxu on 09 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • hinese people place a strong emphasis on collectivism because they can’t live on their own, both spiritually and materially speaking.
blythewallick

People with Depression Use Language Differently | JSTOR Daily - 0 views

daily.jstor.org/ssion-use-language-differently

science psychology research brain science language

shared by blythewallick on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • New research shows that people with depression use absolute words, such as “always,” “nothing,” or “completely,” more often than others.
  • Scientists have long tried to pin down the exact relationship between depression and language, and technology is helping us get closer to a full picture. Our new study, published in Clinical Psychological Science, has now unveiled a class of words that can help accurately predict whether someone is suffering from depression.
  • So far, personal essays and diary entries by depressed people have been useful, as has the work of well-known artists such as Cobain and Plath. For the spoken word, snippets of natural language of people with depression have also provided insight. Taken together, the findings from such research reveal clear and consistent differences in language between those with and without symptoms of depression.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • We know that rumination (dwelling on personal problems) and social isolation are common features of depression. However, we don’t know whether these findings reflect differences in attention or thinking style. Does depression cause people to focus on themselves, or do people who focus on themselves get symptoms of depression?
  • Crucially, those who have previously had depressive symptoms are more likely to have them again. Therefore, their greater tendency for absolutist thinking, even when there are currently no symptoms of depression, is a sign that it may play a role in causing depressive episodes. The same effect is seen in use of pronouns, but not for negative emotion words.
  • From the outset, we predicted that those with depression will have a more black and white view of the world, and that this would manifest in their style of language.
  • Our lab recently conducted a big data text analysis of 64 different online mental health forums, examining over 6,400 members. “Absolutist words” – which convey absolute magnitudes or probabilities, such as “always”, “nothing” or “completely” – were found to be better markers for mental health forums than either pronouns or negative emotion words.
  • But as the World Health Organisation estimates that more than 300m people worldwide are now living with depression, an increase of more than 18% since 2005, having more tools available to spot the condition is certainly important to improve health and prevent tragic suicides such as those of Plath and Cobain.
blythewallick

Opinion | I Used to Fear Being a Nobody. Then I Left Social Media. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...quit-social-media.html

science psychology research Technology social media

shared by blythewallick on 24 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Though I thought disappearing from social media would be as simple as logging off, my refusal to post anything caused a bit of a stir among my small but loyal following. I began to receive emails from strangers asking me where I had gone and when I would return.
  • The truth is I have not gone anywhere. I am, in fact, more present than ever.
  • Twitter functions much like an echo chamber dependent on likes and retweets, and gaining notoriety is as easy as finding someone to agree with you.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • When I consider the near-decade I have spent on social media, this worry makes sense. As with many in my generation, Twitter was my entry into conversations happening on a global scale; long before my byline graced any publication, tweeting was how I felt a part of the world.
  • was measuring my individual worth in constant visibility. Implicit in my follower’s question “Where will you go?” is the resounding question “How will we know where you’ve gone?” Privacy is considered a small exchange for the security of being well known and well liked.
  • Perhaps at the root of this anxiety over being forgotten is an urgent question of how one ought to form a legacy; with the rise of automation, a widening wealth gap and an unstable political climate, it is easy to feel unimportant. It is almost as if the world is too big and we are much too small to excel in it in any meaningful way.
  • “The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow,” the writer Anaïs Nin said. “This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us.”
blythewallick

Social media has limited effects on teenage life satisfaction: Study of teenage social media use and life satisfaction -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...190506151834.htm

social media research psychology science brain science Technology

shared by blythewallick on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • This is the first large-scale and in-depth study testing not only whether adolescents who report more social media use have lower life satisfaction but also whether the reverse is true. Before this study scientists had little means of disentangling whether adolescents with lower life satisfaction use more social media or whether social media use leads to lower life satisfaction.
  • Yet there were some bidirectional effects: Lower life satisfaction led to increased social media use and vice versa. These bidirectional effects were more consistent for females than for males, but again, these were modest trends.
  • 'Given the rapid pace of technological advancement in recent years, the question of how our increasing use of technology to interact with each other affects our wellbeing has become increasingly important.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • 'Applying transparent and innovative statistical approaches we show that social media effects are not a one-way street, they are nuanced, reciprocal, possibly contingent on gender, and arguably trivial in size'.
  • 'Moving forward access to this kind of data will be key to understanding the many roles that social media plays in the lives of young people', Professor Przybylski added.
blythewallick

With 250 babies born each minute, how many people can the Earth sustain? | Lucy Lamble | Global development | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-the-earth-sustain-lucy-lamble

research science

shared by blythewallick on 18 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • but UN data suggests there were about a billion people in 1800, 2 billion in 1927, 5 billion in 1987 and just over 7.5 billion today.
  • Since the 1960s, more boys than girls have been born every year. About 117 million women are believed to be “missing” in Asia and eastern Europe – due to discriminatory son preference and gender-biased sex selection.
  • Over the last 30 years, some regions have seen up to 25% more male births than female births, reflecting the persistent low status of women and girls.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Experts like Paul Ehrlich argue that the population of the world has long since surpassed optimal levels, though critics counter that consumption is as important as population levels.
  • one-third of all people – almost 4 billion – will be African.
  • By that year, there will be more Nigerians than Americans.
  • If birthrates have fallen so far, why is the population still rising fast?
  • In the pre-modern era, fertility rates of 4.5 to 7 children per woman were common. At that time, high mortality rates of young people kept population growth low.
  • The level of education in a society – of women in particular – is one of the most important predictors for the number of children families have.
  • People are living longer
  • which means that one child in 13 die before their fifth birthday.
  • This compares with six for every 1,000 in Europe and northern America and four for every 1,000 in Australia and New Zealand.
  • A consequence of falling child mortality but continuing high fertility is a “youth bulge” – a high population of young people.
  • But ageing populations can be a cause for celebration. It means development has taken place.
  • What next?
  • Family planning organisations are learning that to survive political shifts and budget cuts, they need to diversify their sources of funding. This means seeing family planning as not just a public health concern but also about development and a clear return on investment.
blythewallick

Recognizing Strangers | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...recognizing-strangers

science psychology brain science research knowledge Bias

shared by blythewallick on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Benoit Monin, assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University, showed college students 80 photos of faces, then asked them which ones they recognized from among the 40 they'd seen in an earlier session. The more attractive the photo (as rated by another group of students) the more likely it was to be recognized—regardless of whether the face had been seen before.
  • "The face's attractiveness actually changes your perception of your past," in this case, the perception of whether you've seen the face before. The shortcut may lead to errors, but it may also help us manage our busy lives, says Monin. "We tend to like familiar things, so it makes perfect sense that over time we would use liking as a clue to familiarity."
  • In what he calls the "warm-glow heuristic," people consider their affinity for a specific person or place as an indicator of familiarity. As with other mental shortcuts, people resort to this heuristic when they lack enough data on which to base their decisions.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In a second session, he showed them an entirely new set of words and asked which words were familiar from the earlier, bogus session. Subjects were more likely to think they'd seen positive words—such as "charm" and "glory"—than either negative or neutral words that appear with the same frequency in English.
sanderk

Make Good Decisions Faster | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...make-good-decisions-faster

quick decisions psychology knowledge purchases

shared by sanderk on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • According to studies done by Sheena Iyengar at Columbia University, Americans make an average of 70 decisions each day. We make mundane decisions about what to have for lunch and which route to take to work, as well as defining decisions such as where to live, whom to marry, and whether to keep this job or accept that other offer. As Albert Camus said "life is the sum of our choices."  
  • the longer you spend waffling over what to have for breakfast, the harder it will be to make a good decision with a customer or co-worker later that morning.  The more we hem and haw about what to buy at the mall on Saturday afternoon, the more likely we are to choose to throw back a pound of fries and double dose of fudge dessert on Saturday evening.
  • A simple Know-Think-Do framework can help solve this problem by enabling us to make all of our decisions--big and small; daily and defining--quicker without sacrificing quality.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The quickest, easiest, most effective way to do this is by "consulting an Anti-You" before you make every decision. As one banking executive explained to me, "It's amazing how many poor decisions can be avoided simply by asking one other person for their opinion."
  • The act of explaining your situation to another person often gives you new insights about the decision before the other person even responds.  And the fresh perspective they offer in response is the second bonus.
  • The purpose of a decision is not to find the perfect option. The purpose of a decision is to get you to the next decision.
manhefnawi

There's a Map of Your Face in Other People's Brains | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...your-face-other-peoples-brains

Mind Cognition Memory Faciotopy

shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Don’t get too creeped out, but there are a whole lot of people walking around right now with a map of your face in their brains. But at least it’s a two-way street—you have their faces mapped in yours, too. That’s the conclusion of a recent report published in the journal Cortex. Social animals depend on being able to recognize one another. All monkeys might look the same to you, but you can be sure that they can tell each other apart. The same is true for humans. The ability to identify another person is a vital part of social interaction, which is an essential part of our lives. 
  • For that reason, our brains seem to devote a lot of real estate to facial recognition. Scientists believe that most of the work of facial perception happens in two brain sections: the occipital face area (OFA) and the fusiform face area (FFA). But it wasn’t clear how those regions managed recognition. 
katherineharron

5 takeaways from Joe Biden's CNN town hall on the coronavirus response - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Joe Biden during a CNN town hall Friday night detailed how he'd respond to the coronavirus pandemic.
  • But he offered an uplifting message -- one in tune with his campaign's core theme -- about the soul of the nation being on display in Americans' reaction to the crisis.
  • He left room for conditions, suggesting at one point that the freeze might not to apply to those whose income up to $75,000 is replaced by unemployment insurance. But he then said: "There should be a rent freeze. No one should be evicted during this period -- period."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The former vice president said that he, as president, would recommend governors temporarily lock down their states for a period of time to stop the spread of coronavirus, aligning himself closer to the billionaire Microsoft founder's suggestion that the country needs a lengthy shutdown, not the President's hope that the country reopen in mid-April.
  • "It's a false choice to make, saying that you either open the economy or everything goes to hell," Biden said. "You cannot make this economy grow until you deal with the virus."
  • The former vice president described his days at home in Delaware, where he is observing the same "stay-at-home" orders that now apply to millions of Americans. For Biden that means calls with family and the occasional visit from a couple grandkids who live nearby and walk over to say hello.
  • "I've lost a couple children, I've lost a wife and it is incredibly difficult to go through and it's harder to go through when you haven't had an opportunity to be with the person while they're dying," Biden said. After noting that he was able to be with his mother, father and son as they died, he said he was not able to do the same with his first wife.
sanderk

How Procrastination Affects Your Health - Thrive Global - 0 views

thriveglobal.com/...astination-affects-your-health

procrastination health Technology

shared by sanderk on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • fine line between procrastination and being “pressure prompted.” If you’re like me and pressure prompted, you are someone who often does your best work when faced with a looming deadline. While being pressure prompted may entail a bit of procrastination, it is procrastination within acceptable limits. In other words, it is a set of conditions that offers just enough pressure to ensure you’re at the top of your game without divulging into chaos or most importantly, impacting other members of your team by preventing them from delivering their best work in a timely manner.
  • Procrastination is a condition that has consequences on one’s mental and physical health and performance at school and in the workplace.
  • Piers Steel defines procrastination as “a self-regulatory failure leading to poor performance and reduced well-being.” Notably, Steel further emphasizes that procrastination is both common (80% to 90% of college-age students suffer from it at least some of the time) and something most people (95%) wish to overcome.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Steel even argues that procrastination may now be on the rise as people increasingly turn to the immediate gratification made possible by information technologies and specifically, social media platforms.
  • for a small percentage of people, procrastination isn’t just a temporary or occasional problem but rather something that comes to structure their lives and ultimately limit their potential.
  • In a 2008 study, Peter Gröpel & Piers Steel investigated predictors of procrastination in a large Internet-based study that included over 9,000 participants. Their results revealed two important findings. First, their results showed that goal setting reduced procrastination; second, they found that it was strongly associated with lack of energy.
  • While it is true that intrinsically motivated people may have an easier time getting into flow, anyone, even a chronic procrastinator, can cultivate flow. The first step is easy—it simply entails coming up with a clear goal.
  • The second step is to stop feeling ashamed about your procrastinating tendencies.
  • sanderk on 21 Oct 19
     
    This article is very interesting because it says that procrastination is not necessarily bad. Procrastination can be good for people in small quantities because it causes them to be pressured into actually doing their work. However, there is a point where procrastination becomes an issue. I find it interesting how phones and computers have caused procrastination problems to become more severe. Phones and computers can give people instant gratification which leads to more procrastination. As the article says if people set goals for themselves and are disciplined they can overcome procrastination.
Javier E

Opinion | The Ugly Secrets Behind the Costco Chicken - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...co-chicken-animal-welfare.html

animal rights cruelty morality

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • we must guard our moral compasses. And some day, I think, future generations will look back at our mistreatment of livestock and poultry with pain and bafflement. They will wonder how we in the early 21st century could have been so oblivious to the cruelties that delivered $4.99 chickens to a Costco rotisserie.
  • Torture a single chicken in your backyard, and you risk arrest. Abuse tens of millions of them? Why, that’s agribusiness.
  • Those commendable savings have been achieved in part by developing chickens that effectively are bred to suffer. Scientists have created what are sometimes called “exploding chickens” that put on weight at a monstrous clip, about six times as fast as chickens in 1925. The journal Poultry Science once calculated that if humans grew at the same rate as these chickens, a 2-month-old baby would weigh 660 pounds.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • When Herbert Hoover talked about putting “a chicken in every pot,” chicken was a luxury: In 1930, whole dressed chicken retailed in the United States for $7 a pound in today’s dollars. In contrast, that Costco bird now sells for less than $2 a pound.
  • It’s not that Costco chickens suffer more than Walmart or Safeway birds. All are part of an industrial agricultural system that, at the expense of animal well-being, has become extremely efficient at producing cheap protein.
  • “They’re living on their own feces, with no fresh air and no natural light,” said Leah Garcés, the president of Mercy for Animals. “I don’t think it’s what a Costco customer expects.”
  • Garcés wants Costco to sign up for the “Better Chicken Commitment,” an industry promise to work toward slightly better standards for industrial agriculture. For example, each adult chicken would get at least one square foot of space, there would be some natural light and the company would avoid breeds that put on weight that the legs can’t support.
  • Burger King, Popeyes, Chipotle, Denny’s and some 200 other food companies have embraced the Better Chicken Commitment, but grocery chains generally have not, with the exception of Whole Foods.
  • Yet what struck me was that Costco completely accepts that animal welfare should be an important consideration. We may disagree about whether existing standards are adequate, but the march of moral progress on animal rights is unmistakable.
  • When I began writing about these issues, I never guessed that McDonald’s would commit to cage-free eggs, that California would legislate protections for mother pigs, that there would be court fights about whether an elephant has legal “personhood,” and that Pope Francis would suggest that animals go to heaven and that the Virgin Mary “grieves for the sufferings” of mistreated livestock.
  • I don’t pretend that there are neat solutions. We raised a flock of chickens on our family farm when I was a kid, and we managed to be neither efficient nor humane. Many birds died, and being eaten by a coyote wasn’t such a pleasant way to go, either. There’s no need for a misplaced nostalgia for traditional farming practices, just a pragmatic acknowledgment of animal suffering and trade-offs to reduce it.
  • We treat poultry particularly poorly because humans identify less with birds than with fellow mammals. We may empathize with a calf with big eyes, but less so with species that we dismiss as “bird brains.”
  • Still, the issue remains as the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham posed it in 1789: “The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
Javier E

Remembering Rush | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...remembering-rush

discourse demagogue right-wing media decline meanness bullying language

shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Rush succeeded, and in part because meanness was just ramping up in conservative circles in the 80’s, and because he knew which people to stomp on.
  • The overriding traits that I observed were arrogance and meanness toward “lesser” creatures. He was big into “othering” people
  • I’ve always remembered how Rush would mock poor people, and even the towns they lived in, like Rio Linda, a small community west of Sacto. He mocked everyone who wasn’t like him
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • So I didn’t celebrate his death as so many have, and frankly it pains me to read that stuff because it’s as cruel as he was
  • there is perhaps no other human who did more to lower the civility of public discourse, and who gave license to others to do the same. He became a truly disgusting broadcaster.
Javier E

Implicit Bias Training Isn't Improving Corporate Diversity - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-improving-corporate-diversity

training bias effectiveness racism diversity

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • despite the growing adoption of unconscious bias training, there is no convincing scientific evidence that it works
  • In fact, much of the academic evidence on implicit bias interventions highlights their weakness as a method for boosting diversity and inclusion. Instructions to suppress stereotypes often have the opposite effect, and prejudice reduction programs are much more effective when people are already open-minded, altruistic, and concerned about their prejudices to begin with.
  • This is because the main problem with stereotypes is not that people are unaware of them, but that they agree with them (even when they don’t admit it to others). In other words, most people have conscious biases.
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  • Moreover, to the extent that people have unconscious biases, there is no clear-cut way to measure them
  • The main tool for measuring unconscious bias, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), has been in use for twenty years but is highly contested.
  • meta-analytic reviews have concluded that IAT scores — in other words, unconscious biases — are very weak predictors of actual behavior.
  • The vast majority of people labeled “racist” by these tests behave the same as the vast majority of people labelled “non-racist.” Do we really want to tell people who behave in non-racist ways that they are unconsciously racists, or, conversely, tell people who behave in racist ways that they aren’t, deep down, racists at all?
  • Instead of worrying what people think of something or someone deep down, we should focus on ways to eliminate the toxic or prejudiced behaviors we can see. That alone will drive a great deal of progress.
  • Scientific evidence suggests that the relationship between attitudes and behaviors is much weaker than one might expect.
  • Even if we lived in a world in which humans always acted in accordance with their beliefs, there would remain better ways to promote diversity than by policing people’s thoughts.
  • Organizations should focus less on extinguishing their employees’ unconscious thoughts, and more on nurturing ethical, benevolent, and inclusive behaviors.
  • This means focusing less on employees’ attitudes, and more on organizational policies and systems, as these play the key role creating the conditions that entice employees (and leaders) to behave in more or less inclusive ways.
  • This gets to the underlying flaw with unconscious bias trainings: behaviors, not thoughts, should be the target of diversity and inclusion interventions.
  • Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is chief talent scientist at Manpower Group and a professor at University College London and Columbia University.
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