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Minneapolis Police Investigate Punching of a Black Teenager by an Officer - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...olis-police-investigation.html
shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Minneapolis Police Investigate Punching of a Black Teenager by an Officer
  • The suspect, another Black teenager, said he had been scared when Robbinsdale police officers led him toward the back seat of a patrol car.
  • The Minneapolis Police Department has opened an internal affairs investigation after a Black teenager was punched by an officer who appeared to be white, the mayor and the police chief said on Thursday.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • an eyewitness had drawn widespread attention and touched off protests by Black community members, who called for the officer to be fired.
  • The protests were set against the backdrop of the trial of Derek Chauvin, one of four former Minneapolis police officers who have been charged in the killing of George Floyd last May.
  • “De-escalating is paramount in the work that our officers do,”
  • daria Arradondo, the city’s police chief, said during a news
  • a Arradondo, the city’s police chief, said during a new
  • “violent felony carjacking”
  • Minneapolis police officers had been helping their suburban counterparts, who had stopped a suspect in the carjacking, when a group of residents approached and protested that the officers had the wrong person in custody, the eyewitness video showed
  • The events were recorded on video by an eyewitness and came as residents had been protesting another teenager’s arrest in connection with what police said was a “violent felony carjacking.”
  • Black teenager at the scene during a skirmish, the video showed. The person who recorded the video had been walking away from scene when the exchange happened, so it was not immediately clear what had led the officer to throw the punch.
  • he didn’t know whether the young man had played a role in the carjacking.
  • The police did not provide further details about whether the teenager had been charged or the nature of his injuries.
  • Civil rights groups criticized the use of force by the officer.
  • “The M.P.D. is out of control,”
  • “They don’t care if they are being filmed or if their body cameras are on. They know they can act with impunity.”
  • nneapolis said that he could not comment on the specifics of the case without potentially compromising the internal affairs investigation.
  • neapolis said that he could not comment on the specifics of the
  • that he could not comment on the specifics of the case without potentially compromising the internal a
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Opinion | He's a Famous Evangelical Preacher, but His Kids Wish He'd Pipe Down - The Ne... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...elical-rick-joyner-family.html
shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • He’s a Famous Evangelical Preacher, but His Kids Wish He’d Pipe Down
  • The Rev. Rick Joyner has called on Christians to arm themselves for civil war. But his children would be on the other side.
  • The Rev. Rick Joyner is a famous evangelical leader who has called on Christians to arm themselves for an inevitable civil war against liberals, whom he suggests are allies of the devil.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • But this is the awkward part: His five children would be on the other side of that civil war, as he and his kids all acknowledge
  • She worries that his far-right rhetoric may get people killed, so she feels a responsibility to challenge him.
  • “He talks about Democrats being evil, forgetting that all five of his kids vote Democratic,”
  • “Who is he asking his followers to take up arms against? Liberal activists? That’s me.”
  • Just as America is torn asunder by politics and polarization, so is the Joyner family.
  • “I hope my kids don’t get involved in the violence, but it’s coming,”
  • “I think what he does is morally wrong, but I love him,”
  • “I don’t want to hurt him, but when he’s spreading dangerous ideas, it gets complicated.”
  • “One of my goals as a parent was to raise strong, independent children,”
  • “But I think I overshot the runway.
  • “I think it’s completely possible that some of my dad’s followers could pick up guns and cause violence because they think they’re defending the country,”
  • He claims liberals are in league with Satan and Democrats are plotting “to criminalize Christianity.”
  • Joyner’s rants leave his children furiously texting back and forth in exasperation (they say their mom is somewhere in the middle).
  • “There is a responsibility to hold those you love accountable,”
  • But how? The siblings disagree among themselves.
  • “I’m not willing to sacrifice my relationship with him to call him out.”
  • The most outspoken is Anna Jane, who says her father’s rhetoric became more extreme in recent years. She had her first falling out with him when she became a Democrat and an environmentalist while a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He cut off her college funding, and she moved to New Zealand. Soon after, she nearly died in a boating accident — and the first person she called was her dad. They reconciled.
  • He also promoted a film by his son Ben about a gay man in the South, even though it likewise had him gritting his teeth.
  • “The church in America has been tremendously weakened,”
  • At what point can I no longer go home for Thanksgiving and watch football with my dad?” Ben mused. “By doing so, am I condoning his behavior? It can be hard to draw that line in the sand, especially when you love this person.”
  • “Is it OK to just talk about movies and dogs with someone who’s trying to incite civil war? I don’t know.”
  • She was furious at her father for his climate denial — but he’s the person she called in that crisis, and he stayed on the phone with her for much of the night, relaying the latest information and helping to keep her safe.
  • “I’m so angry at him for his politics and for endangering me and all of us by not believing in climate change,” she said. “And yet he’s the one I turn to in the middle of the night when I’m evacuating and I’m really scared.”
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The Linguistic Evolution of 'Like' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...507614
shared by caelengrubb on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In our mouths or in print, in villages or in cities, in buildings or in caves, a language doesn’t sit still. It can’t. Language change has preceded apace even in places known for preserving a language in amber
  • It’s under this view of language—as something becoming rather than being, a film rather than a photo, in motion rather than at rest—that we should consider the way young people use (drum roll, please) like
  • First, let’s take like in just its traditional, accepted forms. Even in its dictionary definition, like is the product of stark changes in meaning that no one would ever guess.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • To an Old English speaker, the word that later became like was the word for, of all things, “body.”
  • The word was lic, and lic was part of a word, gelic, that meant “with the body,” as in “with the body of,” which was a way of saying “similar to”—as in like
  • It was just that, step by step, the syllable lic, which to an Old English speaker meant “body,” came to mean, when uttered by people centuries later, “similar to”—and life went on.
  • Like has become a piece of grammar: It is the source of the suffix -ly.
  • Like has become a part of compounds. Likewise began as like plus a word, wise, which was different from the one meaning “smart when either a child or getting old.”
  • Dictionaries tell us it’s pronounced “like-MINE-did,” but I, for one, say “LIKE- minded” and have heard many others do so
  • Therefore, like is ever so much more than some isolated thing clinically described in a dictionary with a definition like “(preposition) ‘having the same characteristics or qualities as; similar to.’”
  • What we are seeing in like’s transformations today are just the latest chapters in a story that began with an ancient word that was supposed to mean “body.”
  • Because we think of like as meaning “akin to” or “similar to,” kids decorating every sentence or two with it seems like overuse. After all, how often should a coherently minded person need to note that something is similar to something rather than just being that something?
  • The new like, then, is associated with hesitation.
  • So today’s like did not spring mysteriously from a crowd on the margins of unusual mind-set and then somehow jump the rails from them into the general population.
  • The problem with the hesitation analysis is that this was a thoroughly confident speaker.
  • It’s real-life usage of this kind—to linguists it is data, just like climate patterns are to meteorologists—that suggests that the idea of like as the linguistic equivalent to slumped shoulders is off.
  • Understandably so, of course—the meaning of like suggests that people are claiming that everything is “like” itself rather than itself.
  • The new like acknowledges unspoken objection while underlining one’s own point (the factuality). Like grandparents translates here as “There were, despite what you might think, actually grandparents.”
  • Then there is a second new like, which is closer to what people tend to think of all its new uses: it is indeed a hedge.
  • Then, the two likes I have mentioned must be distinguished from yet a third usage, the quotative like—as in “And she was like, ‘I didn’t even invite him.’
  • This is yet another way that like has become grammar. The meaning “similar to” is as natural a source here as it was for -ly: mimicking people’s utterances is talking similarly to, as in “like,” them.
  • Thus the modern American English speaker has mastered not just two, but actually three different new usages of like.
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Review: 'MLK/FBI' Adds Dimension To The Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...es-a-civil-rights-icons-legacy MLK documentary FBI
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • and the responses to the ostensible hypocrisy of it all were no less colorful than they had been in previous years: expletive-filled kiss-offs, angry memes, and links or screenshots from articles detailing the agency's notoriously relentless surveillance of King in the final years of his life.
  • This is neither new nor little-known information, but that doesn't render Sam Pollard's documentary MLK/FBI
  • the film aims to restore dimensions to the now-flattened image of King, who today is often reduced to iconography and erroneously viewed by many as having been a noncontroversial figure during his lifetime.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • On a federal judge's order, the surveillance tapes of King are sealed in the National Archives until at least 2027, and ethical questions are posed about whether dissecting these details are yet another invasion of King's privacy.
  • And of course, there's the concern over King's legacy and how it might crack under revelations that seemingly contradict his near-deified memory.
  • "Does [the truth of his romantic dalliances] make him in my mind less of an historic civil rights leader?
  • King's legacy is complicated, but certainly not undone, by MLK/FBI. That's a good thing; the more we see him as an extraordinary but flawed human being, the easier it is to envision a path forward.
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'I Think This Guy Is, Like, Passed Out in His Tesla' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tesla-autopilot-sleeping.html tesla automation self-driving car tech metaphor safety social media
shared by Javier E on 08 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • Tesla’s response to these videos has been consistent: Autopilot is meant to function as a complement to a conscious driver, not a replacement. If you don’t keep a hand on the wheel, your Tesla is supposed to beep at you; eventually it’s supposed to slow to a stop and put its hazard lights on. Anyway, who knows if these clips were real? Couldn’t some of them be the work of pranksters?
  • of course you can still fall asleep with a hand on the wheel — or you can go on YouTube and watch Tesla drivers swap tips for using a water bottle or custom “cellphone holder” to fool the system.
  • What’s fascinating is the way the sci-fi novelty of Autopilot — combined with the deep familiarity of old-fashioned driving — manages to warp our danger-detecting radar. There are instances in which investigators have found that the Autopilot system contributed to crashes, but none of those have been captured on film.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • driving is already one of the more dangerous activities Americans undertake on a daily basis. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “drowsy driving” was a factor in 91,000 crashes, resulting in 50,000 people injured and 810 deaths in 2017, so it’s theoretically possible that what some of these videos are showing us is disaster averted, not disaster in motion.
  • Tesla once generated widespread good will by promising affordable electric cars that would make the world cleaner and safer. But over time, its image was tarnished by missed deadlines, worrying crash reports, signs of a cultlike corporate culture and a chief executive, Elon Musk, who habitually exaggerates progress while announcing extravagant new ideas. This was hardly the institution you would want determining the future of highway safety.
  • These technologies — and the companies that engineer them — keep turning out to be less benign than imagined. We fell in love with Amazon, but now we miss the local stores it closed. We couldn’t resist the convenience of Uber and Lyft, but now we’ve seen their effect on public transit and drivers. “Jetsons”-esque smart-home technology turned out to be riddled with glitches and vulnerable to hackers.
  • Tech companies have hollowed out old industries, shredded privacy, disregarded regulations and created new vectors for the spread of misinformation and extremism, and now there is a sense that choices we have already made — tectonic shifts already in motion, terms of service already accepted — may be changing us in ways that we are only beginning to process, ready to leap up and bite us in the collective behind.
  • It’s hard to imagine a more potent visual metaphor for this feeling than a human lulled to sleep inside a hunk of metal and glass, hurtling down a highway under the control of proprietary algorithms beamed on board from Palo Alto
  • These videos are magnetic not just because of the eerie images they contain, but also because, watching them, we can’t actually be sure what we’re seeing. Is this danger or safety or both at once? Perhaps in a different era we would have cried out in excitement: How cool! Today we are more tempted to gasp in shock and call out a warning: Wake up!
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'I Like to Watch,' by Emily Nussbaum book review - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-b08e-cfd89bd36d4e_story.html TV medium theory cultural criticism
shared by Javier E on 13 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Nussbaum’s case: That television could be great, and not because it was “novelistic” or “cinematic” but because it was, simply, television, “episodic, collaborative, writer-driven, and formulaic” by design.
  • According to Nussbaum, a TV show achieved greatness not despite these facts (which assumes they are limitations) but because of them (which sees them as an infrastructure that provokes creativity and beauty — “the sort that govern sonnets,”
  • Nussbaum’s once-iconoclastic views have become mainstream.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • It is increasingly common to find yourself apologizing not for watching too much TV but for having failed to spend 70 hours of your precious, finite life binge-watching one of the Golden Age of Television’s finest offerings.
  • Nussbaum writes of her male classmates at NYU, where she was a literature doctoral student in the late 1990s. These men worshiped literature and film; they thought TV was trash. These men “were also, not coincidentally, the ones whose opinions tended to dominate mainstream media conversation.”
  • the same forces that marginalize the already-marginalized still work to keep TV shows by and about women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals on a lower tier than those about cis, straight, white men: Your Tony Sopranos, your Walter Whites, your Don Drapers, your True Detectives
  • Over and over, Nussbaum pushes back against a hierarchy that rewards dramas centered on men and hyperbolically masculine pursuits (dealing drugs, being a cop, committing murders, having sex with beautiful women) and shoves comedies and whatever scans as “female” to the side.
  • Nussbaum sticks up for soaps, rom-coms, romance novels and reality television, “the genres that get dismissed as fluff, which is how our culture regards art that makes women’s lives look like fun.
  • Nussbaum’s writing consistently comes back to the question of “whose stories carried weight . . . what kind of creativity counted as ambitious, and who . . . deserved attention . . . Whose story counted as universal?
  • What does it mean to think morally about the art we consume — and, by extension, financially support, and center in our emotional and imaginative lives? The art that informs, on some near-cellular level, who we want to know and love and be?
  • maybe the next frontier of cultural thought is in thinking more cohesively about what we’ve long compartmentalized — of not stashing conflicting feelings about good art by bad men in some dark corner of our minds, but in holding our discomfort and contradictions up to the light, for a clearer view.
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Simon Stone Faced the Unthinkable. He Thinks You Should Too. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...simon-stone-medea-bam.html theater catharsis adaptation psychology trauma
shared by Javier E on 01 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • When he was 12, his father had a heart attack in a swimming pool, dying in front of him. Stone immersed himself in plays, reading as many as five a day, and films, sometimes watching 15 in a week. He turned to acting, because he was, he said, “really, really weirdly behaved. I had too many emotions, too many too inappropriate emotions.” Those emotions found a home onstage.
  • In his early 20s, he founded a theater company in Melbourne, the Hayloft Project, and began directing classical plays, rewriting scenes that felt stodgy, outdated. Eventually, as a resident director at the Belvoir theater in Sydney, he began reworking the plays entirely — “sampling and remixing,” as he put it — modernizing circumstance and idiom to show myths endure.
  • Instead of alienating audiences, he wants to bring them closer, reminding them of the archetypes that persist even in their own lives. Watching most tragedies, you can comfort yourself with the idea that you would escape that fate, because you are more circumspect, more evolved, because you have been to therapy. His plays don’t allow that.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • His theater uses contemporary language and circumstance to get at the center of a nightmare — his own nightmare: dying young because his father died young — and maybe find a way to wake up from it. He is just old-fashioned enough to believe in catharsis, the idea that tragedy can purge us of our pity and fear, that it can heal.
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Could a brain scan diagnose you as a psychopath? | Chris Chambers | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-diagnose-you-as-a-psychopath psychopathology logical fallacies neuroscience scientific method
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Society is intrigued by psychopaths, at least from a distance. Hollywood paints them as powerful and emotionless predators – a small few who have embraced their inner dark passengers.
  • Psychopathy is of course a very real disorder and a lot more complex than portrayed on film.
  • What Fallon found was his own scan, which appeared to show reduced activity in a part of the brain associated with empathy. Based on this, and some genetic tests, Fallon concluded that he himself was a psychopath
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • One of the most obvious mistakes in Fallon’s reasoning is called the fallacy of reverse inference.
  • areas of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex are important for empathy and moral reasoning. At the same time, empathy and moral reasoning are lost or impaired in many psychopaths.
  • The flaw with this argument – as Fallon himself must know – is that there is no one-to-one mapping between activity in a given brain region and complex abilities such as empathy. There is no empathy region and there is no psychopath switch.
  • these parts of the brain aren’t like hammers or screwdrivers that perform only one task. They’re more like Swiss army knives that have evolved to support a range of different abilities.
  • just because two things are associated with each other doesn’t mean one of them caused the other.
  • In neuroscience, confusing correlation with causation is close to unforgivable.
  • “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion…draws all things else to support and agree with it.” If we only seek to confirm rather than falsify our beliefs then we will find that we are always right – or at least it will seem that way.
  • This confirmation bias is one of the most powerful traps in reasoning because we all like to be right, and we prefer to be consistent.
  • By consistently interpreting weak evidence in favour of his beliefs, Fallon’s investigation is a case study in bias.
  • real advances require a self-critical mindset and a strict adherence to the scientific method.
  • it can be tempting to forget these rules and exploit logical fallacies that we think others won’t notice.
  • “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”.
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In a Swing County in a Swing State, the Verdict Is In: It's Going to Be Close - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...wing-vote-pinellas-county.html bias new york times swing
shared by adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Hillary could not win over Pinellas County the same way Obama could, she did resonate with middle-class voters. This seems to be a common theme when referring to the election in 2016. It seemed that Trump appealed to the middle class more so that Hillary.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      The county also reflects the sate in terms of being a "swing"
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      The county also reflects the sate in terms of being a "swing"
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Important demographic of the area
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Important demographic of the area
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • with most polls indicating that it’s anyone’s guess who will carry Florida
  • held rallies in nearby Tampa on Thursday that underlined the polar-opposite realities each candidate now inhabits:
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      I like how the article highlights the way the two candidates went about trying to win a swing state like Florida. Biden being focused on Coronavirus and actual problems. While Trump went on to make Biden look bad instead of focusing on problems and policy.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      I like how the article highlights the way the two candidates went about trying to win a swing state like Florida. Biden being focused on Coronavirus and actual problems. While Trump went on to make Biden look bad instead of focusing on problems and policy.
  • a conservative who said he had blocked Fox News on social media for being “too mainstream,”
  • “felt that it would be a good learning experience, so she could learn about some history and politics firsthand.”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Interesting that he took his daughter out of school to be apart of history. It makes me think about the question of "what side of history do you want to be on?"
  • Does he have a locker-room mentality?
  • “Yeah, sure, but I’m not hiring him to be nice.”
  • once overshadowed by Clearwater’s beach-retirement hub — has been transformed by recent years that have brought a mix of gentrification and progressive politics.
  • get-out-the-vote rally in honor of Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and voting rights champion who died over the summer
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      It is so interesting how areas so close to each other are so drastically different in politics and beliefs.
  • One in five Black Floridians is thought to have a felony conviction and could be unable to vote because of it.
  • “I’m not encouraging anyone to break the law, but today is a day for some ‘good trouble,’” she added, using one of Mr. Lewis’s signature phrases from his civil rights struggles
  • Mr. Overcast sighed. He said that living in the same county as the Church of Scientology’s headquarters had taught him how to tolerate almost any point of view, even that of the neighbor, who he suspected had stolen the Trump sign from his lawn.Mr. Overcast said his home security system had filmed the culprit making off with it. But rather than confront the neighbor, Mr. Overcast just bought another sign.“But with this one I tied 90 pounds of fishing line on it and tied it to a tree in my yard,” he said.
  • Billy Overcast — “spelled like the weather,” said Mr. Overcast, pointing up, however, to a typically clear day with one hand, a “Trump 2020” flag in the other.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Once again so close but so drastically different
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      He is showing his beliefs even though the majority of his club fly Trump flags, not Biden flags. The picture at the beginning of the article shows how much pride he has for his beliefs
  • Clearwater
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Interesting how they are comparing Florida being a swing state to the flying of flags on jeeps
  • The Confederate flag also bothered him, he told his fellow Jeep enthusiasts, as did the systemic racism
  • decorated with red, white and blue balloons; an American flag; a Black Lives Matter flag; another flag with an L.G.B.T. rainbow he found on Amazon; and lots of Biden-Harris campaign paraphernalia.
  • St. Petersburg and conservative Clearwater, the vacation hub and base of the Church of Scientology.
  • in the swing state that crowned past presidents by small margins, much in this country is riding o
  • n the all-important question of who flies what flag on which Jeep.
  • Pinellas County, about three-quarters of which is white, includes a good number of older retirees and suburban women
  • favor Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee.
  • 256,000 are registered as Democrats
  • 252,000 as Republicans.
  • a swing county in a swing state
  • Donald J. Trump narrowly triumphed here by roughly 6,000 votes, out of about half a million cast
  • But postelection observers said her appeals to middle-class voters in Pinellas County didn’t resonate as well as Mr. Obama’s had.
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A Theory About Conspiracy Theories - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ology-conspiracy-theories.html social media conspiracy theories susceptibility knowledge education
shared by lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • More than 1 in 3 Americans believe that the Chinese government engineered the coronavirus as a weapon, and another third are convinced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has exaggerated the threat of Covid-19 to undermine President Trump.
  • Another is less so: a more solitary, anxious figure, moody and detached, perhaps including many who are older and living alone.
  • all conspiring to use Covid-19 for their own dark purposes.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Taking advantage of a very realistic fear and making it much more dramatic
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Still, psychologists do not have a good handle on the types of people who are prone to buy into Big Lie theories, especially the horror-film versions.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      To an extent, most people are prone to buy into these theories
  • The theories afford some psychological ballast, a sense of control, an internal narrative to make sense of a world that seems senseless.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      People don't like thinking things are random!! They like having some semblance of control!!
  • “With all changes happening in politics, the polarization and lack of respect, conspiracy theories are playing a bigger role in people’s thinking and behavior possibly than ever,”
  • Conspiracy theories are as old as human society, of course, and in the days when communities were small and vulnerable, being on guard for hidden plots was likely a matter of personal survival,
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Believing conspiracy theories could have been important to survival at one point in time
  • More than 1 in 3 Americans believe that the Chinese government engineered the coronavirus as a weapon, and another third are convinced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has exaggerated the threat of Covid-19 to undermine President Trump.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Conspiracy theories affect everyone around us. Constantly.
  • “You really have a perfect storm, in that the theories are directed at those who have fears of getting sick and dying or infecting someone else,”
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Theories take advantage of those who already are extremely vulnerable and stressed
  • About 60 percent scored low on the scales, meaning they were resistant to such theories; the other 40 percent ranged above average or higher.
  • For example, qualities like conscientiousness, modesty and altruism were very weakly related to a person’s susceptibility. Levels of anger or sincerity bore no apparent relation; nor did self-esteem.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Are these the results scientists were expecting?
  • The personality features that were solidly linked to conspiracy beliefs included some usual suspects: entitlement, self-centered impulsivity, cold-heartedness (the confident injustice collector), elevated levels of depressive moods and anxiousness (the moody figure, confined by age or circumstance).
  • It’s a pattern of magical thinking that goes well beyond garden variety superstition and usually comes across socially as disjointed, uncanny or “off.”
  • when distracted, people are far more likely to forward headlines and stories without vetting their sources much, if at all.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Distractions can easily be undermined and make people believe conspiracy theories
  • They have a core constituency, and in the digital era its members are going to quickly find one another.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Spread through the internet and social media
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Are shows like Dexter to blame for inspiring violent crimes? | Steve Lillebuen | Opinio... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...inal-season-tv-violence-murder TV Dexter crime pop culture
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • serious crime has always been tied to pop culture.
  • The attempted assassination of US President Ronald Reagan was even linked to watching Taxi Driver.
  • But the scientific evidence backing up such a link has never been very clear, leading many to quite rightly discount the level of influence.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • how Twitchell's crimes challenge this new way of thinking that totally exonerates pop culture from contributing to real-life violence.
  • In 2008, he had been completing a Dexter-inspired film production when police charged him with a missing man's murder and an attack on another. An unimaginable court case then revealed all: the filmmaker had re-enacted his horror script in real-life.
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20
       
      How do you regulate something like this? Many people like myself, watch these shows for the plot lines or topics addressed. People would eventually maneuver around watching shows like these even if they were banned/cancelled.
  • This didn't seem like a case of insanity, mental illness or a drug-induced psychosis. Twitchell was a married father with no history of violence or criminal convictions before he transformed seemingly overnight into a would-be serial killer.
  • We just need to distinguish what it really means to be inspired rather than who is responsible.
  • Like other tragedies before it, this finger-pointing stems from an intense need to find tangible explanations for horrific violence when the answers can be far more layered, far more complex.
  • Millions around the world are now watching. The uncomfortable truth remains that so is Mark Twitchell and many others who are like him.
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Can you trust your earliest childhood memories? - BBC Future - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...ur-earliest-childhood-memories
shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The moments we remember from the first years of our lives are often our most treasured because we have carried them longest. The chances are, they are also completely made up.
  • Around four out of every 10 of us have fabricated our first memory, according to researchers. This is thought to be because our brains do not develop the ability to store autobiographical memories at least until we reach two years old.
  • Yet a surprising number of us have some flicker of memory from before that age
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  • Experts have managed to turn people off all sorts of foods by convincing them it had made them ill when they were a child
  • “People have a life story, particularly as they get older and for some people it needs to stretch back to the very early stage of life,”
  • The prevailing account of how we come to believe and remember things is based around the concept of source monitoring. “Every time a thought comes to mind we have to make a decision – have we experienced it [an event], imagined it or have we talked about it with other people,” says Kimberley Wade
  • Most of the time we make that decision correctly and can identify where these mental experiences come from, but sometimes we get it wrong.
  • Wade admits she has spent a lot of time recalling an event that was actually something her brother experienced rather than herself, but despite this, it is rich in detail and provokes emotion
  • Memory researchers have shown it is possible to induce fictional autobiographical memories in volunteers, including accounts of getting lost in a shopping mall and even having tea with a member of the Royal Family
  • Based on my research, everybody is capable of forming complex false memories, given the right circumstances – Julia Shaw
  • In some situations, such as after looking at pictures or a video, children are more susceptible to forming false memories than adults. People with certain personality types are also thought to be more prone.
  • But carrying around false memories from your childhood could be having a far greater impact on you than you may realise too. The events, emotions and experiences we remember from our early years can help to shape who we are as adults, determining our likes, dislikes, fears and even our behaviour.
  • Memories before the age of three are more than likely to be false. Any that appear very fluid and detailed, as if you were playing back a home video and experiencing a chronological account of a memory, could well also be made up. It is more likely that fuzzy fragments, or snapshots of moments are real, as long as they are not from too early in your life.
  • We crave a cohesive narrative of our own existence and will even invent stories to give us a more complete picture
  • Interestingly, scientists have also found positive suggestions, such as “you loved asparagus the first time you ate it” tend to be more effective than negative suggestions like “you got sick drinking vodka”
  • “Miscarriage of justice, incarceration, loss of reputation, job and status, and family breakdown occur,
  • One of the major problems with legal cases involving false memories, is that it is currently impossible to distinguish between true and fictional recollections
  • Efforts have been made to analyse minor false memories in a brain scanner (fMRI) and detect different neurological patterns, but there is nothing as yet to indicate that this technology can be used to detect whether recollections have become distorted.
  • the most extreme case of memory implantation involves a controversial technique called “regression therapy”, where patients confront childhood traumas, supposedly buried in their subconscious
  • “Memories are malleable and tend to change slightly each time we revisit them, in the same way that spoken stories do,”
  • “Therefore at each recollection, new elements can easily be integrated while existing elements can be altered or lost.”
  • This is not to say that all evidence that relies on memory should be discarded or regarded as unreliable – they often provide the most compelling testimony in criminal cases. But it has led to rules and guidelines about how witnesses and victims should be questioned to ensure their recollections of an event or perpetrator are not contaminated by investigators or prosecutors.
  • Any memories that appear very fluid and detailed, as if you were playing back a home video, could well also be made up
  • While this may seem like a bit of fun, many scientists believe the “false memory diet” could be used to tackle obesity and encourage people to reach for healthier options like asparagus, or even help cut people’s alcohol consumption.
  • Children are more susceptible to forming false memories than adults, especially after looking at photographs or films
  • And we may not want to rid ourselves of these memories. Our memories, whether fictional or not, can help to bring us closer together.
  • anonymous on 04 Nov 20
     
    This is a great and very detailed article about memory and how we change our own memories and are impacted by this change.
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The Brutal Math of Gender Inequality in Hollywood - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...550232 gender inequality hollywood culture
shared by knudsenlu on 13 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Lady Bird won the award for Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, but its writer and director Greta Gerwig was curiously not nominated for Best Director. That category’s five nominees were all male. In fact, only one woman has ever won a Golden Globe for directing: Barbra Streisand, in 1984, for Yentl. At the time, Gerwig was six months old, and her film’s lead actress had not yet been born. Hollywood remains an industry where women are more likely to be celebrated for speaking out in front of a camera than for holding one.
  • Finally, actresses are vulnerable, not only because men dominate powerful occupations, but also because women are cast to portray the very quality of vulnerability
  • Altogether, these surveys and studies suggest something quite simple: The ratio of women in an industry (like film) or in an occupation within that industry (like directing) shapes how women are treated. While more than 80 percent of women say they have been harassed at work, they are 50 percent more likely to say so in male-dominated industries.
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How Psychologists Predict We'll React to Alien News - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...553919 alien psychology science research
shared by knudsenlu on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • On the night before Halloween in 1938, a strange story crackled over radios across the United States. An announcer interrupted the evening’s regular programming for a “special bulletin,” which went on to describe an alien invasion in a field in New Jersey, complete with panicked eyewitness accounts and sounds of gunfire. The story was, of course, fake, a dramatization of The War of The Worlds, the science-fiction novel published by H. G. Wells in 1898. But not all listeners knew that. The intro to the segment was quite vague, and those who tuned in a few minutes into the show found no suggestion that what they were hearing wasn’t true.
  • The exact nature of the reaction of these unlucky listeners has been debated in the decades since the broadcast. Some say thousands of people dashed out of their homes and into the streets in terror, convinced the country was under attack by Martians. Others say there was no such mass panic. Regardless of the actual scale of the reaction, the event helped cement an understanding that would later be perpetuated in science-fiction television shows and films: Humans, if and when they encounter aliens, probably aren’t going to react well.
  • But what if the extraterrestrial life we confronted wasn’t nightmarish and intelligent, as it’s commonly depicted, but rather microscopic and clueless?
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  • Microscopic organisms don’t make for good alien villains, but our chances of discovering extraterrestrial microbial life seem better than encountering advanced alien civilizations, Varnum says. In recent years, more and more scientists have begun to suspect that microbes may exist on moons in our solar system, in the subsurface oceans of Europa and Enceladus and the methane lakes of Titan.
  • In every case, the text-analysis software showed that people, journalists and non-journalists alike, seemed to exhibit more positive than negative emotions in response to news of extraterrestrial microbes.
  • In general, media mentions and their predictive abilities are imperfect measures. Text-analysis software itself has some gaps; the program can’t, for example, detect sarcasm.
  • “A lot of worldviews, both religious and secular, have shown themselves to be pretty flexible,” Varnum says. “The Catholic Church eventually made peace with a heliocentric solar system, right?”
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This Is Why You're Prone to Crying on Airplanes | Time - 1 views

time.com/...airplane-cry-emotion science psychology emotions
shared by sanderk on 20 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • For people who get anxious when there is a change in environment, just arriving at an airport can signal a perceived threat to the brain
  • And a mix of psychological factors related to the plane’s altitude and a perceived loss of control can cause a person to break down emotionally once in the air, DeLuca says.
  • “When you’re dehydrated, it’s not just the body that’s lacking in resources,” De Luca says. “Everything is affected”—including behavior and the brain. “Some people have difficulty self-regulating their emotions.”
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  • A 2017 survey of passengers commissioned by London’s Gatwick Airport found that 15% of men and 6% of women are more likely to cry while watching a film on a flight than if they were to watch that movie elsewhere.
  • sanderk on 20 Oct 19
     
    Whenever I fly I always see people getting freaked and I never knew why. For me, I really enjoy flying and it is fun for me. I found it very interesting that even arriving at an airport can be perceived as a threat to the brain. Also, I understand how people might get freaked out by not having control over the outcome of their flight. The article talks about how this lack of control can make people's brains go into overtime. This article helped explain to me how flying can mess with people's emotions which inturn disables their reasoning.
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'West Side Story' Broadway review: Radical revival is a triumph - 0 views

nypost.com/...w-radical-revival-is-a-triumph
shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • A galvanizing new revival of “West Side Story” opened Thursday night on Broadway, minus some familiar sights and sounds. Jerome Robbins’ legendary choreography has been Jet-tisoned along with the “Somewhere” ballet, and Maria’s chirpy “I Feel Pretty” was given the ax. There’s no longer an intermission, with the musical now running a breakneck one hour and 45 minutes.
  • Instead, in Belgian director Ivo van Hove’s finger-snapping-free staging, there’s a gigantic video wall behind a mostly spare stage, modern clothes and a ferocity not seen since the musical’s 1957 premiere, when The Post’s Richard Watts Jr. called it the story of “the ugliness and horror of a war to the death between the boys.”
  • By pushing back against what we remember from the Oscar-winning 1961 film, a musical that many can recite line-by-line becomes newly suspenseful and gripping.
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  • As we watch during Leonard Bernstein’s booming “Prologue,” when a camera pans across the cast’s faces, the racially specific animus (Puerto Ricans versus the Polish and Irish) is largely gone.
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Coronavirus Live Updates: China Is Tracking Travelers From Hubei - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-coronavirus.html
shared by tongoscar on 14 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • To combat the spread of the coronavirus, Chinese officials are using a combination of technology and policing to track movements of citizens who may have visited Hubei Province.
  • Mobile phone owners in China get their service from one of three state-run telecommunications firms, which this week introduced a feature for subscribers to send text messages to a hotline that generates a list of provinces they have recently visited. That has created a new way for the authorities to see where citizens have traveled.At a high-speed rail station in the eastern city of Yiwu on Tuesday, officials in hazmat suits demanded that passengers send the text messages and then show their location information to the authorities before being permitted to leave the station. Those who had passed through Hubei were unlikely to be allowed entry.
  • Top officials in Beijing on Thursday expanded their mass roundup of sick or possibly infected people beyond Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak, to include other cities in Hubei Province that have been hit hard by the crisis, according to the state-run CCTV broadcaster.
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  • Chinese officials reported Friday that a surge in new infections was continuing, though not as markedly as the day before, when the number of people confirmed to have the virus in Hubei Province skyrocketed by 14,840 cases.
  • Japan has confirmed its first death from the virus.
  • For a moment on Thursday, it seemed as if there might be some good news from the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship being held in the port of Yokohama in Japan, when the authorities said they would release some passengers to shore to finish their quarantine.Instead, Japanese health officials announced the first death from the virus in the country, of a woman in her 80s. It was third death from the virus outside mainland China. The woman had no record of travel there.
  • The Centers for Disease Control said Thursday that a person under quarantine at a military base in San Antonio had tested positive for the virus, bringing the number of confirmed coronavirus patients in the United States to 15.
  • For the first time in a decade, global oil demand is expected to fall.
  • The arts world, too, is feeling the squeeze.Image
  • Movie releases have been canceled in China and symphony tours suspended. A major art fair in Hong Kong was called off. And spring art auctions half a world away in New York have been postponed because well-heeled Chinese buyers may find it difficult to travel to them.
  • The U.S. reported its 15th case after a person under quarantine tested positive.
  • The travel industry in Asia has been upended.Image
  • China ousted a provincial leader at the center of the outbreak.
  • China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday summarily fired two top Communist Party officials from Hubei Province, exacting political punishment for the regional government’s handling of the crisis.
  • A second citizen-journalist in Wuhan has disappeared.
  • A video blogger in the city of Wuhan who had been documenting conditions at overcrowded hospitals at the heart of the outbreak has disappeared, raising concerns among his supporters that he may have been detained by the authorities.The blogger, Fang Bin, is the second citizen journalist in the city to have gone missing in a week after criticizing the government’s response to the coronavirus epidemic.Mr. Fang began posting videos from hospitals in Wuhan on YouTube last month, including one that showed a pile of body bags in a minibus. In early February, Mr. Fang said he had been briefly detained and questioned. A few days later, he filmed an exchange he had with strangers who showed up at his apartment claiming to bring him food.Mr. Fang’s last video, posted on Sunday, was a message written on a piece of paper: “All citizens resist, hand power back to the people.”Last week, Chen Qiushi, a citizen-journalist and lawyer in Wuhan who recorded the plight of patients and the shortage of hospital supplies, vanished, according to his friends.
  • South Korea quarantined hundreds of soldiers who visited China.
6More

Trump tweets threat that 'looting' will lead to 'shooting.' Twitter put a warning label... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 29 May 20 - No Cached
  • Twitter says President Donald Trump has violated its rule against glorifying violence and has affixed a warning label to one of his tweets — the first time such action has been taken against the president's account.
  • This means the tweet will not be removed, but will be hidden behind a notice that says "this Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public's interest for the Tweet to remain accessible." Users can view it if they click past the notice.
  • Later on Friday morning, Trump resumed his criticisms of Twitter and tweeted that "it will be regulated." The official White House Twitter account also posted the same tweet after it was flagged by Twitter in an apparent attempt from the Trump administration to further test the platform's rules.
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  • "As is standard with this notice, engagements with the Tweet will be limited," Twitter said in a tweet explaining its decision. "People will be able to Retweet with Comment, but will not be able to Like, Reply or Retweet it."
  • The post in question was about a third night of protests following the death of George Floyd, a black man who was filmed on video saying that he could not breathe as a white police officer used his knee to pin Floyd down.
  • Less than two-and-a-half hours later, Twitter took action. "This Tweet violates our policies regarding the glorification of violence based on the historical context of the last line, its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today," the company said.
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Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Explained in a Pioneering 1923 Silent Film - Brain Pic... - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...y-of-relativity-fleischer-1923 Physics Observer Participatory Universe
shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • “This is a participatory universe,” physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who popularized the term black hole, wrote in his influential theory known as It from Bit, asserting that “physics gives rise to observer-participancy; observer-participancy gives rise to information; and information gives rise to physics” — an assertion he could not have made without Einstein’s theory of relativity and its groundbreaking insight into how the laws of physics appear to different observers with different frames of reference.
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Don't Scream: Why do we find things scary? - BBC Three - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...55-00a2-4e34-ac68-369c53567b82 science psychology brain science
shared by anniina03 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Spiders? Clowns? Really tall buildings? There are lots of things that might make you scream — but why is it that we get so scared and what can we do to control these fears?
  • "It's evolutionary, it's biological and essentially it's about survival," says Dr Warren Mansell, a psychologist at the University of Manchester and author of a book about coping with fear."Our bodies need a way of getting ourselves prepared to either escape or defend ourselves against some kind of threat.""Being able to recognise and respond to a threat quickly and to get away is essential," adds sociologist Dr Margee Kerr, who specialises in the study of fear. "It's definitely kept us humans alive."
  • The most common way we deal with fear is the "fight-or-flight" response, when your heart rate increases and your pupils dilate.
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  • There's also the startle response — when you jump out of your skin — which is a way to get yourself away from something when you haven't got the time to even work out what it is, but it's coming at you very suddenly and very loudly.
  • First up, there's the classic jump scare, explains Andy Nyman, co-creator of the long-running London horror stage play Ghost Stories, which was also turned into a 2017 film starring Martin Freeman. "Often people think that's a bit of a cheap thing to do but the reality is that it's actually quite a sophisticated thing to pull off."If you can get it right, misdirecting an audience properly and then giving them a jump scare is a really wonderful thing because you're properly catching them off guard."
  • Then, Andy goes on, there's the type of scare that you can't shake off. "These are the scares that are attached to imagery or a moment that means when you close your eyes that's all you can see. These are much deeper-rooted."
  • If you're a very jumpy person who gets scared easily (or if you have a specific phobia, a severe form of fear that impacts on your life), there are things you can do on your own and with a therapist to help you improve
  • "The first thing is to realise that it's best to take things at your own pace and that may mean you don't need to face that fear right now but you're going to do it when you're ready."Most things that frighten people can be broken down into smaller, more manageable sections
  • And Dr Kerr has some practical tips, too, including exposure therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy and breathing exercises.
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