What’s New

Major edits and additions are listed here in reverse chronological order.

• 4/22/24: Added “Perceptions Of Social Dominance And How To Change Them,” Marjorie Hecht.

  This article presents evidence that even infants are aware of and respond to social dominance. However, its proposed remedies are weak. Merely reducing income inequality somewhat and helping more people climb social ladders is insufficient. How many openings are there on the higher rungs anyway? The Top-Down System’s primary mission is to encourage everyone to relentlessly, energetically climb these ladders, dominate and look down on those below, and submit to those above — for personal gain. The solution is to establish a higher purpose for society and make justified, democratic hierarchies a means to serve that purpose rather than ends in and of themselves — in a Bottom-Up System. “Starting gate equality” that leaves losers on their own or in need of aid is inadequate. [Posted in Domination]

• 4/18/24: Edited the Preface.

• “Supercommuicators,” Interview with Charles Duhigg

  Whether it is expletive-filled letter writing or the kind of political campaigning we discussed earlier in the program, there's one skill they both require and that is effective communication. Of course, throughout history and still today, it's a tool of the powerful for both good and bad, but it's also crucial in all of our daily lives, in the workplace, in our personal relationships, and more than ever online. [read more] (posted in Communication)

• “Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet,” L. M. Sacasas.

  In Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet, L. M. Sacasas, editor of The Convivial Society, argues

  • Part of what is going on is that, having grown up with devices at the ready, many people are now simply unable to imagine how to live apart from the steady stream of stimuli that they supply.

    Human beings will naturally seek distractions rather than confront their own thoughts in moments of solitude and quiet because those thoughts will eventually lead them to consider unpleasant matters such as their own mortality, the vanity of their endeavors, and the general frailty of the human condition.

    We are all of us kings now surrounded by devices whose only purpose is to prevent us from thinking about ourselves. [read more] (posted in Big Tech

• “Sisyphus on the Street” A review by Jason DeParle

  In “Sisyphus on the Street,” Jason DeParle reviews Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People by Tracy Kidder…. DeParle reports that in Kidder’s book “there’s not much about the broader inequality from which homelessness springs and almost nothing about politics or the paucity of housing aid…. To connect the policy dots,” DeParle writes, “readers might consult Marybeth Shinn and Jill Khadduri’s In the Midst of Plenty: Homelessness and What to Do About It (2020), a clear-eyed journey through a rich academic literature.” [read more] (Posted in Housing/Homelessness)

• “The Anxious Generation.” Interview with Jonathan Haidt by Walter Isaacson
  April 1, 2024 (17.52) Amanpour and Co.

  Smartphones and social media have altered children’s development. Jonathan Haidt joins Hari to talk about how parents can manage the negative impacts. [read more] (added in Big Tech)

• 4/3/24. Edited Systemic Introduction.

• Supercommuicators, Charles Duhigg, Interview

   And one of the things that we know about conversations is that when we ask questions, when we ask a special kind of question known as a deep question, it tends to change a monologue into a dialogue because we really listen to the other person. And when we prove that we're listening, they become more willing to listen to us. [read more] [posted in Social/Communication]

• Valor Academy’s Circle, Wade Lee Hudson

  I found “How one school is centering social-emotional learning” to be profoundly inspiring. This PBS “Brief but Spectacular” video documents a Valor Collegiate Academy mutual aid “Circle.” Since 2014, Valor has expanded to more than 30,000 students nationwide. Their success suggests the holistic, egalitarian movement is spreading. Time is short, however. The world may be on a deadly downward spiral.

  Daren Dickson, Valor’s Chief Culture Officer, says, “Our dream has been to turn circle facilitation over to the kids as they get into high school. We all know that middle schoolers are much more impacted by each other than by adults, so having them lead the practice will be more meaningful. “

  This 11-minute video captures a Circle led by a Valor student. 

  Valor encourages students to share what’s going on in their lives and accept support. Their mission is “sharp minds; big hearts.”  They aim to create a community of care “to empower our diverse community to live inspired, purposeful lives,…bring our diverse community together, and support each other in identity and relational development.”  Valor bases its approach on four pillars: 1) top-tier academics; 2) intentional diversity; 3) built to last; and 4) whole child development.
  (Use Insert/Comment to comment) [posted in Education]

• The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch (excerpts)

  …Trump showed himself to be an attentive student of disinformation and its operative principle: Reality is what you can get away with…. Previous presidents and national politicians. They may spin the truth, bend it, or break it, but they pay homage to it and regard it as a boundary. Trump's approach is entirely different….

  He was asserting that truth and falsehood were subject to his will…. The lying reflects a strategy,... a national-level epistemic attack: a systematic attack, emanating from the very highest reaches of power, on our collective ability to distinguish truth from falsehood….

• How one school is centering social-emotional learning

  At Valor Collegiate Academy in Nashville, helping students thrive personally and academically through a weekly social-emotional learning practice called Circle is central to their values. The school encourages students to share what’s going on in their lives and to accept support, creating a community of care. According to one student, "It's half-way between a group therapy session and an AA meeting." (read more) [posted in Social/Education]

• The NFL and the Egalitarian Cultural Revolution, Wade Lee Hudson

…Recently, Burke Robinson, a Stanford University management lecturer, helped the San Francisco 49ers to winning records with a new collaborative formula. This approach emphasizes the collective embrace of collaboratively defined core values and principles that provide a precise sense of direction…. (read more) [posted in Cultural/Sports]

1. “Fluke” author Interview Transcript

   ”I grew up in the U.S., where I was sort of told you have to sort of just make your own path. This sort of individualist mindset, the American dream, and so on. And it's a culture that is extremely focused on control, right?

   And I describe in the book how I was living, you know, what I described as a checklist existence. And I think when you start to think about the role of these forces that are sometimes arbitrary, accidental, and random, and also the chaos theory, the ripple effects of our decisions, it starts to liberate you a little bit, right? It starts to make you feel like, you know what, it's maybe OK if I don't have so much top-down control. And that's what I've internalized as a lesson from the book….

   So, instead of imagining that we can have this top-down control, I think we have to have a little bit less hubris and also accept the limits of what humans can and cannot control.” (read more) [Posted in Systemic/Articles]

2. Does “the System” exist?

   References to  “the system” are common in advertising, political commentary, popular culture, and elsewhere, but few people define what they mean by the phrase.

   Wikipedia says, “A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole.” 

   This description leaves open the question of whether any one element controls or dominates a particular system. Concerning human societies, for instance, who rules? Who’s to blame? (read more) (Posted in Systemic/Articles]

3. Rhiannon Giddens Interview

   AMANPOUR: And next, Rhiannon Giddens is currently carving out her own impressive legacy. She's the singer, songwriter, banjo player, fiddler, and actress who keeps adding strings to her bow. "You're the One" is her latest release and her first full album of original songs. She won the Pulitzer Prize in music for her opera "Omar," and she's been on a global tour with Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road ensemble. Now, she's joining Walter Isaacson to discuss her unstoppable career.

   [read more] (Posted in Cultural/Music)

4. My Story: Egalitarian Community Organizing, Wade Lee Hudson

   My experience with egalitarian community organizing began as a child on the baseball diamond in Dallas. We’d gather, choose teams, and play ball without a coach or umpire. In high school, I initiated a leaderless chess club with a self-regulating method to structure the competition. As a freshman at UC Berkeley, I joined a 100-member room-and-board student co-op that managed itself, which introduced me to the cooperative movement. 

   My first political act was participating in a small rally protesting the blockade that led to the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In the Spring of 1963, Bob Dylan’s music and James Baldwin’s speech on campus inspired me. 

   Read More

5. Justice by Means of Democracy: A Review, Wade Lee Hudson

   In her magnificent magnum opus, Justice by Means of Democracy, Danielle Allen affirms egalitarianism and criticizes domination. She proposes a “power-sharing liberalism” rooted in “difference without domination” and applies her analysis to the entire society: politics, the economy, and society. Nevertheless, her analysis falls short.

   Allen affirms the development of 

   citizens’ ability to adopt habits of non-domination in their ordinary interactions with one another.… This would permit us to establish a virtuous cycle linking political, social, and economic domains in support of the kind of human flourishing that rests on autonomy, both private and public.

   This attention to interpersonal relationships by a political scientist is rare and vital. 

   She defines difference without domination as social patterns that don’t involve any group or individual controlling another. She rightly asserts that protecting private autonomy is as important as safeguarding political liberties.

   Allen recognizes the necessity to submit to legitimate limits “that come from laws, shared cultural practices, social norms, and organizational protocols.” These hierarchies, however, must “avoid an arbitrary or rights-violating exercise of power.”

   Read More [posted in Systemic/Articles]

6. The Willingness to Submit, Wade Lee Hudson

   Conformity comes in many shapes, and often it’s rational. Unfortunately, society fosters irrational submission that undermines personal and collective empowerment. Determining if rebellion is justified can be tricky, but these decisions are essential, and engaging in effective resistance is critical.

   Many people please their teacher to gain good grades and please their boss to get promoted. They self-censor and avoid expressing their views on controversial topics to minimize the risk of job loss or career opportunities. They work for dictatorial employers who regulate their speech, clothing, and manners and threaten to fire them for their political activities, diet, or almost anything bosses care to govern. 

   Read More (Posted in Social/Domination)

7. The Essential Skills for Being Human, David Brooks

   …I have learned something profound along the way. Being openhearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills. The real process of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete actions well: being curious about other people; disagreeing without poisoning relationships; revealing vulnerability at an appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.

   People want to connect. Above almost any other need, human beings long to have another person look into their faces with love and acceptance. The issue is that we lack practical knowledge about how to give one another the attention we crave. Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life. (read more) [Posted in Social/Communication) RELATED: David Brooks Interview

8. Zoning Out, Daniel Immerwahr

   Capitalism no longer dreams of a unified world. Instead, market radicals have shattered the globe into thousands of zones, enclaves, and special jurisdictions. And they’ve left the rest of us to live among the shards. (read more) (Posted in Economic/Economic Policy)

9. Interview with "The Politics of Language" Author and Yale University Professor of Philosophy Jason Stanley

   Speech is more than just about factuality. [Effective activists] try to point (people) to actual circumstances in their communities that ... the local community sees. ... You switch the vocabulary up to avoid the expressions that are connected with polarization... One goal of politics, a political strategy, is to infuse more and more words with this kind of identity.

10. So, as soon as your political opponent uses one of those words, in this case, climate change, people's minds shut off. So, they group people into groups and people don't listen to the arguments... The vocabulary affected policy... It justified treating children in terrible ways. (read more) (Posted in Social/Communication)

11. Why Trump Won’t Let Go of His Dream of Domination, Thomas B. Edsall.

    Dan P. McAdams: Trump’s unique personality profile — the high extraversion and low agreeableness, the narcissistic motivations, the “warrior” life story — seems perfectly suited to assume the authoritarian mantle at a time in American history when many Americans crave the security and exult in the excitement that such a mantle seems to confer. Even as he creates chaos, Donald Trump — as president of the United States — confidently assured Americans that he would deliver them from chaos. We will be standing safe and strong in the end. We will win. We will dominate…

    Kevin Smith: [Democratic Norms] are incredibly hard to institutionalize but, unfortunately, apparently much easier to destroy. And once they are gone, they may be incredibly hard to re-establish. If that’s correct, then the end result may be a political system that is indeed more open to shocks of unconstrained coercive alpha male behavior but also to unprincipled behavior among political elites more generally. If there are few costs and clear benefits to such behavior, what’s the argument for not seeking power solely to benefit you and yours and to heck with everybody else? (read more) (Posted in Systemic/Domination/Partnership)

12. No Freedom to Move, Marina Warner.

    “…It is clear … that the current politics of immigration have turned and twisted human nature against itself and our own kind and are fostering unimaginable maltreatment of those who wish only to survive and live a better life. As Warsan Shire, whose family left Somalia and then managed to relocate to Britain, writes in one of her most unforgettable poems, “no one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark.” War, famine, religious and ethnic strife, and natural catastrophes will continue to drive thousands to leave, despite the extreme danger.

    Forthright as they are, neither book addresses the question, “What would happen if the borders were opened?” But both strongly convey the urgency of fundamentally rethinking immigration policy, especially in the context of accelerating global warming. What if, instead of transferring millions of dollars and euros to unstable countries and dictatorships to keep out border crossers and sanctuary seekers, these vast resources were used to set up legal avenues for migrants, welcome centers, education and training, and to rethink the restrictions on their rights (to work, to move on, to marry)? Before World War II, from 1922 to 1938, there were Nansen passports for undocumented refugees (not entirely satisfactory, as Hannah Arendt reported, but far better than current attitudes to statelessness).

    The apparatus of enforcement crushes its targets; even when asylum seekers finally succeed (and many thousands do because they have legal grounds for their claim), they have been damaged physically by the horrors of their treatment, and exhausted psychologically. It is also worth considering the damage to the enforcers, not because I want to defend them but because state support for their actions does harm to the entire social body. Frantz Fanon, when working as a psychiatric doctor in Algeria, found himself treating the survivors of torture and their torturers; both were haunted, hobbled, incapacitated by what they had been through, what they had done.

    It is already late to act, but that is a poor reason for inaction. Many fine minds are exploring the possibilities of changing direction: Lyndsey Stonebridge in Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018), Mary Jacobus in On Belonging and Not Belonging (2022), David Herd in Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World: Making Space for the Human (2023), John Washington in his new book, The Case for Open Borders. “As we deny, cast out, and crack down, we have turned our thresholds into barricades,” Washington writes. “We lose our own home by denying it to others.”

    Are open borders so unthinkable? When German chancellor Angela Merkel accepted a million Syrians in 2015–2016, and more recently when even the United Kingdom established a sponsorship scheme for Ukrainian refugees, as had happened for Jews fleeing the Nazi regime before and during World War II, they demonstrated that a different course can be adopted. The prime minister and members of recent and current Conservative governments of the UK are the children of immigrants, not all of whom were wealthy or particularly educated (and therefore would not qualify for admission to the country today). It is one of the bitterest ironies of the present political uses of xenophobia in Britain that children of Black and brown immigrants, whose right to enter inspired generations like mine to march in protest against exclusionary government policies, are now eagerly consolidating “the hostile environment,” blocking legal routes of immigration, and stoking the frenzy against “small boats.” (read more) [Posted in Politics/Immigration]

13. The Liberal Agenda of the 1960s Has Reached a Fork in the Road, Thomas Edsall.

    “People are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness... favor fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.” (Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin and Paul Bloom)... Democrats give top priority, at 51.2 percent, to ensuring that everyone’s basic needs are met. (Nicholas Dias) (read more) [Posted in Economic/Economic Inequality)

14. The Women of NOW, Katherine Turk

    So, yes, I think NOW's story can help us understand what we lose when the grassroots is no longer in the driver's seat... The national landscape, at least of these D.C. based organizations, what they're offering people is oftentimes a way to give money, a way to sign up as a member, perhaps sign a petition, open your e-mail inbox to lots of messages, but what's missing from the research that I've done on NOW in its most productive years in the early '70s is a way to do something, a way to organize in your community around those issues in a local sense, a way that matters to you and to the people where you live, but can also be nationally coordinated... In the early '70s, in its first decade or so, was really only loosely coordinated from the top, and it was local members who were in the driver's seat, not only signing petitions and, you know, paying those membership dues, but actually driving the movement's agenda. And what's lost when it's a more top-down model is people's sense of ownership, not only belonging, but really being able to shape the agenda of a movement that is also theirs. (Posted in Political/Organizing)

• Center for Cultural Power

  “Culture is power Culture is the beating heart of our human experience. It is the traditions, rituals, and expressions of our deepest values and beliefs. It provides continuity and connection across generations and moves us forward. Culture is fluid and ever-changing, shaping what we think is possible. Culture can heal, sustain collective action, and is the space where we dream new worlds into existence. When we harness cultural power our wildest dreams become possible, and then become real.” (read more) (Posted in Cultural/Advocates).

• 5 ways to create a compassionate workplace

  “We live in tumultuous times which can create an added layer of uncertainty for employees who need to build relationships with students, patients or clients. Providing calm, confident and warm emotional labour can be difficult for people experiencing burnout, grief or compassion fatigue.” (read more) (Posted in Cultural/Action)

• Guide to Local Peace Economy

  “This guide explores the concept, models, and examples of the peace economy: the giving, sharing, thriving, caring economy without which none of us would be alive. A peace economy is the sharing of resources, a culture of care, and the remembrance that there is enough abundance for all of us on this planet. It is the return to a culture that understands true value and wealth come from nurturing life, love, and joy. We call it a "local" peace economy because it operates at the local level, beginning in the commons. This guide also offers ways to divest from the war economy that is destroying life and well-being on this planet.” (read more) [Posted in Economy/Advocacy]

• Cultural Workers Organize

  “A research project that explores the hypothesis that flexworkers in the arts, communication, and cultural industries are protagonists of a recomposition of labour politics today.” (read more) [Posted in Cultural/Advocates]

• Counter Authoritarians with Practical Idealism, Wade Lee Hudson

  Authoritarian gurus, teachers, preachers, therapists, coaches, writers, lecturers, trainers, and other Leaders assume an air of authority and seduce people to surrender to the Leader’s wisdom. 

  They persuade followers to believe they can achieve unrealistic abstract absolute goals, but the disciples repeatedly fall short. Frustrated, they repeatedly return to the Leader for guidance about how to gain perfection — like a mouse chasing cheese in a running-wheel cage. The result is never-ending submission to the Leaders’ power. 

  Practical idealists offer an alternative: focus on winnable concrete goals that move toward long-term ideals, grounded in body and earth, knowing they’ll never win a final victory. They keep two ideas in mind at the same time: the ideal and immediate reality. (read more)

• Why do we want to dominate or be subservient to another?, Krishnamurti

  It is essential, is it not?, if one is to resolve any of these problems of our life, to tackle them oneself directly, to be in relationship with them, and not merely rely on specialists, experts, religious leaders, or political givers of panaceas. …

  One of the problems, amongst others, which most of us have not very deeply and fundamentally faced, is the question of domination and submission. …Why is it that we dominate, consciously or unconsciously? (read more) [posted in Domination]

• What Happens When a Woman Chooses Career Dominance Over Her Relationship, Jessica Grose

  ...For women who didn’t want to take a step back, there were two additional barriers to success. One was “the pressure to give up what they saw as their relational style in favor of the hard-charging ‘masculine’ style the firm venerated in client interactions.” The second was that the mothers who did make it to partner were “routinely” belittled by colleagues as bad mothers and bad role models. ...Ely and Padavic interviewed one man who was, in their words, “resolute in his conviction that women’s personal preferences were the obstacle to their success.” This left him “unable to account for such anomalies as childless women, whose promotion record was no better than that of mothers. In his calculation all women were mothers, a conflation that was common in our interviews.” ... And this truth has echoes in economic research like that of Claudia Goldin, this year’s winner of the Nobel in economics. This week, in an interview about her award, she said, “We’re never going to have gender equality until we also have couple equity.” ...[The film] “Fair Play” at least understands that we’re a long way from that happening. [Posted in Domination]

• They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie? Gideon Lewis-Kraus

  Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino became famous for their research into why we bend the truth. Now they’ve both been accused of fabricating data. …

  Ariely, for his part, predicted that nudges were just the beginning, and held out for more ambitious social engineering. He told me, “I thought that in many cases paternalism is going to be necessary.” ... It now seems as though the “fudge factor” was less of an explanation of a phenomenon than a license for it—yet another just-so story about why a little deceit isn’t so bad after all. …

  George Loewenstein, ...has refashioned his research program, conceding that his own work might have contributed to an emphasis on the individual at the expense of the systemic. “This is the stuff that C.E.O.s love, right?” Luigi Zingales, an economist at the University of Chicago, told me. “It’s cutesy, it’s not really touching their power, and pretends to do the right thing.” [read more] (posted in Culture/Corruption)

• Grow Compassion, Build Community, Change the System: A Declaration for Action

  By Wade Lee Hudson

  Introduction

  Countless individuals and organizations relieve suffering and promote justice. Unfortunately, this compassionate humanity community is fragmented and afflicted with selfish and competitive hyper-individualism. Members don’t support each other to undo or control divisive social conditioning, even though this mutual aid could increase their effectiveness, help them unite based on shared principles, adopt new ways of working together, cultivate caring cooperation throughout society, and grow a compassionate humanity movement to change the System.

  Currently, gaining wealth, power, and status is primary. Money is a way to keep score. Political ambition is an addiction. Social recognition is an obsession. But these patterns aren’t inevitable.

  Businesses can serve the public interest as well as earn profits. Politicians can be community organizers who help build people power. Everyone can welcome praise, if it comes, as icing on the cake rather than seek it. We can make wealth, power, and status means to a higher end: serving humanity, the environment, and life itself, the invisible creative force that energizes and stabilizes the universe and enables living objects to reproduce. [read more]

• Transforming Dysfunctional Organizations: The Desire to Dominate and the Willingness to Submit, Wade Lee Hudson.

  Power struggles weaken organizations, but hardly anyone addresses the divisive social conditioning that inflames the desire to dominate and the willingness to submit for personal gain. Overcoming this divisive root cause can help fix dysfunctional organizations and build a systemic reform movement to transform society into a just and compassionate community rooted in democratic hierarchies.

  Hyper-individualistic, hyper-competitive domination leads to exploitation and efforts to defeat “enemies” and punish scapegoats. Blind submission reinforces the status quo. The failure to distinguish between justified and unjustified domination/submission interferes with controlling adverse reactions.

  Paternalistic human service professionals assume a superior, controlling, disabling attitude toward clients. Nonprofit housing corporations resist collaborating with tenant councils. Kind-hearted people-helpers seek ego gratification and social status. Teachers funnel knowledge into students’ minds in a one-way process. Traditional doctors and nurses treat patients as objects. Self-seeking trainers of all sorts hustle for money and praise. (read more) [posted in Systemic/Articles]

• Why Aren’t Cops Held to Account? Linda Greenhouse.

  Decades of Supreme Court decisions have converted qualified immunity from a commonsense rule into a powerful doctrine that deprives people injured by police misconduct of recourse. [posted in Politics/Criminal Justice]

• Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood, Jo Freeman

  Trashing is a particularly vicious form of character assassination which amounts to psychological rape. It is manipulative, dishonest, and excessive. It is occasionally disguised by the rhetoric of honest conflict, or covered up by denying that any disapproval exists at all. But it is not done to expose disagreements or resolve differences. It is done to disparage and destroy. [read more] (posted in Gender/Articles)

• The Scapegoat Trap, Wade Lee Hudson.

  . . . The result is widespread frustration, and people often take out their anger on handy targets — a family member, their boss, a racial or ethnic group, powerful elites, the opposing political party, Donald Trump, or some other scapegoat.

  I first encountered the notion of a scapegoat when I worked as an orderly in a psychiatric institution run by Dr. “Bob” Beavers, whose System Model of Family Assessment significantly impacted psychiatry. His study of family systems led him to conclude that families often vent their frustrations on one family member, which worsens the scapegoat’s suffering.

  In the Bible, after the chief priest had symbolically laid the people's sins upon it, Hebrews released a goat into the wilderness, believing the animal would take with it all the sins and impurities of the community. But today, instead of a goat, it's a political opponent, a racial group, or world leaders who bear the brunt of society's frustrations. . . (read more) [posted in Systemic/Articles]

• The Life of the Party, Osita Nwanevu

  In general, nothing about empowering the state to make critical investments necessarily implies empowering the workers manning those projects or labor at large. Taking this critique seriously could produce yet another moral capitalism, in a guise and policy combination not yet tried. But one can also see in it the seeds of a radical turn, perhaps toward what we might call economic democracy. [read more] (Posted in Economic Policy)

• John Lewis Speech Transcript at the March on Washington, John Lewis

  We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here. For they are receiving starvation wages or no wages at all. While we stand here, there are sharecroppers in the Delta of Mississippi who are out in the fields working for less than three dollars a day, 12 hours a day. While we stand here, there are students in jail on trumped-up charges. Our brother James Farmer, along with many others, is also in jail. We come here today with a great sense of misgiving. It is true that we support the administration’s Civil Rights Bill. We support it with reservation, however. [read more]

• The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way, Adam Grant

  in multiple experiments led by the psychologist Alexander Haslam, the opposite held true. Groups actually made smarter decisions when leaders were chosen at random than when they were elected by a group or chosen based on leadership skill.

  Why were randomly chosen leaders more effective? They led more democratically. “Systematically selected leaders can undermine group goals,” Dr. Haslam and his colleagues suggest, because they have a tendency to “assert their personal superiority.” When you’re anointed by the group, it can quickly go to your head: I’m the chosen one.

  When you know you’re picked at random, you don’t experience enough power to be corrupted by it. Instead, you feel a heightened sense of responsibility: I did nothing to earn this, so I need to make sure I represent the group well. [read more] (posted in Politics/Democracy)

• Oppenheimer, Wade Lee Hudson

  After watching the feature film, “Oppenheimer,” I viewed the PBS documentary, “The Day After Trinity,” and the documentary about its production on the Criterion channel. I then did some research on the issues these films raise.

  The backdrop for the decision to bomb Hiroshima was America’s apparently unusual demand for unconditional surrender from Germany and Japan.  [read more] (Posted in Political/Foreign Policy)

• Learning from the Obama Movement, Wade Lee Hudson

  Barack Obama's presidential campaigns showed we can create a large national movement based on local teams focused on achievable goals. Instead of relying solely on top-down leadership, the campaigns enabled ordinary citizens to collaborate as equals. We can learn from these efforts to build a movement to transform the worldwith compassion and justice one demand at a time. (read more) [posted in Systemic/Essays]

• Economists Love Immigration. Why Do So Many Americans Hate It?

  “In “Immigration and Democracy” (Oxford), Sarah Song, a professor of law and political science at Berkeley, offers an alternative to this depressing dialectic.... she arrives at a middle road: “What is required is not closed borders or open borders but controlled borders and open doors.”... What Song ends up constructing is an ethical basis for an immigration system that, with some reforms, America could plausibly achieve.” (Read more) [Posted in Politics/Immigration]

• Leading Change Network

  Organized people power leading change towards a more just, sustainable, and democratic world.

  We develop and support new civic leadership that organizes communities to build power and create change.

  We are a global community of organizers, practitioners, educators and researchers catalyzing change through the power of narratives, rooted in the pedagogy and practice of community organizing.

  We develop and support new civic leadership that organizes communities to build power and create change. We build the leadership, organizing capacity and resources of change makers across the globe to enable them to win campaigns that strengthen justice and human rights.

  LCN members are developing leadership and building power in over 75 countries. (Posted in Political/Organizing/Advocates)

• Othering and Belonging Institute

  WE ALL BELONG IN THE CIRCLE OF HUMAN CONCERN. Othering is the problem of our time. Belonging is the solution.

  The Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley advances groundbreaking approaches to transforming structural marginalization and inequality. We are scholars, organizers, communicators, researchers, artists, and policymakers committed to building a world where all people belong. [posted in Systemic/Advocates]

• The Ancient Patterns of Migration, Deborah Barsky.

  Today’s hot-button issue is actually as old as the human race…. Since then, peoples of shared inheritance have established strict protocols for assuring their sense of membership in one or another national context. Documents proving birthright guarantee that “outsiders” are kept at a distance and enable strict control by a few chosen authorities, maintaining a stronghold against any possible breach of the system. Members of each social unit are indoctrinated through an elaborate preestablished apprenticeship, institutionally reinforced throughout every facet of life: religious, educational, family, and workplace. ..(read more) [posted in Systemic/Articles]

• From "The Transcendentalist," by Ralph Waldo Emerson

  NOTE: In this lecture, which Emerson delivered at the Masonic Temple, Boston, in January 1842, he vividly describes the young Transcendentalists of his day with great sympathy. However, toward the end, he voices some criticisms of “ all these of whom I speak (who) are not proficients; they are novices;…”

  But he concludes with:

  Will you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable?... The thoughts which these few hermits strove to proclaim by silence, as well as by speech, not only by what they did, but by what they forbore to do, shall abide in beauty and strength, to reorganize themselves in nature, to invest themselves anew in other, perhaps higher endowed and happier mixed clay than ours, in fuller union with the surrounding system.

  Following are excerpts.

  +++++

  …It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. [read more] [Posted in Personal/Spirituality]

• The Politics of Delusion Have Taken Hold, Thomas Edsall

  These excerpts from Edsall’s New York Times essay., The Politics of Delusion Have Taken Hold, The language is his except where indicated. Following these excerpts, I post a comment. Posted in Political/Partisan Divide

  “Matters of status and identity are easy to whip up into existential conflicts with zero-sum solutions. To the extent that political leaders are encouraging people to focus on threats to their social status rather than their economic or material well-being, they are certainly directing attention in an unhelpful and often dangerous direction. It’s much easier to think of others as disproportionately dangerous and extreme when their victory means your loss, rather than focusing on the overall well-being of the nation as a whole.” (Lilliana Mason) [read more]

• Agenda-Free Conversation

  In line with “What Conversation Can Do for Us,” by Hua Hsu, suspend efforts to persuade and simply explore whatever’s on the minds of the participants, listening closely and aiming to better understand each other.
  Added to Social/Actions/Other Proposals.

• What Conversation Can Do for Us, By Hua Hsu

  Our culture is dominated by efforts to score points and win arguments. But do we really talk anymore?

  ...“In past eras, daily life made it necessary for individuals to engage with others different from themselves,” Paula Marantz Cohen explains... Cohen, a professor of English at Drexel University, is the author of “Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation” (Princeton). She makes the case that talking to others—sharing our stories—is how we learn things and sharpen our belief systems, how we piece together what it means to be funny or empathetic. Conversation can change our minds while sustaining our souls... (read more) Posted in Social/Communication

• Danielle Allen and Ezra Klein on A.I. and Deliberative Democracy, By Wade Lee Hudson

  In her April 14, 2023 interview on the Ezra Klein Show, Danielle Allen (whose new book is Justice by Means of Democracy) addresses how society might use modern technology to develop and strengthen “deliberative democracy structures that we have not yet set up.” Klein calls voting “a pretty thin level of participation” and envisions methods to enable people to “really be part of steering the ship of state.” 

  Klein argues, “You could have things like citizens assemblies and meetings, and in other ways, you could have a thicker kind of participation and advisory role for the public than you currently do.” Modern deliberative digital tools can enhance democracy, which Allen defines as “equal empowerment across a body of free and equal citizens.” She believes, “One of the greatest values of democracy is that together we can be much smarter than we can be as individuals.” Posted in Politics'/Democracy. Read more

• Daily Reflection: U.S. Development Support

  TV talking heads only give lip service to addressing the roots causes of the current migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. This issue used to be Vice-Present Kamala Harris’ responsibility, but we’ve heard little about her efforts. Today’s lead story in the Times, “What’s Driving Record Levels of Migration to the U.S. Border?” described the crises in Latin America that have upended the lives of millions, but says nothing about U.S. efforts to help mitigate these problems. Rather, it merely laments in its sub-head that the U.S. “has little control over (them).” I find this passivity disturbing, a probable lack of compassion..

  So I asked ChatGPT a series of questions:

  1. What does the United States do to help boost economic development in countries south of the border?

  2. How much money does the United States spend to help boost economic development in countries south of the border?

  3. What percentage of its annual budget does the United States spend to help boost economic development in countries south of the border?

  4. What do advocates propose for how the United States could better boost economic development in countries south of the border?

  Its responses follow:

  ​Read More​

• Audre Lorde’s 1979 landmark lecture, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House”, reflected on the women’s movement’s work with consciousness-raising groups. (read more, 5/10/23 entry)

• The Holy Thursday Revolution, Beatrice Bruteau

  “Drawing from a wide range of disciplines Bruteau presents a unifying vision of a world that must move from…domination to one of equality and sharing… Presents [jesus’] two teaching events of Holy Thursday -- Footwashing and Holy Communion -- as entry gates into a new way of living and loving in a world of domination, power, and separation.”

• The War in Ukraine and the Future of Democracy (audio), Timothy Snyder.

  Democracy might or might not have a future. The signs, in general, are not good… The future is democracy, or it is not at all.

  We are used to people telling us that we have to choose between freedom and security. In fact, we have to choose both to get either…

  The war in Ukraine is a specific (and terrible) instance of a general problem... The Ukrainian president’s choice to remain in the country, I argue, is an important reminder that democracy exists as a commitment, or not at all...

  We…have tended to forget that democracy is about the future, and as such can only exist when individuals seek to generate futures on the basis of values with the help of institutions that allow them to do so… We have tended to believe the democracy was inevitable, because there were no alternatives, because capitalism would guarantee it, and so on. In fact, placing faith in structural factors and abstractions makes democracy impossible. Democracy will always be a struggle. (read more; listen to audio) [Posted in Political/Democracy]

• How to Strangle Democracy While Pretending to Engage in It, Carlos Lozada

  ...But the German-born Hirschman — who in addition to being an academic economist was a U.S. Army veteran, an antifascist resister, an adviser on the Marshall Plan and a consultant to the Colombian government — was too intellectually honest, or simply had seen too much of the world, to stop with the right. The left displays its own unity of certitude, he suggested in the penultimate chapter of “The Rhetoric of Reaction,” and its habit of rationalization is “richer in maneuvers, largely of exaggeration and obfuscation, than it is ordinarily given credit for.”...

  (read more) [Posted in Political/Democracy]

• The U.S. Thinks ‘It Can’t Happen Here.’ It Already Has, By Jamelle Bouie

  The move from democracy to autocracy isn’t a sudden shift. It is not a switch that flips from light to dark with nothing in between. But it’s also not quite right to call the path to authoritarianism a journey. To use a metaphor of travel or distance is to suggest something external, removed, foreign.

  It is better, in the U.S. context at least, to think of authoritarianism as something like a contradiction nestled within the American democratic tradition. It is part of the whole, a reflection of the fact that American notions of freedom and liberty are deeply informed by both the experience of slaveholding and the drive to seize land and expel its previous inhabitants. (read more) [posted in Political/Democracy]

• The Uncomfortable Truths That Could Yet Defeat Fascism, Anand Giridharadas

  Polls swing this way and that way, but the larger story they tell is unmistakable. With the midterm elections, Americans are being offered a clear choice between continued and expanded liberal democracy, on the one hand, and fascism, on the other. And it’s more or less a dead heat.

  It is time to speak an uncomfortable truth: The pro-democracy side is at risk not just because of potential electoral rigging, voter suppression and other forms of unfair play by the right, as real as those things are. In America (as in various other countries), the pro-democracy cause — a coalition of progressives, liberals, moderates, even decent Republicans who still believe in free elections and facts — is struggling to win the battle for hearts and minds. (read more) [posted in Political/Democracy]

• Fareed Zakaria on Grassroots Democracy, From his 10/16/22 CNN GPS program.

  And now for the last look. The protests raging in Iran have been deeply inspiring, sparked by women demonstrating against the repression of a brutal regime, that has made control over women and their bodies a central tenant of its rule. And as the "New York Times" notes, the protests have now spread to include oil workers who have taken to the streets shouting slogans like "death to the dictator."

  This is powerful stuff. But are the regime's days numbered? In a fascinating piece in "The New York Times," Max Fisher notes two puzzling trends. All over the world we are seeing an astonishing rise in protests. But this rise in frequency does not appear to correlate to a rise in efficacy. In fact, quite the opposite. (read more) [posted in Political/Democracy.]

• Countering the Domination-Submission Paradigm, Wade Lee Hudson

  The deeply ingrained, largely sub-conscious self-centered domination-submission paradigm permeates and undergirds modern society. The other-centered compassionate humanity worldview is a fundamental alternative. (read more)

• American Culture Is Trash Culture, [behind paywall], Wesley Morris

  It’s not just that trash is what Americans want from movies; it’s who we are. So where did it go?

  ...Our culture has always been at its most pure when it’s in the gutter, when it’s conflating divine and ugly, beauty and base. Blackface minstrelsy, ragtime, jazz: Somebody was always on hand to cry debasement (not unjustly in minstrelsy’s case). But the crude truth of trash is that we like it — to cry over, to cringe and laugh at — even when we say we don’t. The gutter is where our popular culture began, and the gaminess lurking there is our truest guise.

  So really what I mean when I say trash vanished is that it vanished from movies. But trash is a persistent, consumptive force that’ll set up shop in any eager host. And its shamelessness went and found a new home, in American politics...

  (read more) [behind paywall]

• Promoting the Compassionate Humanity Community, Wade Lee Hudson and Larry Walker.

  Rooted in humanity’s highest traditions, the time-honored effort to relieve and prevent suffering is alive and well. In countless ways, ethical individuals and organizations spread compassion and promote justice as alternatives to society’s selfishness. These manifestations of a global compassionate humanity community tap into deep, innate, positive instincts, strengthen love and trust, counter hate and fear, and channel anger into positive action. These efforts use democratic partnerships to counter unjustified domination and blind submission. (read more)

  [Posted under Systemic/Articles]

• The New York Times Series on Mental Health. [behind paywall]

  It’s Not Just You.

  America’s mental health crisis isn’t just about our unhappiness as individuals. It’s about the world we live in: our economy, our culture, our medical establishment. Americans have long treated mental health as a personal matter. But until we realize that society shapes our mental health and how we treat it, we won’t be able to feel better.

  [read more — behind paywall]
  Posted in Personal Growth/Mental Health/Articles

• Mental Health Is Political, Danielle Carr.

  What if the cure for our current mental health crisis is not more mental health care?...

  ..Some social scientists have a term — “reification” — for the process by which the effects of a political arrangement of power and resources start to seem like objective, inevitable facts about the world. Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one;...

  Medicalizing mental health doesn’t work very well if your goal is to address the underlying cause of population-level increases in mental and emotional distress. ...

  Solving the mental health crisis, then, will require fighting for people to have secure access to infrastructure that buffers them from chronic stress: housing, food security, education, child care, job security, the right to organize for more humane workplaces and substantive action on the imminent climate apocalypse.

  A fight for mental health waged only on the terms of access to psychiatric care does not only risk bolstering justifications for profiteering invoked by start-ups eager to capitalize on the widespread effects of grief, anxiety and despair. It also risks pathologizing the very emotions we are going to need to harness for their political power if we are going to win solutions.

  [read more — behind paywall]

  Posted in Personal Growth/Mental Health/Articles

• The Proud Boys and the Long-Lived Anxieties of American Men, Adam Hochschild.

  "...But one wonders if what groups like the Proud Boys are really worried about is the replacement of men by women.

  A similar sense of precarious white masculinity underlay the earlier vigilante groups...

  A future U.S. administration may more tightly seal the country’s borders and claim to stop the Great Replacement. But despite recent efforts by the Supreme Court, it will have a far harder time rolling back advances by American women. Which suggests that the Proud Boys — who have misogyny “baked into the rules,” Campbell writes — won’t vanish from our streets any time soon."

  [read more — behind paywall]

  Posted in Gender/Articles.

• A Finnish Scholar Wants to Change How We See American History, Jennifer Schuessler.

  “Indigenous Continent,” (by Pekka Hamalainen) published on Tuesday by Liveright, aims to do nothing less than recast the story of Native American — and American — history, portraying Indigenous people not as victims but as powerful actors who profoundly shaped the course of events.

  Hamalainen, a professor at the University of Oxford who has written acclaimed histories of the Comanche and the Lakota, is hardly the first scholar to argue against the trope of the “doomed” Indian, who inevitably falls victim to the onslaught of guns, germs and capitalism. But he takes the argument further.

  The confrontation between European settlers and Indigenous America, he writes, “was a four-centuries-long war,” in which “Indians won as often as not.”...

  Back then, Hamalainen was part of a cohort of scholars who were building on the so-called New Indian History. And the field has only continued to explode.

  [read more — behind paywall]

  Posted in History/Articles.

• Can’t We Come Up with Something Better Than Liberal Democracy? Adam Gopnik.

  The West’s favored form of self-government is looking creaky. A legal scholar and a philosopher propose some alternatives.

  …Getting the part to act as the whole presupposes an agreement among the whole. There is no such agreement. Trumpism and Obamaism are not two expressions of one will for collective action; they are radically incommensurable views about what’s needed...

  The perennial temptation of leftist politics is to suppose that opposition to its policies among the rank and file must be rooted in plutocratic manipulation, and therefore curable by the reassertion of the popular will. The evidence suggests, alas, that very often what looks like plutocratic manipulation really is the popular will...

  Kōjin Karatani... s a staunch egalitarian, who believes that democracy actually exemplifies the basic oppressive rhythm of “ruler and ruled.” His ideal is, instead, “isonomia,” the condition of a society in which equal speaks to equal as equal, with none ruled or ruling, and he believes that such an order existed around the Ionian Islands of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E., before the rise of Athens...

  ...Yet the basic inquiry into the possibility of human relationships that Karatani undertakes is moving, even inspiring. Though he doesn’t cite them, his Ionians most resemble the classic anarchists, of the Mikhail Bakunin or Emma Goldman kind: repudiating all power relations, ruler to ruled, in a way that shames more timid liberal imaginations. (Posted in Democracy/Articles)

• We Build Civilizations on Status. But We Barely Understand It, Ezra Klein Show with Cecilia Ridgeway.

  You can listen to the podcast on your favorite platform. The transcript is here. (behind paywall)

From the Intro:

Cecilia Ridgeway is a sociologist and professor emerita at Stanford University. She spent her entire career studying what she calls the deep story of status, what it is, why it matters, how it works and all the ways it shapes our world. And Ridgeway’s basic argument is that the way we typically think about status is all wrong. Status isn’t just some social vanity limited to elite institutions or the top percentages of the income ladder. It’s a cultural system that is absolutely fundamental to how our society operates, one that permeates literally every aspect of our lives, from the office, to the classroom, to the dinner table. At the heart of Ridgeway’s theory and of this conversation is what she calls the double-edged sword of status...

My comment:

While listening to this valuable podcast, it struck me that they did not address the need to respect everyone's essential equality, as does Beatrice Bruteau when she affirms "a worldview that features the incomparable value of each person, [which leads to] mutual respect and care." Recognizing everyone's "incomparable value" seems to be a critical starting point. At the conclusion, however, the podcast does touch on this issue with these remarks:

Secondly, respect others. Respect others. Understand that they’re all in this game too. And treat them with respect. If you want to be treated with respect, treat others with respect. It works. It works. So that can help. Because a lot of when you get really obsessed with status, it’s because nobody treats you with it. You don’t get no respect. But if you respect others, they tend to respect you back. They do. And then that gets you through.

But even here they don't clearly affirm everyone's infinite value.

• The Holy Thursday Revolution, Beatrice Bruteau.

  A pioneer in interspirituality and contemplative thinking, Bruteau offered a worldview that features the incomparable value of each person and the community dynamics of mutual respect and care that follows from that view. In her last book, The Holy Thursday Revolution, Bruteau addressed, How can the world evolve from a culture of war and domination to one of friendship and communion? She wrote:

  In saying that the domination/submission paradigm lies at the basis of many of our contemporary ills, I do not say that all of our ills can be traced to it, nor do I say that it is productive only of ill.

  In fact, I hold that certain versions of it can be useful and appropriate in various limited, specific, functional situations… However, in our culture we have tended to award to the functionally dominant persons and institutions a total value of superiority, privilege, and power that has often led to injustice, damage, and suffering.

  I am suggesting that domination is basic to a great many ills from which our culture does suffer and that it may be possible to replace it with an alternative paradigm that would afford some improvement. I think that each of these paradigms lies at a sufficiently deep level in our consciousness to be a unifying principle for a great many particular behaviors, and therefore if we deal with the matter on a deep level, we could thereby effect alterations in the relatively superficial attitudes and actions much more efficiently than by trying to change those feelings and events piecemeal.

  Posted in Systemic/Books.

• The Decline of Democracy Around the World

  NOTE: This article prompts two questions: 1) Is cable news similar to social media in terms of the problems described here? 2) Might another form of “populism” be productive?

• Relational Equality: A Conceptual and Normative Analysis, Kathryn E. Joyce.

  “This dissertation provides a conceptual framework for theorizing about relational equality. I demonstrate its appeal by using it to develop an account that attends to neglected aspects of relational equality, grounds its core commitments, and provides resources for addressing some of the most pressing objections raised against it.”

• Introduction to the Democracy topic.

  “History reflects an ongoing battle between autocracy and democracy. Popular forces, often invisible and underground only to emerge unpredictably, chip away at oppressive hierarchies that enable the rich and powerful to monopolize wealth and power, shape a country’s culture, and socialize its people to conform. Even in relatively democratic countries like the United States, the corrupt hierarchy remains dominant.”

• What Bob Dylan Wanted at Twenty-three, Nat Hentoff.

  A portrait of the artist trying to move past “finger-pointing” songs, and finding a new voice in the process.

• Why Your Social Life Is Not What It Should Be, David Brooks (behind paywall).

  "...If a bunch of people are lonely, why don’t they just hang out together?... Once you get used to filling your day with social exercise, it gets easier and easier, and more and more fun... the fate of America will be importantly determined by how we treat each other in the smallest acts of daily life..."

• Together Software

  “A mentorship platform that empowers your organization to drive performance through relationships.Accelerate employee growth through mentoring.”

• Peer Learning: 6 Benefits To Collaboration in the Workplace, Matthew Reeves.

  “Here are six compelling reasons to consider peer learning in your workplace. Peer learning is one of the strongest ways to accelerate employee development. Why? For starters, learning sticks when we’re collaborating with others. We’re discussing things back and forth, explaining ourselves, actively listening to others, and refining our ideas.”

• Peers, more than teachers, inspire us to learn, Michigan State University.

  "Why do I have to learn this?" It's a common question among youth, but new research suggests students perform much better academically when the answer is provided by their peers rather than their teachers.”

• The Rise of Workplace Surveillance (transcript),

  “Is your productivity being electronically monitored by your bosses? (behind paywall), The Daily podcast.”

• Review of James Lindley Wilson: Democratic Equality, John Thrasher.

  “It is especially important insofar as it defends a conception of political equality based on the relational egalitarian notion of equality of status that does not cash this idea out in terms of equality of power. Taken as a whole, Wilson presents a thoroughly worked out conception of political equality as well as its relation to democracy and democratic institutions.”

• Review of Democratic Equality (James Lindley Wilson) for Political Theory, Samuel Bagg,

  “Despite these lingering worries – which no theory can entirely escape – Wilson’s book is clearly a significant contribution to ongoing debates in analytic political philosophy. On its own terms, then, it is undoubtedly an impressive achievement. He outlines a distinctive account of the justification and demands of democracy, carefully contrasts his view with others, and systematically draws out its institutional implications. He endorses recent arguments that equal authority over common affairs is an essential component of relations of social equality. Yet he doubts that this can be achieved through equal power or influence. Just as we give appropriate consideration to the judgments of our friends, rather, representatives must grant the same respect to their constituents, and equal citizens to one another. To aid them in this task, Wilson concludes, political institutions must be designed to minimize deliberative neglect.”

• Quotes

  • 2018: “Facebook, as well as Twitter and Google’s YouTube, have become the digital arms dealers of the modern age … by weaponizing pretty much everything that could be weaponized. They have mutated human communication, so that connecting people has too often become about pitting them against one another and turbocharged that discord to an unprecedented and damaging volume. They have weaponized social media. They have weaponized the First Amendment. They have weaponized civic discourse. And they have weaponized, most of all, politics.”
    Kara Swisher, Aug. 2, 2018 (behind paywall) (Posted in Big Tech)

• Joining Hearts and Hands together: Vocations calling Vision share, Randy Thomas.

  “Kairos and Temenos, Womb of Mystery
     Drawn to listen, still repose
  Creative Source within the center
     Grace and Mercy, Birth compose”
  READ MORE

• Cultural Complementarity email to Charlie Mundale 2009, Hector Garcia.

  All humans see only a small part of reality, which brings about a sense of insecurity (this is one of the assumptions of CC). Our tendency is to subconsciously allay anxiety by acting as if what our group sees in our time is all of the true reality; consequently, all other groups must be totally or partially wrong. Since all groups are doing the same, conflict easily develops and grows. We then try to validate our position, and often our aggression, by showing current and past evidence for that position. This is not difficult for any group to do since the present and the past hold multiple facts and human errors to pick from and take offense. (The time I have spent as a consultant has taught me that you can usually select from an abundance of facts to validate most positions you want to sell). Parties in conflict will continue to assign fault to each other until the more powerful one puts an end to the never-ending argument by exercising its power; as a victor, it will acquire the credibility to gain support for its position… READ MORE

• The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare, Thomas Homer-Dixon.

  ...By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.

  We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine. In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace... READ MORE (Posted in Democracy)

• Putin and the Power of Collective Action from Shared Awareness, Otto Scharmer.

  ...Pointing out these shortcomings in America today is just as popular as it was in 2003 to criticize the US invasion of Iraq (which, like the invasion of Ukraine, was conducted on false and fabricated pretenses). No one wants to hear it. Because it’s part of the collective Western blind spot: our own role in the making of the tragedy that is unfolding in Ukraine.... Why is US foreign policy perpetually unable to respect the security concerns of another major nuclear power that has been invaded by Western forces more than once (Hitler, Napoleon) and that in the 1990s went through another traumatic experience: the collapse of both its empire and its economy (guided by the advice of Western experts)? READ MORE (Added to Foreign Policy)

• How Houston Moved 25,000 People From the Streets Into Homes of Their Own, (behind paywall) Michael Kimmelman.

  “Chronic homelessness” is a term of art. It refers to those people, like many in the Houston encampment, who have been living on the streets for more than a year or who have been homeless repeatedly, and who have a mental or physical disability. Nationwide, most of those who experience homelessness do not fall into that narrow category. They are homeless for six weeks or fewer; 40 percent have a job... There are at the same time many thousands of mothers and children, as well as couch-surfing teenagers and young adults who are ill-housed and at risk. These people are also poor and desperate. Finding a place to sleep may be a daily struggle for them. They might be one broken transmission or emergency room visit away from the streets. They’re in the pipeline to homelessness. But they are not homeless according to the bureaucratic definition...

  Eradicating homelessness would involve tackling systemic racism, reconstituting the nation’s mental health, family support and substance abuse systems, raising wages, expanding the federal housing voucher program and building millions more subsidized homes... Five states — California, New York, Florida, Washington and Texas — now account for 57 percent of the people experiencing homelessness. Not coincidentally, it is worst in those big cities where affordable housing is in short supply, the so-called NIMBYs are powerful, and the yawning gap between median incomes and the cost of housing keeps growing...

  It may seem surprising that, of all cities, Houston — built on a go-it-alone oil business culture — decided to tackle homelessness by, in effect, collectivizing its homeless relief system... The vast majority of the 50,000 people in the Houston area who sought some type of homelessness service in 2021 did not qualify for an apartment... There are critics of rapid rehousing who contend it’s just kicking the can down the road...

  As elsewhere, giant investment firms like Blackstone have been gobbling up housing stock, pricing out middle-class and lower-income residents. Making matters harder, eviction filings in Harris County are now soaring: they’re higher than they were before the pandemic...

  Nearly a year after watching people being moved out of the encampment in the underpass, that was still the city’s message and I still had a lot of questions. I wondered about the uncounted couch-surfing families and youth; about the underpaid, overtaxed caseworkers who cannot provide enough help; about the landlords refusing to house tenants with vouchers, and people like Ms. Harris and her daughter, Blesit, judged not quite desperate enough for more permanent housing.

  But mostly I wondered what individuals would extract from Houston’s example. Homelessness is a calamity millions reckon with each day — a calamity provoking a mix of rage, fear and powerlessness in the housed and unhoused alike. For me, the big reveal after a year was not that Houston had solved the problem. It hasn’t. There is no one-time fix to homelessness....

  The other day, I talked to Ms. Harris on the phone... she has no housing voucher, and her lease will expire at the end of July unless she can come up with the $886 a month the continuum now pays in rent... Ms. Harris is housed. But she isn’t home yet. READ MORE (behind paywall) (Posted in Housing/Homelessness)

• Realistic conflict theory, wikipedia.

  Realistic conflict theory (initialized RCT), also known as realistic group conflict theory (initialized RGCT), is a social psychological model of intergroup conflict. The theory explains how intergroup hostility can arise as a result of conflicting goals and competition over limited resources, and it also offers an explanation for the feelings of prejudice and discrimination toward the outgroup that accompany the intergroup hostility. Groups may be in competition for a real or perceived scarcity of resources such as money, political power, military protection, or social status.

  Feelings of resentment can arise in the situation that the groups see the competition over resources as having a zero-sums fate, in which only one group is the winner (obtained the needed or wanted resources) and the other loses (unable to obtain the limited resource due to the "winning" group achieving the limited resource first). The length and severity of the conflict is based upon the perceived value and shortage of the given resource. According to RCT, positive relations can only be restored if superordinate goals are in place.

  History

  The theory was officially named by Donald Campbell, but has been articulated by others since the middle of the 20th century. In the 1960s, this theory developed from Campbell's recognition of social psychologists' tendency to reduce all human behavior to hedonistic goals. He criticized psychologists like John Thibaut, Harold Kelley, and George Homans, who emphasized theories that place food, sex, and pain avoidance as central to all human processes. According to Campbell, hedonistic assumptions do not adequately explain intergroup relations… (Posted in Social/Realistic Conflict Theory)

• Thomas Piketty’s Case for ‘Participatory Socialism’, Ezra Klein interview.

  “The economist argues for universal inheritance, worker ownership and other policies to close the wealth gap… wealth is, in a way, a better indicator of opportunity, of power than income. And more generally, what I care about is really the equality or inequality of capabilities as Amartya Sen would have said. So what you can do with your life, the kind of choice you can make, the bargaining power you have, vis-à-vis the rest of society and vis-à-vis your own life. And from this viewpoint, wealth is quite important.

  Because when you have no wealth at all, or even worse, when you have negative wealth, when you have only debt, you need to accept everything, basically. You need to accept any working condition, any wage. Because you need to pay for your rent, you need to take care of your family or relatives. And you cannot really make choices.

  Whereas, if you have just — even just $100,000, $200,000, or $300,000, or euros, this can seem very small to someone who has millions or billions, but in fact, this makes a big difference, as compared to having zero or negative wealth. Because then you can — so if you are being proposed a job and you don’t like it, you don’t need to accept it right away. You can wait a little bit. You can try to create your own business. You can build your own home so that you don’t need to bring in a wage and rent every month. And you can start different kinds of projects in your life.” READ MORE Posted in Economic Resources / Poverty / Inequality

• ‘The Wire’ Stands Alone, James Poniewozik (behind paywall).

  After 20 years, the classic drama is much praised and rarely imitated. For a series based on the idea that institutions don’t change, that’s fitting.

  When critics get to assessing a classic TV show, we have a weird tendency to turn into evolutionary biologists. We pull out the old television family tree and gauge the series’s achievement by how many branches we can trace back to it — how many series modeled one or another aspect on it. “Dragnet,” “The Simpsons,” “Lost” — you shall know them by their copycats.

  And sure, influence is one measure of greatness. But so is inimitability. There is the painter who leaves behind a school of disciples, but there is also the artist who sees a color that no one has envisioned before or since.

  “The Wire” premiered on HBO on June 2, 2002. In the two decades since, its reputation has only grown, as has its audience. It is one of those series, like the original “Star Trek,” that future generations will refuse to believe struggled with low ratings during its entire run. (Let alone that it was nominated for an absurd two Emmys, and won exactly none.)

  But has anyone made another “Wire” since?
  READ MORE (behind paywall)

• The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation’s Upheaval and Racial Reckoning, Resmaa Menakem.

  Through the coordinated repetition of lies, anti-democratic elements in American society are working to incite mass radicalization, widespread chaos, and a collective trauma response in tens of millions of American bodies.

  Currently, most of us are utterly unprepared for this potential mayhem. This book can help prepare us—and possibly prevent further destruction.

  In The Quaking of America, therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem takes readers through somatic processes addressing the growing threat of white-supremacist political violence.

  This preparation focuses not on strategy or politics, but on practices that can help us

  Build presence and discernment in our bodies

  Settle our bodies during the heat of conflict

  Maintain our safety, sanity, and stability in dangerous situations

  Heal our personal and collective racialized trauma

  Practice embodied social action

  Turn toward instead of on one another

  The Quaking of America is a unique and perfectly timed guide to help us navigate our widespread upheaval and build an antiracist culture. (Posted in Social/Race)

• We Can’t Even Agree on What Is Tearing Us Apart (behind paywall), Thomas B. Edsall, May 25, 2022.

  Today, even scholars of polarization are polarized.

  This was not always the case.

  ...They haven’t yet related it to the wider literature or explained why so many centrist voters seem unable to elect centrists, or why it is when there is a national tide running against a party, it’s mostly moderates who lose.

  Fowler and his co-authors, on the other hand, contest the view that voters are deeply polarized:

  We find that a large proportion of the American public is neither consistently liberal nor consistently conservative...

  There are, Fowler and his collaborators point out,

  many genuine moderates in the American electorate...

  Orr contended in an email:

  Several experiments have successfully manipulated feelings toward people from the opposing party and found no effects on anti-democratic attitudes or other predicted consequences of affective polarization.

  ...There is another key factor underpinning growing polarization and the absence of moderate politicians.

  “Most legislative polarization is already baking into the set of people who run for office,” Andrew Hall, a political scientist at Stanford, wrote in his book, “Who Wants to Run: How the Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization”: “Indeed, when we look at the ideological positions of who runs for the House, we see the set of all candidates — not just incumbents — has polarized markedly since 1980.”

  This trend results from the fact that since “the winning candidate gets to influence ideological policies” in increasingly polarized legislatures and the Congress, “the ideological payoffs of running for office are not equal across the ideological spectrum.” As a result, “when costs of running for office are high or benefits of holding office are low, more moderate candidates are disproportionately less likely to run.”

  In other words, polarization has created its own vicious circle, weeding out moderates, fostering extremists and constraining government action even in times of crisis. (Posted in Politics/Partisan Divide) (BEHIND PAYWALL)

• Bob Crawford, Hell & High Water with John Heilemann Podcast

  John Heilemann talks with Bob Crawford, bassist for The Avett Brothers and creator of Concerts of Change: The Soundtrack of Human Rights, a new audio docu-series on SiriusXM. Through conversations with artists including U2's Bono, Bob Geldof, and Joan Baez, historian Douglas Brinkley, and civil rights icon Andrew Young, Crawford explores the surge in humanitarian and political activism by musicians -- particularly focused on Africa -- in the seventies and eighties. Heilemann and Crawford discuss the rise of star-studded benefit shows from George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh to Live Aid; the genesis and behind-the-scenes stories of the chart-topping charity singles "Do They Know It’s Christmas?" and "We Are The World"; the singular influence of Geldof in launching Band Aid and Live Aid; the role played by Steven Van Zandt's "Sun City" in ending apartheid in South Africa; and how Bono institutionalized his activist impulses to help combat poverty and AIDS in Africa. They also reflect on Crawford’s career with The Avett Brothers, and how his daughter Hallie's battle with cancer changed him and his band. (Posted in Cultural/Music)

• Why the School Wars Still Rage, Jill Lepore.

  From evolution to anti-racism, parents and progressives have clashed for a century over who gets to tell our origin stories... But across the past century, behind parents’ rights, lies another unbroken strain: some Americans’ fierce resistance to the truth that, just as all human beings share common ancestors biologically, all Americans have common ancestors historically. A few parents around the country may not like their children learning that they belong to a much bigger family—whether it’s a human family or an American family—but the idea of public education is dedicated to the cultivation of that bigger sense of covenant, toleration, and obligation. In the end, no matter what advocates of parents’ rights say, and however much political power they might gain, public schools don’t have a choice… READ MORE (Posted in Social/Education)

• U.S. democracy is in grave danger, a new Economist report warns, Amanda Erickson.

  "Democracy is in under siege around the world, according to a new report by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

  The annual Democracy Index tracks the health of the world's governments. And the results for 2017 are depressing. In 89 countries, democratic norms look worse than they did last year, the report's authors write. Just 4.5 percent of the world's residents live in fully functioning democracies, down from 8.9 percent in 2015.

  That precipitous drop is thanks, primarily, to the United States..."

• A Socialist in Canada

• Foreign Policy Books:

  Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville and Henry Reeve.

  Healing the Heart of Democracy, Parker J. Palmer.

  The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels. Jon Meacham.

  The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, Robert B. Reich.

• The Guardian World News

• Amanpour & Co. with Christiane Amanpour. Fascism and Human Rights interviews. April 7, 2022: Scroll to: Bosnia-born Dunja Mijatovic--the human rights commissioner for the Council of Europe and Author Jason Stanley talks about fascism and the dangerous spread of autocracy. November 11, 2023: A new report says U.S. democracy is backsliding. A look at why and the dangers of polarization.

• Threat to Democracy, Fareed Zakaria interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin and Jon Meacham.

• Interview with Masha Gessen begins at [10:40:42]

• Fareed Zakaria: Columns and Global Public Square on CNN

• Cultural Complementarity, Hector E. Garcia.

  “…All humans see only a small part of reality, which brings about a sense of insecurity (this is one of the assumptions of CC). Our tendency is to subconsciously allay anxiety by acting as if what our group sees in our time is all of the true reality; consequently, all other groups must be totally or partially wrong. Since all groups are doing the same, conflict easily develops and grows. We then try to validate our position, and often our aggression, by showing current and past evidence for that position. This is not difficult for any group to do since the present and the past hold multiple facts and human errors to pick from and take offense. (The time I have spent as a consultant has taught me that you can usually select from an abundance of facts to validate most positions you want to sell). Parties in conflict will continue to assign fault to each other until the more powerful one puts an end to the never-ending argument by exercising its power; as a victor, it will acquire the credibility to gain support for its position…” READ MORE

• The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare, Thomas Homer-Dixon.

  “The U.S. is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war. What should Canada do then?… Once a hardline doctrine is widely accepted within a political movement, it becomes an “infrastructure” of ideas and incentives that can pressure even those who don’t really accept the doctrine into following its dictates. Fear of “true believers” shifts the behaviour of the movement’s moderates toward extremism. Sure enough, the experts I recently consulted all spoke about how fear of crossing Mr. Trump’s base – including fear for their families’ physical safety – was forcing otherwise sensible Republicans to fall into line...” READ MORE

• renovations after surviving the worst of covid, devorah major. (Posted in Personal Growth/Poetry)

• China's Foreign Relations, Wang Yi. “The Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era laid out in the report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is a major theoretical innovation by our Party, and the latest achievement and a significant advancement of adapting Marxism to the Chinese context. It provides a strong theoretical framework and guideline for the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era.” READ MORE

• Howard Thurman on Jesus and the Disinherited.

  While he was Professor of Spiritual Resources and Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University from 1953 to 1965, Dr. Howard Thurman became a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is reported that when he traveled King carried with him Thurman’s small book, Jesus and the Disinherited. This Boston University resource presents twelve 1959 sermons by Thurman on the theme, “Jesus and the Disinherited.” (The sermons are numbered but they aren’t listed in sequential order.) (Posted on Personal/Spirituality)

• How We Stopped Believing That People Can Change (behind paywall), Rebecca Solnit.

  "...We as a society seem unequipped to recognize transformations, just as we lack formal processes — other than monetary settlements — for those who have harmed others to make reparations as part of their repentance or transformation... beyond the individual cases comes the need for something broader: a recognition that people change, and that most of us have and will, and that much of that is because in this transformative era, we are all being carried along on a river of change." READ MORE (behind paywall) (Posted in Personal/Personal Growth)

• Democrats, You Can’t Ignore the Culture Wars Any Longer (behind paywall), Jamelle Bouie. (Posted in Social/Education)

  Almost 60 years ago, the historian Richard Hofstadter described what he saw as the true goal of McCarthyism. “The real function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950s was not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage,” he wrote, “or even to expose actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.”...

  ...they are the foundation for an assault on the very idea of public education, part of the long war against public goods and collective responsibility fought by conservatives on behalf of hierarchy and capital. READ MORE (behind paywall)

• There Is Joy in Struggle, Cornel West.

  “What an honor to be here! What a privilege, what a blessing to salute the Class of 2019, Harvard Divinity School.... We know most of human history is a history of domination and oppression and exploitation and degradation. Most of human history is a history of hatred and contempt... As I look at myself, I can see the white supremacy in me. But oh, when I was at Charlottesville, looking in the eyes of those sick, neo-Nazi white brothers, gangsters, thugs, I didn’t lose sight of the gangster in me. (Posted in Systemic/Essays) READ MORE.

• THE POWER OF BIG OIL

  “FRONTLINE examines the fossil fuel industry’s history of casting doubt and delaying action on climate change. This three-part series traces decades of missed opportunities and the ongoing attempts to hold Big Oil to account.”

• Shaming, Self-improvement, and Political Action, Wade Lee Hudson.

  “In “The Shaming-Industrial Complex, Becca Rothfeld describes the problem: Absent structural change, self-improvement will be limited. A large network of supportive small teams whose members are aware of this problem could be one solution. In itself, this network could constitute structural reform, which Rothfeld seeks. It could also nurture a strong sense of community whose members, given their awareness of the Shaming-Industrial Complex, would logically pursue structural reform in other social sectors and, ideally, cultivate holistic and systemic transformation.” (Posted in Systemic/Essays) READ MORE

• America Has Turned Its Back on Its Poorest Families (behind paywall), Ezra Klein

  The expanded child tax credit. It gave parents $3,000 for every child age 6 to 17 and $3,600 for every child under age 6. There were no strings attached. It was just money. It could be used for child care, for food, for clothes, for anything. It treated parents, even poor parents, as the experts on their family’s finances, a quietly radical idea in American social policy. It was a huge experiment, it was studied exhaustively, and we can now say this definitively: It worked...

  The Biden administration added an extension in Build Back Better, but that bill died, and there’s no immediate hope of revival. Once again, we are accepting our prepandemic levels of child poverty as a permanent feature of our democracy.

  And so the Biden administration’s single biggest policy success has turned, for now, into a signal political failure.

  READ MORE (behind paywall)

• Dr. Cornel West: Philosophy in Our Time of Imperial Decay. American philosopher, political activist, social critic, and educator public lecture.

  “SirFortesque: Is any living human being gonna try to tell me that you couldn't listen to Dr West talk about any topic for hours on end and just feel better about your life and want to hug somebody? Who else can seamlessly meld Philosophy, Literature, History, Music, Religion, Politics, and Ethics together in such a manner that you smile for no reason while challenging your beliefs. The vast knowledge from so many diverse fields and a computer-like memory mixed with the outpouring and nonjudgmental LOVE just envelops me every time i hear this world treasure speak. This is the sort of Christian warrior that even as an Atheist I find so mesmerizing. He can critique anything without being condescending or mean spirited. I feel honored to be able to watch this man.” (Posted on Systemic/Videos)

• Opposition to NATO Expansion

  On June 26, 1997 a group of 50 prominent foreign policy experts that included former senators, retired military officers, diplomats and academicians, sent an open letter to President Clinton outlining their opposition to NATO expansion. They said, “We, the undersigned, believe that the current U.S.led effort to expand NATO, the focus of the recent Helsinki and Paris Summits, is a policy error of historic proportions. We believe that NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability... Because of these serious objections, and in the absence of any reason for rapid decision, we strongly urge that the NATO expansion process be suspended... In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West, bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement, and galvanize resistance [to arms control treaties]…”

  ALSO:
  On February 21, 2022, after Russia had invaded Ukraine, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman published "This Is Putin’s War. But America and NATO Aren’t Innocent Bystanders" in which he reported:

  “On May 2, 1998, immediately after the Senate ratified NATO expansion, I called George Kennan, the architect of America’s successful containment of the Soviet Union. Having joined the State Department in 1926 and served as U.S. ambassador to Moscow in 1952, Kennan was arguably America’s greatest expert on Russia....I asked for his opinion of NATO expansion. [He answered]:

  “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever... Don’t people understand? Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime...”
  (Posted on Political/Foreign Policy)

• Day of Affirmation Address, University of Capetown, Capetown, South Africa, June 6, 1966. Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

  “…The second danger is that of expediency; of those who say that hopes and beliefs must bend before immediate necessities. Of course if we must act effectively we must deal with the world as it is. We must get things done. But if there was one thing that President Kennedy stood for that touched the most profound feeling of young people across the world, it was the belief that idealism, high aspiration and deep convictions are not incompatible with the most practical and efficient of programs – that there is no basic inconsistency between ideals and realistic possibilities – no separation between the deepest desires of heart and of mind and the rational application of human effort to human problems. It is not realistic or hard-headed to solve problems and take action unguided by ultimate moral aims and values, although we all know some who claim that it is so. In my judgement, it is thoughtless folly. For it ignores the realities of human faith and of passion and of belief; forces ultimately more powerful than all the calculations of our economists or of our generals. Of course to adhere to standards, to idealism, to vision in the face of immediate dangers takes great courage and takes self-confidence. But we also know that only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly…” (READ MORE)

• Why Cultures of Care?

  Cultures of Care celebrates people that practice collective care in unconventional and insurgent ways. Care is an essential, immediate and practical way to create belonging. Perhaps most vitally in our urgent times, at the heart of each profile you will find provocations that are seeds for reshaping society and how we relate to each other and the world.

  Cultures of Care was initiated in the fall of 2020 as we faced a deepening pandemic and economic inequality, popular uprisings against state-sanctioned violence against Black people, an expanding border wall and a deluge of traumatic climate events. These conditions continue to grow today. In the chaos, isolation and fear of these multiple storms, we also witness beautiful points of shelter. These practices center an ethos of collective care in the face of multiple forms of overlapping othering and oppression. Some of these are new and emergent, like harnessing technology to adapt to social isolation. Others are long-standing, such as stewarding ancestral lands through fire. Most, if not all, are an evolving mix of new and old ways to practice collective care. Cultures of Care are practices that create belonging in the context of othering. A Culture of Care is an affirmative, generative form of resistance and adaptation….

  READ MORE

• The Enemies of Liberalism Are Showing Us What It Really Means

  “After three decades of dominance, liberalism is losing its hold on Western minds,” Matthew Rose writes in his powerful new book, “A World After Liberalism.”

  Rose does not mean liberalism in the way we typically use the word. This is not about supporting universal health care or disagreeing with Justice Samuel Alito. Rose means liberalism as in the shared assumptions of the West: a belief in human dignity, universal rights, individual flourishing and the consent of the governed.

  That liberalism has been battered by financial crises, the climate crisis, checkered pandemic responses, right-wing populists and a rising China. It seems exhausted, ground down, defined by the contradictions and broken promises that follow victory rather than the creativity and aspiration that attend struggle.

  At least, it did…. (Posted in Democracy)

  READ MORE

• The Shame Industrial Complex Is Booming. Who’s Cashing In?, (behind paywall), Alissa Bennett, The New York Times.

  Where “The Shame Machine” seems to rattle off its tracks is in O’Neil’s discussion of what she refers to as “healthy shaming” — let’s call it a lateral punch. The lateral punch is the blow that we strike against people who do not share our social value systems; it’s the self-righteous bravado we feel when we tell an internet stranger, after the fact, to put his mask on; it’s the thrill of watching someone be reprimanded when they violate our understanding of how things should be. Though O’Neil outlines how the lateral punch often successfully influences behaviors that result in a genuine collective benefit (she provides Covid-19 vaccinations as an example), she neglects to fully excavate what role sheer pleasure plays in our impulse to shame in those situations that have neither obvious victim nor victimizer. It seems disingenuous to ignore what is quietly at play in even the “healthiest” of shaming: a request for compliance that is hinged to a threat of ostracization. The basic “us” versus “you” dichotomy that foregrounds even the most benign of shaming always stands in the shadow of the hierarchical tower.

• The Shaming-Industrial Complex, Becca Rothfeld.

  ,,,the book ends by recommending that we “detoxify our relations.” It’s self-improvement that’s paramount. We should stop feeling shame, and we should stop inflicting it. “Don’t get outraged—or at least don’t make a habit of it.”

  But how much does it matter whether we make a habit of it? The suggestion that our emotional practices have such outsized political import belongs to a dubious theory of cultural change. There is little evidence that electoral havoc is an offshoot of private insecurities, to be discussed and dismantled on the psychoanalyst’s couch. Vicious gerrymandering and laws that continue to disenfranchise millions are at least as consequential as a handful of private outbursts.

  The force of shame stems from its status as a social condition, not from its emotional resonance. The bad feelings that shamings instill are incidental to the material injuries they inflict. No matter how supreme our sanguinity, how unshakable our equipoise, people who get raked over the coals online can expect to find themselves jobless in the aftermath,....

  “The trolling works only when the target is ashamed,” she writes sunnily, concluding that “shamelessness can be a healthy and freeing response.” But if fat-shaming is the result of the weight-loss industry’s machinations, we almost certainly cannot alter our feelings without altering the institutional arrangements that support them. Flanagan may be right that emotions are culturally specific—but we will still have to change a culture in order to change the emotions that it generates. How effective can a personal crusade really be when the gears of the shame machine go on grinding?

• Podcasts

  • Why this Hollywood Actor Stays Off Social Media (Mostly). Kara Swisher interviews Andrew Garfield, who starred in The Social Network about Facebook and Tick, Tick…Boom” about the producer of the breakthrough, landmark musical Rent. Garfield addresses the deadly allure of status and the need for prophetic voices.

• Intergenerational Poem: Where I Come From, Wade Lee Hudson

  — presented to the Voice of Witness group, March 2022 in response to:

  Where do you come and what is your identity?

  From dust to dust

  Filled with spirit briefly

  Dying from the moment of birth

  Living with cancer

  Multiple myeloma

  Treatable but not curable

  Progression-free at the moment

  Cancer-drug side-effects troublesome

  Prognosis uncertain

  Death knocks at my door

  As it knocks at your door

  Nevertheless

  I live as fully as possible

  As long as possible

  A human being

  Nothing more

  Nothing less

  Trying to make the most of my time

  Trying to reverse humanity’s downward spiral
  
  (read more)

• Where Does American Democracy Go From Here? New York Times (behind paywall), March 17, 2022

  Freedom House: The United States had slid down its ranking of countries by political rights and civil liberties — it is now 59th on Freedom House’s list, slightly below Argentina and Mongolia.

  Mason: The word “identity” keeps coming up, and this is a really crucial part of it. And remember that we have research about intergroup conflict, right? Don’t look at this as, like, a logical disagreement situation. We’re not disagreeing on what kind of tax structure we should have. We’re not just disagreeing about the role of the federal government in American society. What we’re disagreeing about is increasingly the basic status differences between groups of people that have existed in America for a very long time. One of the things that Nathan Kalmoe and I found in our forthcoming book is that if you look at Democrats and Republicans who really, really hate each other and call each other evil and say the other party is a threat to the United States, the best predictor of that is how they think about the traditional social hierarchy. (read more) (behind paywall)

• Putin Wants a Clash of Civilizations. Is ‘The West’ Falling for It? (behind paywall), The New York Times, March 11, 2022, Thomas Meaney.

  …The more we hear about the resolve of the West, the more the values of a liberal international order appear like the provincial set of principles of a particular people, in a particular place.

  Of the 10 most-populous countries in the world, only one — the United States — supports major economic sanctions against Russia... Nor do non-Western states appear to welcome the kind of economic disruptions that will result...

  The rest of the world is concerned not only about wider economic immiseration but also about the global escalation of a conflict between two “civilizations” that share the preponderance of the world’s nuclear weapons between them.

  (read more) (Posted in Political/Foreign Policy)

• Ezra Klein Interviews Fareed Zakaria

  Transcript: March 4, 2022

  Fareed Zakaria Has a Better Way to Handle Russia — and China

  The case for thinking strategically, not ideologically, about great power conflict.

  I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

  It is eerie knowing that you have lived through the end of an era and that you’re now witnessing the birth of another. For most of my life, foreign policy has not been dominated by great power conflict. And that is a defining characteristic of that period. There have been crises. There have been wars. There have been horrors. But America was too strong and other countries too weak to really worry about world wars or even cold wars, to see the world as this great power chessboard.

  That’s changed…. (Posted in Political/Foreign Policy)

  READ MORE

• Sufi Ruhaniat International —

  “dedicated to helping individuals unfold their highest spiritual purpose, manifest their essential inner being, and live harmoniously with others, with the hope of relieving human suffering and contributing to the awakening of all of humankind.”

• Vladimir Putin’s Clash of Civilizations, Ross Douthat, The New York Times, Feb. 26, 2022.

• “…In this vision the future is neither liberal world-empire nor a renewed Cold War between competing universalisms. Rather it’s a world divided into some version of what Bruno Maçães has called “civilization-states,” culturally-cohesive great powers that aspire, not to world domination, but to become universes unto themselves — each, perhaps, under its own nuclear umbrella.

  This idea, redolent of Samuel P. Huntington’s arguments in “The Clash of Civilizations” a generation ago, clearly influences many of the world’s rising powers — from the Hindutva ideology of India’s Narendra Modi to the turn against cultural exchange and Western influence in Xi Jinping’s China. Maçães himself hopes a version of civilizationism will reanimate Europe,…” (read more)

• Nutrition — Scott Zieman provided three articles.

• Corporate Charters — New topic with multiple new resources. Initiated by Rob Scarlett.

• The Age of Anti-Ambition (behind paywall), Noreen Malone, The New York Times, Feb. 15, 2022.

  EXCERPTS:

  When 25 million people leave their jobs, it’s about more than just burnout…

  The act of working has been stripped bare. You don’t have little outfits to put on, and lunches to go to, and coffee breaks to linger over and clients to schmooze. The office is where it shouldn’t be — at home, in our intimate spaces — and all that’s left now is the job itself, naked and alone. And a lot of people don’t like what they see... (read more) [Added to Personal Resources/Ambition]

• Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation, Simone Weil.

  "...He holds every human being without any exception as something sacred to which he is bound to show respect. This is the only possible motive for universal respect towards all human beings....it is for the intelligence to conceive the idea of need and to discern, discriminate, and enumerate, with all the accuracy of which it is capable, the earthly needs of the soul and of the body…

  (read more) [posted in Systemic/Articles]

• Status Anxiety Is Blowing Wind Into Trump’s Sails (behind paywall), The New York Times, February 9, 2022, Thomas B. Edsall.

  
  “…It is hardly a secret that the white working class has struggled in recent decades — and clearly many factors play a role — but what happens to those without the skills and abilities needed to move up the education ladder to a position of prestige in an increasingly competitive world?

  Petersen’s answer: They have become populism’s frontline troops.

  Over the past six decades, according to Petersen, there has been a realignment of the parties in respect to their position as pro-establishment or anti-establishment… ‘Economic insecurity translates into support for the far-right’”. (read more; behind paywall)

• New Opening for the Preface.

  “Humanity is on a downward spiral headed toward a premature death—or the end of life as we know it… Neither History, God, Progress, a left-wing Savior, a right-wing Strongman, nor some Darwinian “cultural evolution” will save us… Our best hope is to awaken a profound and widespread moral commitment to do the right thing—to pursue Truth, Justice, and Beauty—in small supportive, action-oriented teams whose members support each other with their personal efforts to become better human beings and their political efforts to become more effective activists while coming together, at least occasionally, in a unified, independent social movement to advance holistic and systemic transformation—for the sake of all humanity, the environment, and life itself—to grow democratic hierarchies, cultivate co-equal partnerships, and establish democratic equality throughout society. This website is dedicated to this mission. (read more)

• Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation, Simone Weil.

  “…Over time she lost faith in political ideologies and was drawn to Christianity. Her religious writings often emphasized sacrifice and martyrdom through an ascetic lifestyle, a lifestyle that Weil personally adopted and which led to her early death at age 34 from tuberculosis. In this 1943 essay, written during the last year of her life, which she spent working with Gen. de Gaulle in the struggle for French liberation, Weil makes the case for the existence of a transcendent and universal moral law, and describes the social responsibilities that accompany it. (read more) [Posted in Personal/Spirituality.]

• Studio 54 - documentary. “The story of the notorious 1970s New York City nightclub.”

• An Endless Seeing (behind paywall), The New York Review of Books, January 13, 2022, Jacqueline Rose.

  “Simone Weil’s political and moral vision always looked beyond her own earthly sphere of existence… Absence of joy, she suggested, is the ‘equivalent of madness.’… To revolt against God because of human misery is to misrepresent God as a ‘sovereign’ or tyrant who rules the world, as opposed to a deity who has laid down his power. It falls on humans to create a better world… A truer reality beyond and above this world...can be recognized only by those who bear equal respect to all human beings...whoever they may be. Marguerite Porete…had the nerve to enter a zone of absolute spiritual daring in which the self or ego dissolves... It would take some time before (Weil) herself would embrace such a radical disorientation of the ego as the only possible spiritual and psychic path to take. ‘What we believe to be our self [moi], she wrote, is as ‘fugitive’ as ‘the shape of a wave on the sea.’ (read more, behind paywall). Posted in Personal/Spirituality.

• Hannah Arendt on Violence and Politics, Wade Lee Hudson.

  “As political violence permeated the United States and spread across the globe, in 1969 the influential political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote On Violence. This small, passionate book analyzed the nature and sources of violence, offered some prophetic speculations, and challenged many widespread assumptions — including some that I had embraced but now reject. This re-evaluation will lead me to rewrite some of the content on this site…”

  READ MORE

• What America Would Look Like in 2025 Under Trump (behind paywall), The New York Times, Feb. 2, 2022, Thomas B. Edsall.

  What will happen if the political tables are turned and the Republican Party wins the White House in 2024 and the House and Senate along the way?

  One clue is that Donald Trump is an Orban worshiper — that’s Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, a case study in the aggressive pursuit of a right-wing populist agenda...

  Kitschelt’s last point touches on what is sure to be a major motivating force for a Republican Party given an extended lease on life under Trump: the need to make use of every available tool — from manipulation of election results to enactment of favorable voting laws to appeals to minority voters in the working class to instilling fear of a liberal state run amok — to maintain the viability of a fragile coalition in which the core constituency of white noncollege voters is steadily declining as a share of the electorate. It is an uphill fight requiring leaders, at least in their minds, to consider every alternative in order to retain power, whether it’s democratic or authoritarian, ethical or unethical, legal or illegal. (read more)

• So, You Think the Republican Party No Longer Represents the People (behind paywall), The New York Times, February 2, 2022, Russ Douhat.

  ...But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities... So just as a conservative alternative to Trump would need to somehow out-populist him, to overcome the dark side of right-wing populism, American liberalism would need to first democratize itself.

  (read more)

• Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off of Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison, Peter Schweizer.

  “One of the biggest scandals in American politics is waiting to explode: the full story of the inside game in Washington shows how the permanent political class enriches itself at the expense of the rest of us. Insider trading is illegal on Wall Street, yet it is routine among members of Congress.” (1/20/2022: Pelosi opens the door to stock trading ban for members of Congress.)

• The Trouble with Cultural Evolution, Massimo Pigliucci.

  “Ultimately, it is still very much an open question whether we can develop a coherent Darwinian theory of cultural evolution, or whether it may be better to abandon the analogy with biological evolution and recognize that culture is a significantly different enough beast to deserve its own theory and explanatory framework. Of course, cultural evolution is still tied to biological evolution, for the simple reason that we are both cultural and biological creatures. But we may have a long way to go before untangling the two and arriving at a satisfactory explanation of how precisely they are related to each other.”

• The Rise of A.I. Fighter Pilots, Sue Halpern.

  “Artificial intelligence is being taught to fly warplanes. Can the technology be trusted?... Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of more than a hundred and eighty non-governmental organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the World Council of Churches, has urged nations to adopt a legal treaty controlling the use of lethal autonomous weapons. The U.S. is not among the nearly seventy countries that have so far signed on….” Posted in Economic/Big Tech.

• Comments from Michael Johnson on The System, Systemic/Overview, Systemic/Problems, and Systemic Solutions.

• The One Thing TV Characters Don’t Talk About, Jordan Calhoun. “The topic of money requires the most awkward suspension of disbelief in fiction.”

• Digging for Utopia, Kwame Anthony Appiah.

  “In The Dawn of Everything David Graeber and David Wengrow search for historical examples of nonhierarchical societies to justify their anarchist vision of human freedom... And cities [they say] could function perfectly well without bosses and administrators... In their view we should give up both and reject the inevitability of states... [But] when the dust, or the darts, have settled, we find that Graeber and Wengrow have no major quarrel with the “standard historical meta-narrative,” at least in its more cautious iterations... They don’t dispute that forager societies—with fascinating exceptions—tend to have less capital accumulation and inequality than sedentary farming ones... Human beings are riven with both royalist and regicidal impulses; we’re prone to erect hierarchies and prone to topple them. We can be deeply cruel and deeply caring... It’s just that Graeber and Wengrow aren’t content to make those points: they want to establish the existence of large, dense, city-like settlements free of rulers or rules; and, when the fumes of conjecture drift away, we are left without a single unambiguous example.”
  Posted in Systemic Resources/History.

• ‘And I One of Them’, Kevin Young. "Nancy Cunard’s relationship with the jazz musician Henry Crowder helped inspire her years of civil rights activism. Her romance wasn’t just with him, but with Blackness... Her crowning achievement was the Negro anthology (1934), a costly, comprehensive 855-page volume celebrating Blackness and Harlem just as its Renaissance was ending. ...More written about than read, more notorious than known, the British heiress Nancy Cunard has much to tell us and warn us against... Nancy’s tragedy is that, despite her tremendous labor of love, in type and image, she ultimately couldn’t imagine an Africa beyond her youthful fantasies. Despite her emphasis on Black genius, she was still foregrounding herself as the white savior... Viewing Blackness as monolithic, her ideas about it were as large and unwieldy as the book she assembled. She urged Crowder to “be more African”; Cunard deigned to say what kind of Black was best, a problem of overfamiliarity, while refusing to admit her own views sprang from a need to outrage her own highborn origins.”
  Posted in Social Resources/Race.

• ‘Part of Why We Survived’, Ian Frazier. “A new history of the long tradition of Native comedy, inside and outside mainstream entertainment”

  Reviewed:

  We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans in Comedy by Kliph Nesteroff

  The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy by Kliph Nesteroff

  "...Humans are resilient, and the risky exhilaration of making one another laugh helps them to be. Again and again in We Had a Little Real Estate Problem, Native people describe how comedy sustained them, and how seeing comedians who looked like themselves lifted them and changed their lives... 'I’m not saying we’re saving the world or anything like that, but it’s just a solid contribution.'"
  Posted in Cultural/Resources.

• The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash (Official Documentary). “YouTube Originals presents The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash stands among the giants of 20th century American life. But his story remains tangled in mystery and myth. This documentary, created with the full cooperation of the Cash estate and rich in recently discovered archival materials, brings Cash the man out from behind the legend. Taking the remarkable Folsom Prison recording as a central motif and featuring interviews with family and celebrated collaborators, the film explores the artistic victories, the personal tragedies, the struggles with addiction, and the spiritual pursuits that colored Johnny Cash's life. The Original Score to the documentary is available now, featuring essential Johnny Cash recordings & original score by Mike McCready incorporating exclusive interview soundbites with Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash, and others. https://JohnnyCash.lnk.to/TheGiftOST

• Reimagining the Public Defender, Sarah A. Seo. “In Free Justice, Mayeux provides a historical example of a community-based public defender’s office that sought justice outside the courtroom. The Roxbury Defenders Committee, established in 1971 in a predominantly Black and poor neighborhood in Roxbury, Massachusetts, did fight vigorously for its clients in court. Its lawyers were known for “their eagerness to file motions, take cases to trial, and challenge actions taken by police and prosecutors,” all of which were possible because they strictly limited their caseload. But the Roxbury defenders also advocated for prisoners’ rights, hosted know-your-rights workshops for the community, published a neighborhood newsletter, and broadcast a weekly call-in radio show, as well as running a twenty-four-hour hotline for those who needed to speak to an attorney right away. As Mayeux puts it, the lawyers in the Roxbury office “reimagined the public defender not merely as a substitute for retained counsel…but as a friendly neighborhood resource.” Such legal services go beyond adversarial representation to further both individual and social justice.” Posted in Political/Criminal Justice.

• You Can't Optimize For Rest, L. M. Sacasas. “…There are two key points. First, our exhaustion—in its various material and immaterial dimensions—is a consequence of the part we play in a techno-social milieu whose rhythms, scale, pace, and demands are not conducive to our well-being, to say nothing of the well-being of other creatures and the planet we share. Second, the remedies to which we often turn may themselves be counterproductive because their function is not to alter the larger system which has yielded a state of chronic exhaustion but rather to keep us functioning within it. Moreover, not only do the remedies fail to address the root of the problem, but there’s also a tendency to carry into our efforts to find rest the very same spirit which animates the system that left us tired and burnt out. Rest takes on the character of a project to be completed or an experience to be consumed. In neither case do we ultimately find any sort of meaningful and enduring relief or renewal.” Posted in Systemic/General/Articles.

• The Happiness Project — “In 2009, Gretchen Rubin’s breakout book, The Happiness Project, became a New York Times #1 bestseller and revolutionized the way people approach personal development. Over the last decade, she has taken her approach to creating a happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative life off those pages and into the daily lives of her readers and listeners through her books, blog, podcast, online courses, and weekly newsletter.” Posted in Personal Growth/Advocacy-Services.

• The Growing Democracy Project, Michael Johnson. “The Growing Democracy Project (GDP) is a cultural and political program for developing a legion of everyday citizens who can generate enough collective power to make democracy the dominant political force in our country. The strategy is to produce abundant, persistent, and effective citizen action to solve shared problems at all levels of our society. The means is the continuous development of participants’ “habits of the heart” and skillful democratic means.”

  READ MORE

• Two First Things in Building Collective Action, Michael Johnson.

  “I have put 40 years into building and sustaining an urban intentional community of substantial size—the Ganas Community in Staten Island, NY. We began with seven, reached 100 in the 90s, and settled in at around 65 ever since. I have also studied collective action groups out in the regular world, especially worker co-operatives and solidarity economic groups.

  So, do I have anything useful to pass on? I think so. At least a couple.

  For me there is one lesson that stands out above all others in starting a community or collective action group: the group that starts and sustains the project has to learn how to talk to each other about the problems they have with each other.

  READ MORE

  Posted in Social/Communication

• How Ivy League Elites Turned Against Democracy, Stephen Marche. “Some of the best-educated people in the country have overseen the destruction of their institutions…. What the Ivy League produces, in spades, on both the left and the right, is unwarranted confidence. Its institutions are hubris factories.... America’s less-educated and less-productive citizens drive anti-government patriotism, both in its armed and elected wings, but they mostly, despite themselves, pick their representatives from the ranks of the Ivy League and other similarly elite institutions around the country. Even in their rage against elites, the anti-elitists fall back on the deep structure of American power....” (COMMENT: But why do they submit?) Posted in Systemic Resources/Meritocracy

• The Gender Gap Is Taking Us to Unexpected Places, Thomas B. Edsall. “Women are just as competitive as men, Haidt wrote, ‘but they do it differently.’… Benenson writes:

  From early childhood onwards, girls compete using strategies that minimize the risk of retaliation and reduce the strength of other girls. Girls’ competitive strategies include avoiding direct interference with another girl’s goals, disguising competition, competing overtly only from a position of high status in the community, enforcing equality within the female community and socially excluding other girls.... The result of these two somewhat conflicting motives is that girls and women seek high status but disguise this quest by avoiding direct contests.

• Apotheosis Now, Fara Dabhoiwala. “What does it mean when men are worshiped, willingly or not, as gods? …It also serves to mask the extent to which Western attitudes depend on their own forms of magical thinking. Our culture, for example, fetishizes goods, money, and material consumption, holding them up as indices of personal and social well-being. Moreover, as Subin points out, none of us can truly escape this fixation:

  Though we may demystify other people’s gods and deface their idols, our critical capacity to demystify the commodity fetish still cannot break the spell it wields over us, for its power is rooted in deep structures of social practice rather than simple belief. While fetishes made by African priests were denigrated as irrational, the fetish of the capitalist marketplace has long been viewed as the epitome of rationalism.

  …We all make our own gods, for our own reasons, all the time.

• Mahatma Gandhi : his message for mankind : a commemoration symposium, Haridas Chaudhuri; Leonard Roy Frank. “Cultural Integration Fellowship has been celebrating the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi every year in the first week of October since 1951. A special celebration marks the centenary of Gandhi this year at San Francisco Ashram ... Beniamino Bufano, the internationally famed sculptor, exhibits in the Ashram his beautiful mosaic of Gandhi and reminisces on his thrilling participation in Gandhi's historic Salt March in 1930 ... Other speakers include Dr. Framroze A. Bode, Zoroastrian High Priest from Bombay, who was actively associated with Gandhi for sometime, and Dr. Haridas Chaudhuri, President of California Institute of Asian Studies ... The idea of this commemoration volume on Mahatma Gandhi came from Mr. Leonard Roy Frank, manager of the Continental Art Gallery in San Francisco ... The purpose of this small volume is to spotlight the unique significance of Gandhi in the history of human evolution ..." Added to Systemic/Resources/Books.

• Evolution of Integral Consciousness, by Haridas Chaudhuri. “According to Dr. Haridas Chaudhuri, former president of the California Institute of Asian Studies, consciousness is the essential structure of the human psyche. It is the common denominator of all the levels of the human psychic structure. Consciousness is the essential structure of human reality. All that we do outside of ourselves in our human relations, social activities, or building up social, political and international structures, is ultimately determined by the dynamics of the human psyche. Chapters include: The Role of Philosophy; Integral Psychology; Quantum Theory and Consciousness; and Meditation for Integral Self-Development” Added to Systemic/Resources/Books.

• "The Aristocracy of Talent" Review. “…Wooldridge calls for private schools to offer half their places to poorer students and advocates the creation of a “highly variegated” school system consisting of technical and art schools as well as academically selective ones. He also says we need a “moral revival” in our values to counteract our society’s obsessive celebration of intelligence. He points out that many members of the cognitive elite (such as bankers and journalists) are generally despised by the ordinary public, who revere the caring professions instead….” Added to Systemic/Meritocracy/Articles.

• Georgia Football: Team "Connection", Marc Weiszer. “In the business world, a company may hold a corporate retreat for employees for team building in hopes of producing better results. The Georgia football team turned inward for players to get to know the guy across from them in the locker room or the person who they lined up besides or against on the practice field. Skull sessions, they called them. It started last winter after an 8-2 season in which Georgia failed to win the SEC East for the first time since 2016 and the pandemic altered usual player interactions. (read more). Added to Social/Mutual Support.

• The Happiness Project — “In 2009, Gretchen Rubin’s breakout book, The Happiness Project, became a New York Times #1 bestseller… Over the last decade, she has taken her approach to creating a happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative life off those pages and into the daily lives of her readers and listeners through her books, blog, podcast, online courses, and weekly newsletter. [On their site] you’ll find all the practical tools, resources, and insights you need to start your own Happiness Project. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution — your Happiness Project is unique to you, based on your own nature, interests, values, and experiences. This collection is your personal happiness toolkit, where you can discover what tools work for you so that you can build the life you want, starting today.” Added to Personal/Actions.

• Humans Being — “searches for lessons in the most popular movies, books, TV shows, and more. Whatever you’re reading or streaming, this newsletter wants to be your companion to help understand the story and decide what to play next.”

• The Godmother of ‘Plant-Based’ Living, Steven Kurutz. “Frances Moore Lappé’s last hamburger was in 1971, the same year she published ‘Diet for a Small Planet,’ her hugely influential book about food and sustainability, which virtually created the publishing category of food politics and turned Ms. Lappé into what she once self-deprecatingly called ‘the Julia Child of the soybean circuit.’

  In ‘Diet,’ Ms. Lappé argued that Americans eat too much meat, especially beef, and that our meat-centered meals are an enormous waste of resources. Both our bodies and the planet would be healthier if we ate a plant-focused diet instead... (read more) — Added to Food / Agriculture.

• The Human Costs of AI, Sue Halpern. “Artificial intelligence does not come to us as a deus ex machina but, rather, through a number of dehumanizing extractive practices, of which most of us are unaware… AI can’t account for the qualitative, nonmeasurable, idiosyncratic, messy stuff of life. The danger ahead, then, is not that artificially intelligent systems will get smarter than their human creators. It’s that by valorizing these systems without reservation, humans will voluntarily cede the very essence of ourselves—our curiosity, our compassion, our autonomy, our creativity—to a narrow, algorithmically driven vision of what counts. (read more) — Added to Big Tech.

• The ‘Third Rail of American Politics’ Is Still Electrifying, Thomas B. Edsall. “Americans, she points out, 'are more open to immigration than either the left or the right assumes. But as soon as the issue is framed around race, it can become more polarized... A coming paper ... reveals an additional hurdle facing pro-immigration Democrats. The authors conducted a survey in which they explicitly provided information rebutting negative stereotypes of immigrants’ impact on crime, tax burdens and employment. They found that respondents in many cases shifted their views of immigrants from more negative to more positive assessments. But ... the effects of the stereotype-challenging information 'on beliefs about immigration are more durable than the effects on immigration policy preferences, which themselves decay rapidly.'“ (read more)

• The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them, Emma Goldberg. “Twenty-somethings rolling their eyes at the habits of their elders is a longstanding trend, but many employers said there’s a new boldness in the way Gen Z dictates taste...Managers, like Ms. Kriegsman, understand the instinct Gen Zers have to protect their health, to seek some divide between work and life — but some are baffled by the candid way in which those desires are expressed. They’re unaccustomed, in other words, to the defiance of workplace hierarchy... (read more)

• A progressive walk on the supply side, Ezra Klein. “…I don't think these various policies have cohered into a policy faction, a way progressives think of themselves, at least not yet. But I'd like to see that happen. Political movements consider solutions where they know to look for problems. Progressives have long known to look for problems on the demand side of the economy — to ask whether there are goods and services people need that they cannot afford. That will make today fairer, but to ensure tomorrow is radically better, we need to look for the choke points in the future we imagine, the places where the economy can't or won't supply the things we need. And then we need to fix them.” (read more)

• The End of American Crusaderism? The Interpreter. “We may, someday soon, look back with puzzlement at the time in which Americans believed their country was so innately superior, so ordained with special virtue — so exceptional — that it was their right and responsibility to dictate affairs overseas.

  There have been indications for years that belief in American exceptionalism is declining. Now, the latest report from a four-year study by the Eurasia Group Foundation, tracking American attitudes on foreign policy matters, suggests that exceptionalism could end outright — and, with it, perhaps even the era of America as global crusader…” (read more)

• Protests Are Taking Over the World. What’s Driving Them? Zachariah Mampilly. “…In many countries, trust in government has been shaken by leaders who put their faith in market-based solutions to the detriment of most citizens... Social trust is a precious thing. It can take generations to build but can be lost in a flash. And so protests are likely to continue wherever that trust remains low,... The pandemic has revealed the disconnect between governments and their citizens. The latter now demand a different, more just world…” (read more)

• Why Everyone Is Always Giving Unsolicited Advice, Tressie McMillan Cottom. “…Even though we resist being judged, we enjoy being the judge. Advice is a method by which we manipulate status to negotiate interpersonal interactions. By giving advice, we enact tiny theaters of social dominance to signal or procure our social status over others…” (read more)

• Francis Fukuyama’s Defense of Liberalism, “Francis Fukuyama and Yascha Mounk on how to make the case for liberalism… You need to not be apologetic about liberalism. That's why I've written this book: To try to remind people why they should be liberals. Say it now and say out loud: “I’m a liberal”. Obviously, in the United States, it has a very specific connotation. So you might want to say, “I’m a classical liberal.” People have to understand that being a classical liberal has these very powerful arguments standing in its favor.”

• Scorn and the American Story, David Brooks. “…Humiliation lingers in the mind, the heart, the veins, the arteries forever,” Vivian Gornick writes in Harper’s Magazine. “It allows people to brood for decades on end, often deforming their inner lives.”

  Loss of status can cause people to retreat to their tribal categories, dwell in the lost glories of the past, bloat with resentment toward rivals and lash out with horrific violence... A remarkable feature of America is that so many of the scorned who came here did not react in that way. They responded to humiliation with creative action…” (read more)

• The Race-Class Narrative Project. “The goal of Demos’ Race-Class Narrative (RCN) project is to develop an empirically-tested narrative on race and class that resonates with all working people and offers an alternative to — and neutralizes the use of — dog-whistle racism.”

• David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Don’t Want to Hear, Ezra Klein. "...Shor believes the party has become too unrepresentative at its elite levels to continue being representative at the mass level. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the people we’ve lost are likely to be low-socioeconomic-status people,” he said. “If you look inside the Democratic Party, there are three times more moderate or conservative nonwhite people than very liberal white people, but very liberal white people are infinitely more represented. That’s morally bad, but it also means eventually they’ll leave.” The only way out of this, he said, is to “care more and cater to the preference of our low-socioeconomic-status supporters..." [For a constructive criticism, see Bill Clinton, Race and the Politics of the 1990s, Jamelle Bouie.]

• The Lie of Nation Building, Fintan O’Toole. “The great question of America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan was not whether the Afghans were fit for democracy. It was whether democratic values were strong enough in the US to be projected onto a traumatized society seven thousand miles away. Those values include the accountability of the people in power, the consistent and universal application of human rights, a clear understanding of what policies are trying to achieve, the prevention of corrupt financial influence over political decisions, and the fundamental truthfulness of public utterances. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the American republic was fighting, and often losing, a domestic battle to uphold those values for its own citizens. It is grimly unsurprising that the US could not infuse them into a very foreign country. (read more)

• Trump True Believers Have Their Reasons, Thomas B. Edsall. “Epistemic hubris — the expression of unwarranted factual certitude — is prevalent, bipartisan and associated with both intellectualism (an identity marked by ruminative habits and learning for its own sake) and anti-intellectualism (negative affect toward intellectuals and the intellectual establishment). The division between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, they write, is ‘distinctly partisan: intellectuals are disproportionately Democratic, whereas anti-intellectuals are disproportionately Republican. By implication, we suggest that both the intellectualism of blue America and the anti-intellectualism of red America contribute to the intemperance and intransigence that characterize civil society in the United States.’ In addition, according to Barker, Marietta and DeTamble, ‘The growing intellectualism of blue America and anti-intellectualism of red America, respectively, may partially explain the tendency by both to view the other as some blend of dense, duped and dishonest.’”