#but the teacher IS responsible for his work ethics violations that contributed to that

[thatscarletflycatcher]

Me, seeing people on my dashboard talking about The Holdovers: ohhh, that looks so good!

Me, seeing someone compare it to Dead Poets Society: okay. I have to reconsider now.

[anniekoh]

post-carbon academia

I am so very interested in thinking through what a post-carbon academia might require. I’ve mostly thought about it from the teacher/student aspect. In general I try to use web conferencing to bring in guest speakers for classes. Even if they are located in the greater LA area, chances are that driving to campus will be at least 1.5 hrs round trip. 

I’m also pretty into hybrid classes that build in space-time flexibility with 50%/50% split between in-person and online classes. It’s truly mind boggling how much driving folks do in Southern California - you might live in Riverside County, work in Orange County and go to school in LA County.

Anthropologist Hannah Knox has written some very smart, thoughtful posts about the ethical and practical considerations of Not Flying as an academic. Knox points to fellow anthropologist Jason Hickel’s blog post on anthrodendum that suggests that ethical code of the AAA fundamentally contradicts the carbon consequences of the annual meeting. Their code of ethics states ‘anthropological researchers must do everything in their power to ensure that their research does not harm the safety of the people with whom they work.’ Contributing to global climate change through academic research seems to violate those ethical principles. (Confession, I am looking at plane tickets right now for a conference at the end of October)

Last year she made a commitment to eschew air travel for a year.

The questions I am raising here about flying are also questions about how to materialise the politics of anthropology, in ways that seem to me entirely consistent with an anthropology of ontology, infrastructure, feminist techno-science and multi-species ethnography.

Political theorists Andreas Malm in his book Fossil Capital and Timothy Mitchell in his book Carbon Democracy have redescribed the politics of the 20th century in terms of such material relations and their social and political effects.

For not flying will demand an attention to the relationship between work and family, a reconsideration of what travel is, how time is spent and with whom. We have good friends and family in the USA. How will we deal with that? Will a personal decision not to fly simply shift responsibility onto others who will be expected to travel to us? There are no generic answers to these questions and I don’t know how they will play out personally but by not flying I aim to put myself in a position to find out. One reason why I have put a limit of December 2020 on this decision is in recognition of how potentially fraught this decision is.

One of the problems I see with the way in which climate change is treated in the UK is that it is so frequently cast as a matter of individual personal choice, and therefore some kind of reflection on the subject as a holder of a fixed and stable identity. This has also been something that has put me off making the decision not to fly.

....

I want to treat giving up flying not as some kind of moral individual act, but as an exploration of what difference it actually makes to professional and personal life to not fly.

Knox recently posted her reflections on the what she learned about “social, political and interpersonal implications of that rather anodyne term ‘low carbon transitions’ by attempting to live without international air travel – the biggest low carbon transition that I could personally make.” She discusses the Swedish concepts of ‘flygskam’ (flight shame) and ‘train bragging’ (tagskryt).

I had been trying to comfort myself with the fact that some airlines have started to use biofuels, and that a packed-to-the-gills flight means we are minimizing the fuel-to-passenger ratio, but Academic Flying has pointed out that jet fuel is in fact a huge and growing contributor to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

[Figure on average annual change in US CO2 emissions by fuel type.]

Municipal data on aviation as part of greenhouse gas inventories

For cities that are honest enough to count aviation at all, the aviation sector is a large fraction of greenhouse gas inventories.

For example, in Seattle’s official 2016 greenhouse gas inventory (.pdf), air transportation at the two airports is responsible for 1.25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions (21% of all emissions). This represents a rapid increase from 2008, when air transportation was only 0.99 million metric tons CO2e (16% of all emissions).

Thus, in just 8 years, the fraction of Seattle’s emissions attributable to aviation jumped by more than 30% (increasing by 5 percentage points from 16% in 2008 to 21% in 2016 of all CO2e emissions).

In Seattle, air transportation grew from 16% of emissions in 2008 to 21% of emissions in 2016.

[lati-will]

How Can You Tell If You’re Being Spiritually Guided? 15 Discernment Tools

I’m in Boulder, Colorado right now with Trevor Hart, leading a Sounds True event about trusting the invisible forces of love to guide you in your life. Yesterday, we spent all day talking about how we can invoke spiritual guidance, the tools and practices that can help you receive guidance, and what gets in the way of opening to this kind of guidance. Today, we’ll be focusing on the tricky topic of discernment.

As Sounds True founder Tami Simon pointed out yesterday, without discernment, we can become flat out delusional in our efforts to seek out spiritual guidance. “What if someone sees seven butterflies,” she asked, “and he assumes that means he’s supposed to get seven wives?” We laughed at her example, but seriously — Hitler thought he was being spiritually guided to purify his race. Discernment is key. Without clear tools of discernment, an attempt to seek out and follow spiritual guidance can turn psychotic. After all, many schizophrenics think the television is talking only to them! The only thing that separates the mystics from the sociopaths and psychotics is discernment.

We’ll be talking about many tools for discernment in today’s Sounds True program, as well as in the 10 month Mystery School immersion Trevor and I will be teaching this year. (You can listen to Trevor and I teaching our free teleclass here.)

In short, there’s no simple answer to the question, “How can you tell if you’re being spiritually guided?” In fact, the very question calls to mind a story Rabbi Reb Zalman told about an enlightened master whose disciples were concerned about choosing another spiritual teacher after he died. The master told them to ask any prospective teachers a question. “Ask him what we should do with our thoughts that interrupt us in meditation, that drag us away. If he answers you, don’t take him as a teacher. It’s too facile to give such an answer.” In some ways, discerning whether you’re receiving accurate spiritual guidance is similar. If anyone tries to tell you they know for sure when they’re receiving clear guidance, be skeptical.

With that disclaimer, here are some key questions you can use to double-check yourself when you think you might be receiving spiritual guidance. Keep in mind that no single one of these questions is adequate for discernment. Don’t interpret your answers to all these questions literally. Use these questions as a prompt for your own intuition and discernment.

15 Discernment Questions

–Does it feel like ‘’shackles on’ or ‘shackles off’?

Does this make you feel like you’re in prison, or unfettered? Is the cage door open or closed? Do you feel the heaviness of the shackles or the lightness of being that comes with freedom. Martha Beck writes, “The Buddha often said that wherever you find water, you can tell if it’s the ocean because the ocean always tastes of salt.” By the same token, anywhere you find enlightenment—whatever improbable or unfamiliar shape it may have assumed—you can tell it’s enlightenment because enlightenment always tastes of freedom. Not comfort. Not ease. Freedom.” If you feel like you’re being guided, does it feel like freedom?

–Is it kind?

If you think you’re being guided to do something overtly cruel, insensitive or unkind, think again. Don’t mistake kindness for people-pleasing though. Trustworthy spiritual guidance is kind at heart, but it can also be tough love — complete with strict boundary setting and ferocious love. You may be guided to break a people-pleasing co-dependence pattern that may feel to someone else like your new boundary setting isn’t as kind as usual. Check the kindness meter in your own heart. Your heart will know.

–Is there Aliveness here?

This is a vitality check. True spiritual guidance rarely tells you to do something that makes you feel dead inside. The rational mind, the fear-based inner critic or the task-master superego may order you to do something that feels deadening, but spiritual guidance will not.

–Does it exhaust me or fill me with dread?

Your true nature may ask you to complete tasks that require you to hunker down and focus. You may even feel a certain weariness after saying yes to a calling that puts you on the front line of something big and scary. But even if your body is tired, you will also feel a certain excitement, a rightness and lightness of being, and positive flow of energy through your body. You may feel scared. You may have butterflies in your solar plexus. But if you feel dread, you can be pretty certain the guidance isn’t pure.

–Does it nourish or deplete me?

Even when spiritual guidance asks you to do something that requires a lot of energy, true guidance will only ask you to do things that fill you with spiritual energy and do not require you to give away all of you own personal energy.

–Does it feel natural, efficient, easeful, peaceful and graceful?

This question, from Joan Borysenko and Gordon Dveirin’s wonderful book Your Soul’s Compass, always help me breathe more easily when I’m discerning whether guidance is real. As they discovered by interviewing priests, rabbis, Sufi masters, Christian mystics, sages, intuitives, and gurus, spiritual guidance usually feels natural, efficient, easeful, peaceful and graceful.

–Does it make sense?

While spiritual guidance may often ask you to do things that feel crazy, common sense is still a useful discernment tool. It certainly didn’t make sense when my spiritual guidance told me to leave my job as a doctor ten years ago. So as with all the questions, this question doesn’t work on its own. But if spiritual guidance is asking you to do something that violates your common sense, slow down. Ask for clarification and confirmation. If you’re not sure, it’s OK to ask for more guidance.

–Will it hurt anyone?

As with the “Is it kind?” question, this doesn’t mean your irresponsible 30-year-old son won’t get his feelings hurt when you set a boundary and tell him he has to move out of the house if he can’t contribute to the household as a mature adult. It also doesn’t mean you may not be guided to hurt someone who breaks into your house and is threatening your kids. It’s simply a prompt to remind you that if your guidance is potentially dangerous or hurtful to someone else, double check yourself.

–Would Love do this?

This is one of my favorite questions because it’s so expansive. What would love do? Sometimes love forgives unforgivable acts. Sometimes love leaves. But there’s nothing more powerful in the universe.

–How does this feel in my body?

Does your body feel contracted or expansive? Is it saying “Hell yeah” or “Hell no?” When you consider what you feel you are guided to do, do you get a headache or feel nauseous? Do you feel exhausted or enlivened? Does your heart light up? Check in. Let your body be your compass .

–Am I rushing?

In my experience, trustworthy spiritual guidance doesn’t rush you unless someone’s life is at risk. If you’re not clear, you can always ask the invisible forces of love for confirmation. Pray for another sign, a dream, a clear knowing or seeing or gut instinct. Slow down and get quiet. Listen deeply. Pay attention. You will get your answer. You just may not get your answer on someone else’s deadline. If you feel pressured to rush, the answer is probably “Not yet.” Urgency usually stems from fear and scarcity. But true guidance isn’t afraid and it’s ever-plentiful. There’s always enough.

–Is it coercive or controlling?

If what you feel guided to do is coercive or controlling of someone else, pause. Love doesn’t coerce or control.

–Is it ethical and aligned with my core values?

This one is so important that I could write a whole blog post just about this. I met a shaman who defended his sexual molestation of a client because he said, “I was being spiritually guided to give her a sexual healing.” Bullshit. I’m not saying that ethics are black and white or that you might be led into grey territory from time to time, but if you think you’re being guided to do something that might be a blatant ethics violation, think again.

–Will this cultivate the stillness in me?

This one is HUGE and it’s not often emphasized in our busy, rushed culture. So many things you might enjoy leave you feeling hyped up, manic, and on edge. As one guy who lived on a wild game reserve in Africa told me when he was breaking up with his girlfriend, “I used to think that the excited feeling I got when I was with her was love. But then I realized it was actually the feeling I get when I’m with an unpredictable wild animal.” Sometimes what we interpret as excitement is actually a physiological stress response. Choose the people, work, and experiences that cultivate relaxation responses in your nervous system.

–What’s true and not true about this situation?

Sometimes we get confused because we think it’s a black or white answer we’re seeking. But maybe it’s both/and. Sometimes the solution that resonates in your heart is a paradox.

Are you being guided? Do you have what the Quakers would call a “leading?” Run through these questions and see if they help. Also, don’t be afraid to seek out trustworthy guidance from therapists, spiritual counselors, and reputable intuitives, energy healers and shamans. Often, they can help confirm what you already know in your heart of hearts.

Trusting your discernment.

By: Lissa Rankin, MD

[ourmrmel]

Mel Feller MPA, MHR, Looks at How our Government Treats Charitable Organizations

Mel Feller MPA, MHR, Looks at How our Government Treats Charitable Organizations

 Mel is the President/Founder of Mel Feller Seminars with Coaching for Success 360, Inc. and Mel Feller Coaching. Mel Feller Ministries. Mel Feller is an Innovator and Business Leader. Visit www.melfeller.com and www.melfellersuccessstories.com Mel Feller currently maintains office in Texas. Currently an MBA Candidate.

 Our government, from the White House to the State Houses, has not done an effective job of regulating America's charities. In addition, this is a recipe for a disaster.

  The American government can no longer make a plausible argument that charities do not deserve the type of scrutiny that the for-profit sector warrants. Quite simply, the charitable sector is much too large to warrant the continued disinterest our government has shown it. 865,000 organizations in this country are recognized as charities. Nearly 15% of our nation's GDP flows through these charities. Did you know that charities in this country raised $212 billion last year from individuals, corporations, and foundations, an amount roughly the GDP of Israel and Egypt combined? Every single one of us in this nation has our life touched by a public charity.

 When charities are good, as they usually are, we all benefit. Charities do the work that we once envisioned our government would do. If it weren't for Teach For America, which provides 2000 teachers to America's neediest communities, who would teach those kids? Who do we really think is working harder to save our environment: Department of the Interior or The Nature Conservancy? Which one cares more?

  In addition, every occasionally, when charities are bad, we ALL lose. When a charity wastes money, not only are its donors ripped off, but people who need that money are denied what was intended for them, to help them. Furthermore, when money goes to a bad charity, with a good cause, it is denied from a "competitor": a good organization, with a talented staff and strong management, who would have used that money wisely.

  When Firefighter's Charitable Foundation decided to give less than 10% of the money they raised last year to victims of fires, and spent the rest on themselves, America was weakened. Fire victims did not get the money they needed. Donors who wanted to help were violated. Moreover, legitimate fire-related charities, which would have ensured that the money reached its intended and worthy victims, had fewer resources to utilize.

 Therefore, it is clear that the charity sector is massive, that it touches all of us, and that it has the potential to improve (or weaken) our lives. It would seem then that it is therefore in the public interest to ensure that this sector is operating in a transparent, forthright, and accountable manner. Yet, our government seems not to care.

  Quantitatively, we know our government has no interest in charity regulation. In the last ten years, the number of charities in this country has doubled, while the number of IRS agents assigned to monitor them has stayed the same. Furthermore, in those ten years, 400,000 brand-new, in some cases, unproven charities, have been created and the number of IRS audits of charities has declined by 50% in that time.

 Need more proof our government isn't paying attention to charities? For-profit companies have to file their financial statements with the IRS quarterly, and have to submit their audited annual report with the SEC within 90 days of the end of their fiscal year. On the other hand, charities file an informational return, the 990, 135 days after their fiscal year, and can have an automatic four-month extension merely by asking (which unlike the for-profit world carries no penalties of interest incurred). In addition, while these 990s are supposed to be provided to any citizen who asks for them, we have found a huge number of national charities who flat-out ignore this law.

  Moreover, what does the IRS do to charities that ignore not only the internal revenue code, but the rights of American donors (and taxpayers), by refusing to provide these documents to citizens who ask for them? Sadly, the answer is "nothing." The IRS either does not care or does not have enough people to enforce their own laws.

Nevertheless, why should we care? Charities are the "Independent Sector". They are not government, and they are not for-profit. They are different. Right? Hogwash.

 First, most charities operate like for-profit companies. Did you know the YMCA of the USA h ad revenues last year of 7 billion dollars? Did you know that the California Community Foundation lost $23 million in the stock market once? Why are these organizations any different from for-profit companies? The idea that charities consist of a few bleeding hearts serving up soup to the homeless is an antiquated recollection of a day that may never have existed, but certainly does not now. Charities are big business. They need to be regulated.

 Moreover, what makes this laissez-faire approach to charity regulation even more insidious is that most big charities are inextricably intertwined with the government. Most charities get tons of money from the government, to carry out government work. Governments, state, local, and federal, contributed over $250 billion of taxpayer money to America's charities last year. At Charity Navigator, we found that, of the largest 2000 charities in America, an overwhelming majority of them received most of their funding from government sources.

  Did you know that the New York City's Museum of Modern Art, which charges a $12 admission fee, received over 50% of its funding last year from government sources? I am not saying this funding is inappropriate. In fact, I think it is more than appropriate; it is necessary. However, the funding, without any accompanying oversight, is immature.

 In essence, what we have done is create a system that is, in many ways, as large as the private sector, with stakes just as high, that operates with a ton of government funding, and that is accountable to no one but the whims and needs of the individual donor. This is outrageous.

  Our government has acted like irresponsible parents who do not realize how big, strong, and powerful their child has become. We would mock a parent that, no matter how great their intentions were, gave their child the keys to the car, a couple of hundred dollars, and no curfew, and then acted shocked when that kid got into trouble. Then if the parent tried to impose some rules, we would not be surprised if the child ignored them.

  However, that is what we have here. We have given charities the privilege of tax-exempt status. We have g iven them millions of dollars of taxpayer funding. We have given them a far less-sophisticated set of accounting and reporting rules to play by, and then we have walked away, and hoped that they would behave.

 In addition, thank God that so many have. Charities do amazing work in this country and remarkably, with little oversight, usually have codes of ethics we all should emulate. Nevertheless, to continue to ignore them is irresponsible and childish, and a relic of a day long gone. It's time to recognize that charities in this country are as big as for-profit companies, are tax-payer funded, and have no one but their own donors demanding that they act responsibly, transparently, and ethically.

 So how do we fix this problem, before it is too late? We need an SEC for charities. The IRS clearly is not up to the job. We need a more thorough review of tax-exempt status. Excessively many organizations are being granted this privilege and they are crowding the field for the organizations with the ability to bring about long-term change. We need regular and more frequent reporting of annual returns. Filing one tax return, as late as nine months after the fiscal year ends, is preposterous. We need an insistence on uniformity of rules for reporting that data. In addition, we need penalties that are actually enforced, for organizations that do not provide their data, to taxpayers, on request.

   We need a government that cares about its most generous people, the ones who give to charity, and one who also cares about its most needy citizens, the ones that depend on that philanthropy. We need a government that cares about charities, and about holding them to the highest standard. Right now, our government could not care less.

          Mel Feller, MPA, MHR, is a well-known real estate, business consultant, personal development Consultant and speaker, specializing in performance, productivity, and profits. Mel is the President/Founder of Mel Feller Seminars with Coaching For Success 360, Inc. and Mel Feller Coaching, a real estate and business specific coaching company and Mel Feller Ministries. His three books for real estate professionals are systems on how to become an exceptional sales performer. His four books in Business and Government Grants are ways to leverage and increase your business Success in both time and money! His book on Personal Development “Lies that Will Sabotage Your Success”. Mel Feller is in Texas. Visit www.melfeller.com and www.melfellersuccessstories.com  

[barreragraham90]

Reiki Level 3 Wonderful Tips

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How To Activate Reiki Energy

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Learn Reiki Massachusetts

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[potr1774com]

Think you know this guy?  Well, let’s dig into who he is, what he has said, and what he has done for America.

Race and Ethnicity

Willingly worked with and supported racists (segregationists) in the 60s and 70s.  He named Senator James Eastland of Mississippi and Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia. “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son,'” Biden told donors at a New York fundraiser, CNN reported.

Biden gave one of the eulogies at the funeral of South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, who had filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and supported segregation for much of his career.

Supported the democrats who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Opposed Busing to desegregate public schools.  Biden argued that the policy would undermine black identity.  He stated, “a rejection of the entire black awareness concept, where black is beautiful, black culture should be studied; and the cultural awareness of the importance of their own identity, their own individuality.” An identity HE is trying to push and impose on them.

Supported an amendment from Senator Jesse Helms that would bar the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) from collecting any data about the race of students or teachers. In addition, HEW could not “require any school . . . to classify teachers or students by race.” Helms said explicitly, “This is an anti-busing amendment.” Biden surprised many supporters by declaring, “I have become convinced that busing is a bankrupt concept” and later calling it “an asinine policy.”

Biden then introduced his own amendment, which declared that school systems could not use federal funds “to assign teachers or students to schools . . . for reasons of race,” which passed. Ed Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican and the first black senator ever to be popularly elected, called the vote on Biden’s amendment “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.”

Believes non-white is synonymous with poverty/dysfunction/uneducated (see full quotes below)

Joe assumes, if you’re non-white, you’re less educated; while meeting with the Asian and Latino Coalition, he stated: “We have this notion that somehow if you’re poor you cannot do it, poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”  The problem is, HE, not WE, had this notion…

In response to a question on the legacy of slavery, Biden said: “We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t want — they don’t know quite what to do.” (see full response below)

Stated this about Obama: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,”

In 2014, in a speech denouncing predatory lenders who focused on military families, Biden denounced “these Shylocks who took advantage of these women and men while overseas.” Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman responded, “Shylock represents the medieval stereotype about Jews and remains an offensive characterization to this day. The Vice President should have been more careful.” A few days later, Biden called Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew “the wisest man in the Orient.”

In 2006, Biden commented on the growing population of Indian Americans in Delaware.  “You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking,” he told a voter.

Gender

Opposed and voted against the creation of an office to probe sexual harassment claims against Senators in 1991.

Anita Hill about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s sexual harassment in 1994; Joe Biden and Orrin Hatch oversaw a disastrous testimony that they structured. Biden called no independent experts and forced Hill to defend herself alone against an avalanche of immensely powerful white men, and Joe Biden has since apologized and said he wished he would have done more.

Dismissive of sexual assault victims claims.  Biden asked her to describe her most embarrassing encounter with Thomas, alone, with no attorney, no victim advocate—”Can you tell us how you felt at the time? Were you uncomfortable, were you embarrassed, did it not concern you? How did you feel about it?”—and pushed an obviously reluctant Hill to say the name of a pornographic film star whom Thomas had alluded to.

In 2009, Politico reported that Biden was overheard making this comment to the then Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko: “I cannot believe that a French man visiting Kiev went back home and told his colleagues he discovered something and didn’t say he discovered the most beautiful women in the world. That’s my observation.”

Having offered sincere and conciliatory words about the inappropriate touching controversy, Biden went on to make light of the whole affair in a speech to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, joking that he had permission to hug the organization’s president.  Multiple women had accused Biden of making them feel uncomfortable by touching them and violating their personal space. One of those women was Lucy Flores, a former Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in Nevada.  After Biden’s joke, Flores told Fox News he had been “so incredibly disrespectful,” adding: “The basis of the behavior that I talked about was something much more serious than just a hug.”

  Commanding/Military Experience

Avoided the draft for Military Service by receiving 5 draft deferments during the Vietnam War then finally claiming to have severe enough asthma that he suffered as a teenager even though he played for his high-school football team or playing halfback for the University of Delaware Blue Hens.

Criminal Justice System Reform

Biden cosponsored the 1984 Crime Control Act, which abolished federal parole, reestablished the death penalty, expanded civil asset forfeiture, and increased federal penalties for cultivation, possession, or transfer of marijuana.  He stated: ““Under our forfeiture statutes, the government can take everything you own. Everything from your car, to your house, to your bank account, not merely what they confiscate in terms of the dollars of the transaction you’ve been caught engaging in. They can take everything!”

Biden bragged that his legislation would make more crimes eligible for the death penalty than would an alternative offered by the Bush administration and Senator Strom Thurmond: “The Biden crime bill before us calls for the death penalty for 51 offenses. . . . The president’s bill calls for the death penalty on 46 offenses.” He boasted, on final passage of compromise legislation, that it was “the single largest expansion of the federal death penalty in the history of the Congress.”

Foreign Policy and Relations

After the 9/11 attacks, he proposed to his staff, “This would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran.” His staff was not receptive to the idea.

For invasion of Iraq.  Biden wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post that “a policy based on sanctions does not guarantee that Saddam Hussein’s weapons program will be curtailed. Ultimately, as long as Saddam Hussein is at the helm, no inspectors can guarantee that they have rooted out the entirety of Saddam Hussein’s weapons program. And I said the only way to remove Saddam is a massive military effort, led by the United States.”

Biden publicly stated that, at the moment of decision about the raid that would ultimately kill Osama bin Laden, he had believed the mission was not worth the risk and told Obama, “Mr. President, my suggestion is don’t go.”

At a St. Patrick’s Day reception for the then Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen in 2010 he stated: “His mom lived in Long Island for 10 years or so, god rest her soul, and, er, although she’s, wait—your mom’s still alive. It was your dad [who] passed. God bless her soul. I gotta get this straight,”

Domestic Surveillance

Voted for the Patriot Act

The Economy and Big Business

Supported and voted for the passage a banking-reform bill that made it harder for consumers to file for bankruptcy protection. This was a longstanding goal of large banks and credit-card companies, many of which have headquarters in Biden’s home state of Delaware.  In addition, during the five preceding years that Biden and other senators had pushed for the changes, Biden’s son Hunter had had a $100,000-per-year consulting agreement with the bank MBNA. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, MBNA executives and employees contributed roughly $200,000 to Biden’s campaigns from 1989 to 2010.

Biden stopped off at a frozen custard shop in Milwaukee back in 2010, the manager offered him a dessert for free if the veep cut taxes, Fox News reported.  Biden replied, “Why don’t you say something nice instead of being a smartass all the time?”

Morals, Ethics, Sensitivity

He got caught plagiarizing in law school at Syracuse, and admitted to it.

Biden dropped out of the 1988 presidential race after reports that he’d copied a speech delivered months earlier by British Labour Party politician Neil Kinnock.

Biden’s campaign manager Pat Caddell took responsibility for mixing up pages of a planned Biden speech for the 1987 California Democratic Convention with papers quoting an inspirational speech by the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

Joe Biden has been making his 2016 deliberations all about his late son since August.  Aug. 1, to be exact — the day renowned Hillary Clinton-critic Maureen Dowd published a column that marked a turning point in the presidential speculation.  According to multiple sources, it was Biden himself who talked to her, painting a tragic portrait of a dying son, Beau’s face partially paralyzed, sitting his father down and trying to make him promise to run for president because “the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values.”  But in truth, Biden had effectively placed an ad in The New York Times, asking them to call.

During a 2008 campaign rally in Missouri, Biden asked the audience to applaud State Senator Chuck Graham. “Stand up, Chuck, let ’em see you,” Biden said, gesturing for Graham to stand.  Graham, a paraplegic following a car accident, is confined to a wheelchair.  “Oh, god love ya, what am I talking about,” Biden said, realizing his mistake. “I tell you what, you’re making everybody else stand up though, pal. Thank you very, very much…You can tell I’m new.”

In an interview with CBS Evening News, Biden criticized the George W. Bush administration’s handling of the financial crisis.  “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed,” Biden said.  But as FactCheck pointed out, Herbert Hoover was president during the 1929 Wall Street Crash and television didn’t exist.

  Sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/us/politics/joe-biden-james-eastland.html

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/06/on-this-day-in-1964-democrats-filibustered-the-civil-rights-act/

https://patriotpulse.net/joe-biden-made-this-racist-comment-that-will-leave-you-speechless/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/us/politics/debate-winners.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/us/politics/biden-record-player.html

“ABC correspondent Linsey Davis, at the Democratic Debate, 2019, asked Biden to reflect on a remark he made in the 1970s: “I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation, and I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.”  Davis said to Biden, “You said that some 40 years ago, but as you stand here tonight, what responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?”  Biden’s response:  “Well, they have to deal with the — look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining, banks, making sure we are in a position where — look, you talk about education. I propose that what we take the very poor schools, the Title I schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the $60,000 level. Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home. We have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are — I’m married to a teacher, my deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. Make sure that every single child does, does in fact, have 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds go to school. Not day care, school. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t want — they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone — make sure that kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background — will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.”

https://theintercept.com/2019/09/13/joe-biden-democratic-debate-slavery/

https://freebeacon.com/2020-election/biden-voted-against-creation-of-senate-office-that-handles-sexual-harassment-complaints/

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/05/biden-opposed-creation-of-office-to-probe-sex-harassment-by-senators.php

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/joe-biden-integration-school-busing-120968?o=1 [deleted by Politico, attempted access 5/24/2020]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/joe-biden-twenty-things-you-probably-didnt-know/

https://www.c-span.org/video/?18528-1/violent-crime-control-act-1991&start=493

https://newrepublic.com/article/61756/rhetorical-question

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1998/09/19/i-meant-no-disrespect/6acd6366-2058-4a7c-83cd-da4d345c144d/?noredirect=on

https://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/joe-biden-bin-laden-raid-defense-hillary-clinton-2016-campaign-121779

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/us/politics/25biden.html?_r=1&sq=MBNA%20biden&st=cse&oref=slogin&scp=1&pagewanted=all

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/us/politics/banking-ties-could-hurt-joe-biden-in-race-with-populist-overtone.html

in 2007 when, during a meeting with the editorial board of the Washington Post, he compared schoolchildren in Iowa with those in the District of Columbia: There’s less than 1 percent of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4 or 5 percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with. . . . When you have children coming from dysfunctional homes, when you have children coming from homes where there’s no books, where the mother from the time they’re born doesn’t talk to them — as opposed to the mother in Iowa who’s sitting out there and talks to them, the kid starts out with a 300-word larger vocabulary at age three. Half this education gap exists before the kid steps foot in the classroom. (https://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2007/10/25/biden-stumbles-over-education-question/)

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/joe-biden-anita-hill

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/09/18/biden-admits-plagiarizing-in-law-school/53047c90-c16d-4f3a-9317-a106be8f6102/

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/opinion/sunday/maureen-dowd-joe-biden-in-2016-what-would-beau-do.html

https://www.pastemagazine.com/politics/joe-biden/the-10-worst-things-joe-biden-has-done-in-his-poli/#9-opposed-school-integration-in-the-1970s

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/woman-broadens-claims-against-biden-include-sexual-assault-n1182296

https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-gaffes-quotes-2020-election-1323905

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/joe-biden-embraced-segregation-in-1975-claiming-it-was-a-matter-of-black-pride

https://www.factcheck.org/2008/09/biden-fdr-and-the-invention-of-television/

https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2009/07/vpotus-overheard-many-beautiful-women-020042

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-calls-custard-shop-manager-a-smartass-after-taxes-comment

Get To Know Joe Biden Think you know this guy?  Well, let's dig into who he is, what he has said, and what he has done for America.

[fullspectrum-cbd-oil]

Where U.S. Presidential Candidates Stand on Breaking up Big Tech

In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, America’s big tech companies are being challenged on many fronts from across the political spectrum, from antitrust concerns to their policies on political ads and ensuring election security.

Many of the Democratic presidential candidates have argued in favor of either breaking up or tightening regulation of firms such as Facebook Inc <FB.O>, Alphabet Inc’s Google <GOOGL.O> and Amazon.com Inc <AMZN.O>.

Republican President Donald Trump’s administration has also stepped up its scrutiny, announcing a wide-ranging investigation in July into whether major digital tech companies engaged in anti-competitive practices.

Trump’s Democratic challengers also criticize online platforms for allowing politicians to make false claims in advertising ahead of the election next November.

Social media platforms are under particular scrutiny after U.S. intelligence agencies said Russia used them to wage an influence operation to interfere with the 2016 election – a claim Moscow has denied.

Here are some of the candidates’ positions on Big Tech.

PRESIDENT TRUMP

Trump, whose social media use and digital advertising campaign helped propel him to the White House in 2016, in September attacked the “immense power” of social media giants in his address to the United Nations.

Trump has stopped short of calling for tech giants to be broken up, as Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have, but said “obviously there is something going on in terms of monopoly,” when asked about major tech companies in a June interview with CNBC.

Trump and other Republicans have also criticized social media companies, without evidence, for alleged political bias.

The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. wrote an opinion piece for The Hill political website in September entitled “Free speech suppression online builds case to break up Big Tech.”

Silicon Valley firms have also been at odds with the Trump administration over policies such as its repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules and the impact of the U.S.-China trade war on their supply chains.

JOE BIDEN

Biden, who was vice president in the Silicon Valley-friendly Obama administration, has taken a more moderate stance than his progressive rivals on the issue of big tech company break-ups.

In a May interview with the Associated Press, he said that splitting up companies such as Facebook was “something we should take a really hard look at” but that it was “premature” to make a final judgment.

The campaign told Reuters that, as president, Biden would aggressively use “all the tools available – including utilizing antitrust measures” to ensure corporations act responsibly.

He did not speak up during a discussion of the issue at the most recent Democratic debate in October.

Biden has criticized e-commerce giant Amazon’s $0 federal tax bill in 2018.

“I have nothing against Amazon, but no company pulling in billions of dollars of profits should pay a lower tax rate than firefighters and teachers. We need to reward work, not just wealth,” he said in a tweet in June.

His campaign also clashed with Facebook, Twitter and Google over their political ad policies after they refused to take down a Trump ad that the Biden team said contained false claims about his son Hunter’s dealings with Ukraine.

ELIZABETH WARREN

Warren is leading the charge to break up big tech companies on the grounds they hold outsized influence and stifle competition.

She has called for legislation to restrict large tech platforms – which she would designate as “platform utilities” -from owning and participating in a marketplace at the same time.

Under this law, Apple would not be allowed to both run the App Store and sell its own apps on it, for example.

She also said she would nominate regulators to unwind anti-competitive mergers such as Facebook’s deals for WhatsApp and Instagram, and Amazon’s deal for Whole Foods.

Warren in October challenged Facebook’s policy of exempting politicians’ ads from fact-checking by running ads containing the false claim that CEO Mark Zuckerberg was endorsing Trump’s re-election bid.

The senator from Massachusetts has also said that she would reject campaign donations over $200 from executives of big tech firms.

BERNIE SANDERS

Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont who frequently criticizes corporate influence, has also called for the break-up of big tech companies such as Facebook and Amazon.

His administration would “absolutely” try to split apart the companies, Sanders said at a Washington Post event in July.

He has said that he will have the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) review all mergers that have taken place during the Trump administration. His broad plan to reshape corporate America would also mandate all large companies to be owned partly by their workers.

Asked how he differentiates himself from Warren on major issues, Sanders told ABC in October: “Elizabeth considers herself – if I got the quote correctly – to be a capitalist to her bones. I don’t.”

Sanders has been vocal in his attacks on Amazon over issues such as its tax contributions and working conditions at its warehouses. In 2018, he introduced a ‘Stop BEZOS Act’ in the Senate, in a reference to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, which would make large corporations either pay their workers more or pay the government for public benefits that their workers receive.

PETE BUTTIGIEG

In general, Pete Buttigieg, who became Facebook’s 287th user shortly after it was launched in 2004 at Harvard University, where he was a student, has been more reluctant to slam the tech giants than some other candidates.

The mayor from South Bend, Indiana, said that the break-up of big tech companies is a “remedy that should be on the table,” but also said it was not a politician’s place to designate which companies should be broken up.

He has said that the FTC should be empowered to prevent and sometimes reverse mergers, but argued that large tech companies should be scrutinized for their actions rather than their size. He says concerns over monopolies and concerns over data security or privacy should not be conflated.

He is in favor of having legislation to protect individual data rights at a national level, including the right to be forgotten – which would give citizens the power to demand that online platforms delete data about them, as is the case in Europe.

KAMALA HARRIS

Senator Harris of California, the home of Silicon Valley, has said that Facebook has not been sufficiently regulated. She has not called outright for the break-up of big tech firms but said it should be “seriously” considered.

During the campaign, Harris touted her experience protecting consumers’ online privacy while she was state attorney general.

In Congress, Harris, along with fellow candidate Senator Amy Klobuchar, introduced the bipartisan ENOUGH Act in 2017 to protect against online exploitation of private images.

Harris recently called on Twitter <TWTR.O> to suspend Trump’s Twitter account, saying his tweets threaten violence. In response, the company said that Trump’s tweets did not violate its policies.

AMY KLOBUCHAR

The Minnesota senator has made oversight of big technology companies one of her major issues in Congress and argued for data privacy laws and net neutrality safeguards as priorities at her campaign launch in February.

Klobuchar has called for tighter regulation of tech giants and suggested that companies who profit from users’ data could be taxed.

She has not endorsed Warren’s plan for their break-up, saying that she would first want investigations. Her plan for her first 100 days in office includes an “aggressive retrospective review of mergers,” which she said she would pay for with an extra merger fee on “megamergers.”

She is also one of the authors of the bipartisan Honest Ads Act, which would require social media platforms to disclose the purchaser of a political ad, as is required for television and print ads.

ANDREW YANG

Yang, the former CEO of a start-up, has benefited from a surge of grassroots supporters on social media who style themselves as the #yanggang.

Although the technology entrepreneur said “we would be well served” if big tech companies were to break themselves up, he is more focused on dealing with the impact of automation on American jobs and on regulating artificial intelligence.

Yang has also emphasized the negative effects of tech on mental health and said he would create a Department of Attention Economy, ideally led by tech ethics advocate Tristan Harris, to look at how to responsibly design and use apps and devices.

He has also called for people to receive a share of the economic value generated from their data.

CORY BOOKER

New Jersey Senator Booker said that Warren’s call to break up the tech giants was “more like a Donald Trump thing to say” and has instead argued that stronger antitrust laws need to be enforced.

When questioned at the October Democratic debate on the issue, Booker advocated reforms to stop tech companies being used “to undermine our democracy” around elections.

He talked broadly about antitrust, “from pharma to farms,” but did not single out tech companies.

A Stanford University graduate who co-founded his own social media start-up WayWire, Booker has historically received donations from major Silicon Valley names such as Zuckerberg. The Facebook CEO also donated $100 million to Newark schools when Booker was mayor of the New Jersey city.

BETO O’ROURKE

O’Rourke, a former U.S. representative from Texas, wants to see Big Tech regulated rather than broken up. He has said he does not think it is the role of a president to designate which companies should be dismantled.

O’Rourke’s campaign told Reuters he would stand up for small business by preventing online platform owners from promoting their own content and products over that of competitors. He also plans to create a new digital markets regulator to create and enforce rules on issues such as privacy and data mobility.

O’Rourke, who as a teenager was part of an influential hacking group, has also said he thinks social media companies should be treated as publishers.

He wants to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally provides immunity to online platforms for content posted by users, to make social media companies more accountable for the amplification of hate speech and domestic terrorism on their platforms.

His campaign recently urged Facebook, Twitter <TWTR.O> and Google to do more to combat online disinformation, after the campaign encountered the spread of a false claim about a gunman in a mass shooting.

JULIAN CASTRO

Castro, who was secretary of housing and urban development in the Obama administration, has said it is worth considering proposals to break up the big tech companies and said during the recent Democratic debate that the U.S. needs to take a stronger stance in cracking down on monopolistic trade practices.

In the October debate, the former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, also singled out Amazon by name for helping to “put small businesses out of business” and for “shortchanging a lot of its workers.”

TULSI GABBARD

Gabbard, a U.S. representative from Hawaii, has called for the break-up of big tech companies and praised Warren’s plan.

In July, she filed a $50 million lawsuit against Google accusing the company of discrimination when it temporarily suspended her ad account after the first Democratic debate. Google said the account had been automatically flagged for unusual activity, without specifying exactly what the issue was.

Gabbard said that Google’s actions reflected “how the increasing dominance of big tech companies over our public discourse threatens our core American values.”

TOM STEYER

California billionaire Steyer has said he is running for president to remove the influence of corporate money from politics. In the October debate, he said that monopolies either have to be dismantled or regulated, but that to win against Trump, Democrats would have to “show the American people that we don’t just know how to tax and have programs to break up companies.”

Instead, he said, Democrats must harness the innovation and competition of the private sector.

Steyer’s campaign has been noted for its massive ad spending which helped push him to the debate stage, including more than $6 million in Facebook ads, according to Democratic digital firm Bully Pulpit Interactive.

(Reporting by Elizabeth Culliford, Editing by Soyoung Kim and Sonya Hepinstall)

from IJR https://ift.tt/34csM6a via IFTTT

[dorothydelgadillo]

Should You Delete Your Facebook Account? Responses from Our Community

Cambridge Analytica, a data and analytics firm focused on political communication, has been accused of harvesting data from millions of Facebook profiles that was then used to specifically target and influence people on social media during the 2016 Presidential election.

While Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, responded saying "This was a breach of trust, and I'm sorry we didn't do more at the time. We're now taking steps to ensure this doesn't happen again." many feel this wasn’t enough.

As a result, searches for “delete my Facebook” came rolling in and the #deleteFacebook hashtag was trending within hours. As users began to delete their accounts it became known that Facebook has been collecting more data than many originally thought including call history and SMS data from Android devices.

As the manager of a vibrant Facebook community of thousands of inbound professionals I couldn’t help but wonder what our community was thinking. Then I thought, why limit it to our community?

I quickly created a survey and shared it throughout IMPACT, my social networks and encouraged others to share as well. The results span a variety of age groups, roles and viewpoints.

A Breakdown of Our Surveyed Audience

We surveyed a variety of people ages 22 to 65. About 50% of the respondents were between the ages of 22 and 29.

Among this group were many marketers and salespeople as well as a variety of other professions including titles such as law clerk, public relations executive, pharmacy technician, paralegal, health counselor, music teacher, singer-songwriter, and more.

Responses from Those Who Are Considering Deleting Their Facebook Accounts

Of the people we surveyed, 21% said they were in fact considering deleting their Facebook accounts. While not all the answers were related specifically to this threat to personal data privacy, some were focused on that.

An inbound marketer who preferred to remain anonymous responded saying “A company that large and with that much user information has an obligation to be THE model of social responsibility. But, more importantly, they should WANT to protect their users and it blows my mind when they don't. Just to clarify: I hold Google, Apple, Verizon, AT&T, Samsung, Comcast, etc. all to this same standard.”

Three members of the IMPACT team also said they were considering deleting their accounts. While one was considering it more because of the negative effects Facebook has on his life in general, the other two said they don’t have confidence in or trust Facebook and related applications to keep their information secure.

IMPACT Elite member John McTigue said: “I'm concerned that my data may be used in ways that I don't approve of or authorize. I also feel that FB has violated privacy policies and/or made them so obscure that they mislead users.”

Finally, an anonymous marketing consultant responded: “Facebook has had a lot of PR blunders recently, this one being the most significant. My usage on the site has decreased over the years which has contributed to negative feelings about the site. Frankly, the pros of using the site are no longer outweighing the cons.”

Responses from People Who Are Keeping Their Facebook Accounts

Of the remaining nearly 80% of respondents who do not plan to delete their Facebook accounts, majority shared similar feelings including being responsible for their own data privacy and finding a lot of value in Facebook, both personally and professionally.

IMPACT Elite member Kaitlyn Casso said: “Not only will all of my memories disappear but I have found a new love for Facebook groups this past year. Between this awesome group and even groups that hit my personal interests like hiking and traveling. I've found them to be so useful when looking for quick advice rather than spending hours doing personal research. And it connects you with like-minded people!”

IMPACT Elite member Paul Wolfer said: “I feel like my life would improve if I deleted my Facebook account, but I've really grown my side business a lot with it (and Instagram), so as much as I have issues with it, I feel kind of stuck.”

Many also said they do make an effort to put as little personal data on Facebook as possible and that they know their data is spread around regardless. Whether it’s by Google, Facebook, Amazon - they understand it’s a risk associated with using these platforms and services.  

Jason Rose, a marketing strategist at IMPACT, weighed in saying: “I also try not to let the newsfeed algorithm dictate my media consumption habits. Facebook only has as much power as you give it. I do believe Facebook to have a net negative effect on our society as a whole, so it takes some mental gymnastics to stay on it. I think of Facebook like I think of the diner you all hang out at in high school. The food sucks but you are there because everyone else is.”

Many said they use it to connect with friends and share photos and until there is something better than Facebook, they’ll likely stick with what works.

Maggie Kamm, a mother and law clerk, responded: “It's how I keep my long distance family and friends in the loop about my life. Most of them are not on twitter. My school also posts a lot of updates and news on Facebook pages rather than via email.”

A graphic designer shared: "I've had my Facebook account since right before I started college in 2005. It has chronicled my entire adult life. There is simply too much information, too many people I connect with on a regular basis and too many news sources for me to stray away from."

Furthermore, there were quite a few responses noting how important Facebook is to many businesses. Responses included sentiments such as:

“It's such a big part of my business...it's just not an option.”

Myrna Arroyo, a marketing consultant, said “I’ve always advised my clients to make every effort to convert their followers on social media into leads by asking for emails, getting them subscribed to a blog, etc.... your website and email and phone list are yours. That way if Facebook were to shut down one day you’d still be able to reach your prospects.”

Deleting Your Facebook Probably Isn’t the Answer

As many have already noted, deleting your Facebook won’t fix our privacy nightmare. Whether we're willing to admit it or not, we're likely being tracked by everything in our digital lives. From search engines to cell phones, your information is being logged, stored and tracked in a multitude of ways. However, most would agree that does not make it acceptable for that information to be abused or used illegally. 

A public relations executive responded: “My data is everywhere.  I shop at Target = Hacked. I had a Yahoo email = Hacked. I used Equifax to monitor my SSN after my identity was stolen = Hacked 2.0. And any sane person will admit they know Russia hacked the last presidential election, so our own votes aren't even safe. I downloaded 50+ apps to my phone, which all have varying amount of data about my life. We live in a world where ethics will take a backseat to the right number ($$) in capitalism. Take a deep breath, take a fake Buzzfeed quiz about which Golden Girl you are and move on. Facebook is here to stay. There is no platform out there like it to replace it.”

A marketing manager responded: "It doesn't seem that big of a deal to me that they used data to target political ads. Politics is a business and businesses advertise to get money. [...] It definitely seems fishy and unethical to try to influence votes, but it sounds like it is just targeted Facebook ads and content. I personally take everything I see on Facebook with a big grain of salt - I don't believe everything I see on Facebook, so just because I see a political ad doesn't mean I will immediately believe it."

While getting completely rid of online search, cell phones, credit cards, and all e-commerce engagement is probably unrealistic for most people, you can take better control of your privacy online.

Taking Control of Your Privacy Online

While learning how to stop third-party apps from accessing your Facebook data does not fully solve the problem, it’s a good first step.

Annette Sugden weighed in with a couple of powerful thoughts: “I turned off the option to use facebook to log onto apps and websites and permissions for any 3rd party app to have access to my profile. Also even before the Cambridge Analytica revelation, I stopped participating in anything that could be mined for identity and other nefarious data collection purposes like those memes where you comment with what your Star Wars or other pop culture name would be based on private information like your full name and/or birthdate.

It’s too bad though that unethical people and criminals ruined games with facebook friends and fun quizzes to escape stress temporarily. Also now consumers trust Facebook and marketers even less. Data could be even more of a dirty word.

But we need data to help businesses and consumers find each other by serving up information and content that’s more relevant to their interests and needs. I’m not a marketer to manipulate others, but to help others. It makes me really angry what some people have done, including Cambridge Analytica.”

Carina Duffy, a marketing strategist at IMPACT, said: “While I think what happened is super messed up and not okay, people are manipulated in more ways than just on social networks, and in my opinion manipulative people and organizations are going to find ways to manipulate these people whether or not they're on Facebook.”

While having a way to respond to your customers' questions in real time is important - there are many ways to accomplish this. I know I find a lot of value in Facebook (especially in our community) but I also accept that it won't be around forever. I do my best to pay close attention to my privacy settings and I try not to log into external sites using Facebook just because it's a little faster. 

What are your thoughts? Will you be updating your privacy settings and deleting third party app permissions? Are you considering deleting your Facebook account entirely? Let us know in the comments or join us in IMPACT Elite to continue the discussion.

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/should-you-delete-your-facebook-account

[psychotherapyconsultants]

Pathologizing the President Reinforces Mental Illness Stigma

A large group of psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and other mental health workers have declared Donald Trump mentally ill and unfit to be president. They don’t name the mental illness, or cite any specific behaviors that make him a threat to the country or constitution. They merely state that he is sick and call for his ouster.

“Duty to Warn” has signatures of 60,000 mental health professionals, none of whom have assessed the president, on a petition calling for Trump’s removal due to “serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States.” To take the petition at it’s word, it is not any deviant acts that disqualify Trump, but the mere fact that the undersigned believe he has a mental illness, and that alone disqualifies him. Many responsible people have serious mental illness that they manage and they function very well. But they still have a serious mental illness. Would these doctors disqualify this group of patients from doing their jobs?

Every one of the signatories of this petition has saddled the seriously mentally ill with the question of what duties, if any, they each are able to discharge. Hold a job? Raise a family? Lead? To be so cavalier in diagnosing and dismissing an individual they have never examined can only lead those who have been properly assessed to question their diagnoses from these doctors and therapists so willing to call for the ouster of a President with no actual diagnosis. What about the teacher, accountant, or truck driver who actually does reach out for treatment? Can a corporate executive or congressman be removed from their job because someone with a degree who they’ve never met has the gall to simply declare them mentally ill?

And what about the productively employed person who does have a diagnosis and makes a mistake on the job? Is that illness alone legitimate grounds for dismissal? These 60,000 mental health professionals signal that it is. This can only increase the stigma held against those who suffer from mental illness yet attempt to be self-sufficient, and this attitude on the part of so many in the mental health field can only drive those who are productive and positively contributing to society to avoid treatment when they need it, lest they too be branded incapable of discharging their duties due to the mere fact that they have a mental illness.

There’s damage done when a man freely elected is passed off as mentally unsound by those who oppose him. Sure, he is egotistical, grandiose, and has poor impulse control. He’s rash and has been an ineffective and unpopular leader. His character is questionable and he has a difficult personality. Yet many sane people share these traits, and for so many unqualified opinions to question his sanity because of these things is insensitive to the people with actual mental illness who struggle daily against the stigma placed on those with mental health challenges.

Many of Trump’s policies could divert or limit funding from effective mental health programs. He does seem willing to sacrifice proven results on the altar of ideology. But this makes him a proponent of limited government and less federal involvement in funding social and medical programs. Yes, this could negatively impact some who are mentally ill, but these and other policies do not disqualify him from being president any more than they make him crazy. Trump’s policies can be properly countered by opponents in the free elections our constitution grants us, beginning with next year’s mid-terms, without resorting to the 25th amendment and removing the President for a trumped up diagnosis. We need no psychology professionals violating their own code of ethics concerning diagnostic criteria and mistakenly offering misinformation about a population already limited by stigma.

Duty to Warn is planning a number of town halls across the country on October 14th. I would hope the extraordinary difficulty of diagnosing a serious mental illness and the fact that such a diagnosis does not automatically preclude a patient from great responsibility will come up, but I fear the meetings will be political and serve to further advance the stigma against those with mental illness. These professionals should be using their pulpit to promote the promise and possibilities each patient is capable of, and to insist on acceptance of those who suffer but work to improve their and their families’ position. Instead, the petition reinforces an attitude of “if it’s awkward or uncomfortable it must be crazy” and traps the mentally ill in the corner of limited self-direction and low expectations. The stigma from the general population due to lack of information can be explained. The stigma from 60,000 professionals who should know better is unconscionable.

from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2017/10/09/pathologizing-the-president-reinforces-mental-illness-stigma/

[kingkongred-blog]

The Disturbing Reprise of Eugenic ‘Alt-Science’

Introduction: The curious case of the workshy workers

Dr John David Jordan

 In March 2017, a CNN feature eviscerated White House press secretary Sean Spicer for his reality mangling attempts to make newly elected President Donald Trump’s - according to CNN - truth-shy, mouth-sounds seem as though they might live somewhere in the proximity of authenticity. Somewhere where they could at least see reality, in the distance. Perhaps in Oz, one supposes, where a wizard lives who could make them true, if magic was real.

The latest truth-squirm surrounded Trump’s accusation that Obama had illegally wiretapped the GOP candidate during the run-up to the 2017 election. According to Spicer, it turns out Trump didn’t really mean Obama after all. And he didn’t really mean wiretapping. Just, someone from the Democrats had done some kind of observation of someone from the Republican Party. But it was still true. Possibly, ‘alternatively’ true.[1]

The issue flagged by CNN wasn’t even that Trump’s claims were necessarily false. Who knows? It was that zero evidence was presented that they were true. Given the gravity of the claim, that should have equalled a retraction. Maybe even an apology. It should not have prompted a shift of terrain away from reality, and down the dung-brick road of BS and ad hominem attack, with, in one case, Spicer describing CNN journalist Jim Acosta as “a guy that has zero intelligence.”[2]

By now, many are familiar with this alt-right tactic. When the truth-shyness of their claims is challenged, they don’t back down, they attack. The alt-right ontology is to believe conspiracies so much that reality doesn’t even matter anymore. Reality, in fact, is a left-wing conspiracy of ‘fake news’, peddled by indoctrinated intellectuals[3] and the elite’s puppet-stringed hacks. Rational mechanisms for establishing factual truth, and even the highly educated people who handle those mechanisms at elite academic level, are dismissed with egregious anti-intellectual hostility.[4] The idea that climate change is a hoax being perhaps the paramount example.

But this isn’t just about being nasty or ignorant. It’s a tactical undermining of the very bases for establishing what is, or isn’t, true, so that a new basis can be inserted. The new basis? Does it support ultra-right-wing conspiracism? If it doesn’t, then reality itself can be dismissed as a left-wing conspiracy. And then new, more politically correct far-right ‘alternative facts’ can be inserted in its place. While the alt-right are fond of citing the adjective ‘Orwellian’, use of that term is an auto-confession.

One of the ways that the alt-right supports this mind-frothing nonsense is to reverse reality in order to claim egregious conspiracism as the epitome of critical thinking. After all, they, the alt-right, are the only ones who were smart enough to not get infected by Leftist brainwashing. Not going to university, in fact, makes them smarter and much more able to think critically than ideologically blinkered so-called experts and professors.[5] (Who ‘we’ve had enough of’ anyway according to UK government minister Michael Gove,[6] who also claims UK public education is controlled by a group of Marxists he calls ‘The Blob’[7])

Conspiracists and politicians are one thing. Some of those have a vested interest in slandering empirical reality as ‘fake news’. But imagine if this tripe-mongering went one step farther. Imagine if it called itself, not just ‘the real’ critical thinking, but science. Imagine if someone behaved like that, and said: Well, if you disagree with my alternative facts, then you’re anti-science! Welcome to the world of alt-science: a new, disturbing, and increasingly influential wing of right-wing ideology. Well, it’s actually not new; it’s just ‘back’. It’s old eugenics, repackaged. But it is disturbing, not least because it is earning support from some mainstream real scientists.[8]

In a nutshell, alt-science can explain away every social problem or event - crime, indigence, global underdevelopment, religious extremism, unemployment, ethnic minority over-representation in poverty, prison and unemployment, immigrant socio-economic positions, educational failure, and gender inequality… everything really –  by citing the apparent genetic inferiority (which alt-science eugenics word-launders into the much more pleasant, even ‘multi-cultural’, sounding term genetic variation)[9] of certain ethnic and/or social groups. (Including women, and ‘Blacks’, per se.) Or else the pathological ‘personality traits’ of individuals. The principle matches alt-right ontologies precisely: simplistic explanations for the otherwise hyper-complex processes and products of capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy. And it is becoming increasingly influential in policy making[10] and policy rollout.[11]

There’s the rub. While alt-science might be supported by numerous scientists, alt-science itself is an intersection of some scientific methods and items, such as statistics and genes (it’s got genes in it, so it must be science!), with socio-economic phenomena, such as poverty and unemployment. It is this point of intersection, where qualitative sociological information is transformed into numbers, that the claim to be ‘science’ significantly breaks down. For example, a recent study by Kraphol et al. (2014) states that:

 we identify the general ingredients of educational achievement using a multivariate design that goes beyond intelligence to consider a wide range of predictors, such as self-efficacy, personality, and behavior problems, to assess their independent and joint contributions to educational achievement. We use a genetically sensitive design to address the question of why educational achievement is so highly heritable

 For this to be considered as robustly scientific, we are required to put out of our minds that “self-efficacy, personality, and behavior problems” are entirely social constructions, having no real existence whatsoever beyond the partisan judgments of onlookers. A child who swears, for example, might be pathologised as having a behaviour problem just because they offend the sensibilities of a teacher. And what if the child expressed ‘bad’ behaviour by, say, refusing to obey a command for ethical reasons, but in doing so contradicted a school’s ethos of strict discipline? Who is that a problem for?

Natural scientists, who are not by profession trained to critically analyse and problematize complex sociological information, are generally not qualified to recognise the qualitative problems surrounding such alt-science methodological issues.

Nevertheless, simply using statistics and genes to explore sociological issues isn’t the problem. People are free to do that, and there may even be value in it if the studies can withstand scrutiny. The problem is, what happens when they don’t withstand scrutiny? And, what if the reply is not retraction, or rational response, but egregious Spicerism?

Let’s take an example. In 2015, Adam Perkins, a lecturer in the ‘neurobiology of personality’ at King’s College London, published a book called The Welfare Trait. In it, Perkins claimed that specific genes were partly linked to certain personality traits - traits that might make someone ‘less employable.’ (A dubious and culturally constructed concept in itself. After all, failure to accept sexist harassment or exploitative working conditions could mean that someone possessed diminished ‘employability’ traits.) Perkins called this an ‘employment resistant personality’. Extending an argument originally proposed by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, not to mention Malthus and a host of 18th and 19th century exploitation apologists, Perkins argued that giving more welfare benefits to people would encourage them to have more children. This would lead to more ‘work-resistant’ personality genes in a population segment already acutely exposed to the environmentally pathological influence of a putative culture of fecklessness. In Perkin’s own words:

 data suggests [sic] that willingness to violate norms concerning work and social responsibility is increasing, generation by generation. It’s as if the welfare state is gradually warping the personality profile of the population so that more people in each generation are resistant to employment.[12]

 Some people called Perkins a eugenic fascist, but many more pointed out perfectly straightforward problems with the book.[13] (We can note just in passing, for example, that the percentage of people in employment in the UK was at its highest ever level when Perkins’ book was published, at least according to government statistics.)[14] Perkins, in response, has vociferously denounced most of the criticisms as a ‘smear campaign’[15] –

 But the vast majority of attacks on The Welfare Trait occupy a middle ground, in which opponents of welfare state reform conceal ad hominem smears beneath the linguistic veneer of factually rigorous ad rem attacks[16]

 - and attacks on ‘evolutionary psychology’ per se as anti-scientific, and motivated by left-wing ideology. Presumably, Perkins, like many of his supporters, assumes that his work is by definition science just because it involved genes and statistics. And therefore, by definition, that critics must be motivated by ideology. After all, who would deny science except the ideologically motivated? Some others agreed. When Perkins’ work failed to pass peer review, and was rejected by Nature, alt-science cheerleader Toby Young claimed that this was because it posed “a direct challenge to one of the central planks of left-wing ideology”[17] – the ‘plank’ being the idea that poverty is inherited, but only via the intergenerational replication of an unfair class system.

Perkins’ central evidence came from a study led by Professor Mike Brewer. This found that, following some increases to government benefits under the UK’s New Labour government, there was a spike in childbirths amongst recipients. This seemed like solid evidence, at least for the idea that benefits do increase childbirth, if not for the idea that genes caused a pathologically ‘work resistant’ personality.

But there were several problems. For one, the study showed an increase in childbirths, but provided scant evidence that recipients were likely to then go on and have more children overall than they would have done without the benefits. Possibly, people were choosing to have children at that time, just because times were better, and incomes higher. Perkins had drawn a conclusion unsupported by the data, as Brewer et al. pointed out.[18] However, much more significantly, the majority of recipients were working. The benefit those families received was working tax credit. So it made no credible sense, so it turned out, to argue that those workers had ‘work-resistant’ personalities.[19] Obviously. Perkins’ response should have been a retraction. Instead, he ‘Spicered’:

 However if we look more closely at the findings of Brewer and colleagues, it is difficult to view the households that had extra births in response to the welfare reforms of the late 1990s/early 2000s as anything other than disadvantaged… the “extra births” effect was statistically significant only in those low income households that also possessed low levels of education (i.e., the result only reaches significance at the 5% level when the sample is split by education). Since less conscientious individuals not only tend to have financial issues (Moffitt et al., 2011) but also are prone to under-achievement in education (e.g., Poropat, 2009), this finding fits with the notion that the lure of increased generosity of per-child welfare benefits is especially strong amongst less conscientious individuals – the very same individuals who are likely to neglect their children.[20]

 There is a lot going on here. For one, Perkins tries to rescue his theory by making a not-so-subtle terrain-shift to argue for a non-genetic inculcation of ‘work-resistant’ personalities. In other words, he’s claiming that the group in question were likely to be ‘neglectful’ of their children; a culture of poverty defamation, rather than a determinist eugenic smear. (Perkins has also made not so subtle, racially inflected comments about welfare claimants, tweeting, in one instance, “Danish data suggesting that welfare benefits taste sweeter to some cultures than others.”)[21] And since then, Perkins has argued that numerous studies which make no reference whatsoever to genes or genetic transmission, support his theory.[22] Whatever the merits (or demerits) of Perkins’ culture of poverty claim, it is an entirely non-sequitur ad hominem misdirection in the context of an extraordinary claim of putative genetic transmission of the so-called ‘welfare trait’. An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence, not least because, if you believe the culture of poverty thesis (I don’t), it is entirely self-sufficient, requiring no eugenics to make it work. Daniel Moynihan and Lawrence Mead, for example, two doyens of the culture of poverty thesis, managed to propose it without genetics.

Now, one of the key tactics of the ‘normal’ alt-right is to smear their ‘enemies’ as child abusers. Perhaps most famously in the bizarre ‘Pizzagate’ claim that the American ‘Leftist elite’ was running a paedophile ring from a Washington pizza parlour.[23] It is interesting, then, that Perkins appears to resort to a child neglect smear also. It is as if Perkins is saying Well so what if they worked? They’re all likely to be child abusers anyway! Or rather, in the pseudoscientific ontology of alt-science, that there is a strong probability that they will be ‘neglectful’. (Neglectful, by the way, is not a scientific category, but a socially constructed judgment; failure to pay for piano lessons, or swearing around your kids, could be neglect.) However, it obviously does matter that they were working, because in that case, the whole idea of genetically transmitted ‘work-resistant personalities’ in workers becomes a theoretical oxymoron. As Brewer et al. also pointed out.

Noting all of this is not to be ‘anti-science’. Or a ‘Leftist ideologue’. It’s just knowing what words mean. Moreover, those who do understand scientific methodology will recognise that, via this rhetorical legerdemain, Perkins made his idea into the opposite of science: an entirely unfalsifiable claim. Anyone, either in work or not in work, can now represent ‘evidence’ of a work-resistant personality gene – just so long as they are poor. Which is an appalling defamation, and appalling apologism for social injustice. (Although, challenging social injustice is now dismissed by alt-science and the alt-right per se as ‘narcissism’, under the defamatory euphemism ‘virtue signalling’.[24])

The underlying claim appears to be that the poor aren’t working hard enough! A claim that strongly supports the UK government’s attempts to bring workers who receive working tax credits, but who don’t work full time, under the smothering pillow of its welfare-to-work programmes.[25]

 The alt-right’s lab coat

By now, most folks are, as with a new, bad neighbour, getting familiar with the so-called alt-right. Many alt-right ideas are also familiar (and bad), albeit 1930s familiar: White supremacy, and absurd claims that Marxists have ‘infected’ Western culture and politics in a conspiracy to destroy ‘White civilization’.[26] Even corporate business is a part of the conspiracy, apparently; because in the alt-right’s slime-covered mirror-world ontology, super-exploitative global capitalists are Marxists, as simply everything that is bad is due to ‘Marxism’.[27] Oh, and of course, universities are stuffed with Marxist pseudo-intellectuals who promote Leftist ideology over scientific fact.[28] A purge, we are assured, is long overdue. Extremely worryingly, some of these same ideas are now the stock-in-trade of the alt-science ‘movement’.

But let’s go back a few decades – because what we’re dealing with here isn’t new, and for sociologists of a certain age, alt-science rings a eugenic bell. It’s ‘sociobiology’, unwelcomely reanimated. Sociobiology attempted to reduce the complexity of human social behaviour to genetically encoded impulses groomed over time by Darwinist algorithms. The parsimony of Darwinist evolutionary mechanisms was in turn used to argue that, contrary to overly wordy pseudo-intellectual sociological nonsense, simple explanations were per se good, and scientific, even when applied to human society. (Simple explanations for complex phenomena once again. See the pattern?)

However, rather too conveniently, sociobiology precisely dovetailed with elite capitalist ideology. This included celebrating self-interest as ‘natural’; explaining away poverty, class and inequality as the products of genetic inferiority; feminism as contrary to the natural order;[29] and why welfare benefits should be cut (otherwise a gene for having too many children will emerge amongst the poor…etc…). It was obviously hokum. Nevertheless, adherents of sociobiology widely responded to detailed criticisms of their methods, data and conclusions by dismissing their detractors as ‘anti-science’. Moreover, as motivated by ‘left-wing ideology’. Detailed responses to the actual criticisms were rare, or else little more than anaphoric, if detailed, reassertions of the ideas and methods that had already been fatally problematised. It was as if, gobsmacked that anyone would deny science of all things, sociobiologists could do nothing but mumble what they knew with all their hearts to be twoo science…

More usually, however, being genetic determinists (no matter how much they denied it with nature/nurture golden mean fallacies), sociobiologists decried criticism of their snake-oil anthropology as biological in origin, reprising the old right-wing libel that the Left responds through emotion, not reason. As sociobiological philosopher (sociologist by PhD) Jeremy Stangroom, and co-writer Ophelia Benson, put it, sociobiological ideas supposedly “provoke extreme reactions and misunderstanding because their critics believe them to be in conflict with the moral and political commitments that they hold.”[30]  As Marxist economist Ernest Mandel put it back (and long before), just because scholars are angry about injustice, it doesn’t logically follow that their analyses of injustice are based on anger. Obviously. If that’s all ya got throw at the Left, then all ya got is sloppy mudslinging.

In fact, while there were many left-wing critics of sociobiology, perhaps the most eminent was the distinctly non-leftist anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach, who noted that sociobiology was so jejune that it had been firmly kicked out of the scientific bed a couple of hundred years earlier.[31] And not without some heavyweight footwork from the Left, I might add. As Engels put it:

 But if I wanted to go into it further I should do it in such a way that I exposed them in the first place as bad economists and only in the second place as bad natural scientists and philosophers.[32]

 As for the Right, you don’t get much more heavyweight than Friedrich Hayek. Hayek warned us in Law, Legislation and Liberty to avoid at all costs the idea that human cultural behaviour is genetic. As someone who had fled the Nazis, and seen numerous Jewish friends persecuted and murdered, Hayek knew all too well that cultural eugenics was useable as a scientific front for fascism.

While human-based sociobiology still clings to life, nevertheless, by and large sociologists and anthropologists – not to mention a number of natural scientists - chased the new ‘discipline’ out of town. Key to the successful chase was highlighting that, behind all the bluff and bluster and ‘science martyr’ jeremiads, sociobiology was an imposter. Many of its most basic premises, assumptions and ideas could not be supported scientifically. The idea of genetic ‘kin selection’ (i.e. that people are genetically programmed to favour people they are more closely related to) was dismissed by Leach in a finger click by pointing out that genetics are usually the least important element of human kinship systems.[33] (For instance, genetically unrelated spouses clearly often ‘favour’ one another over many other genetic relatives.) The rest undermined itself. Perhaps the best example was Dawkins’ claim that “The Selfish Gene could equally have been called The Cooperative Gene without a word of the book itself needing to be changed,”[34] which accidentally conceded what sociologists had been saying for some time: i.e. that the entire notion was unfalsifiable. (As Dawkins had previously admitted deliberately regarding his concept of the ‘extended phenotype’[35]). It was, as with the working workshy, therefore not scientifically testable, and had, ironically, the same ontological basis as claiming that God was responsible for human behaviour. Just like the later alt-right, sociobiology postured on a baseless ontology.  

Meanwhile, the idea that Darwinist algorithms caused human culture to evolve towards order and stability – as Dawkins argued - was so daft that most anthropologists could hardly argue against it for laughing. By applying this concept to human culture, whatever their level as biologists, sociobiologists revealed themselves as very poor functionalist sociologists who artificially divided society into ordered, stable structures which ‘fall into step’ (in Dawkins’ weirdly Mussolini-esque terminology)[36] and ‘deviants’. Biologically laundering the conflict and tensions that exist as integral, interconnected elements of the same society into those who are ‘normal’ and those who are ‘deviant’ (or engaging in general deviance, as Vavsonyi et al. (2016) put it[37] – which sounds quite fun to me) is a deeply disturbing far right list-making exercise (never a good thing), not science. As social scientists could have told them. And did. The response? That the idea was science, because the deviants – or bearers of biological difference - were genetically inferior. Which is not exactly the best way to shuffle off accusations of recycled Nazi ideology.

Sociobiology’s final grasp at mainstream academic life was to argue that human social behaviour was a mixture of genetics and cultural influence. But, it’s a bit of both isn’t really science; it is a golden mean fallacy deployed as an ideological gambit to allow ‘genes’ to remain on the explanatory table. These things do not, as (distinctly non-Leftist) anthropologist Ernest Gellner pointed out,[38] have some kind of ‘weight’ – but it’s only by thinking of them like that, in a simplistic but absurdly aphasic manner, that we can convince ourselves that they counterbalance one another, as if ‘weighed’ as opposites on a scale. With this idea, the power remained with the people who got to decide what was genetic and what wasn’t, and how. In other words, the sociobiologists. But no one could decide. At least not scientifically. It is difficult to see, for example, how you could have a gene that predisposes you to crime[39] when crime is a cultural construction bearing multiple radically different formats. As sociologist Peter Saunders, a strong proponent of the Right, argued, while he could not prove what he believed – i.e. that many people were poor because of low intelligence - neither could class-based explanations prove that poverty wasn’t genetic. This wasn’t necessarily true – poverty can be strongly linked to social class origin, leaving little need for the hypothesis that the poor are stupider than the rich. But true enough, no one could disprove an unfalisifiable claim. If no one can prove it one way or the other, then it falls off the scientific table. Long before Saunders, in fact, sociobiology’s white coat had slipped off, leaving an emaciated far-right political ideology naked under the scrutiny of real intellectual discipline.

Nevertheless, sociobiology didn’t go away. It regrouped with its allies in psychology. Here it had already taken root with theorists such as, most famously, the fascist sympathiser Hans Eysenck. Perhaps the most notorious ship-jumper, however, was right-wing sociologist Charles Murray, who reinvented himself as a social psychologist. Murray and Hernstein’s The Bell Curve, for example, famously argues that Black people have lower average IQs than White people, and that the cause is almost certainly, in part, genetic. (Although Murray and Hernstein deploy the standard sociobiological trick of making appalling claims via equivocating language - a snide rhetorical technique that gets the eugenic message across perfectly clearly whilst leaving room to deny that they ever said it. They were just ‘wondering’ about it, like good scientists.) Some scientists supported them, including known racists, and most famously co-DNA discoverer James Watson. Eugenics was on its way back, and soon enough Saunders, amongst others, would be able to draw on ‘science’ to argue that

 hereditability is the key explanation for why children of successful parents tend to do much better, on average, than children of less successful ones. It's not so much that the former are socially advantaged while the latter are socially disadvantaged (although social advantage and disadvantage do play some part); it is more that the former tend to be brighter than the latter, because they have inherited their successful parents' genes, and this enables them to emulate their parents' achievements.[40]

 And remember the deviant ‘list-making’ of functionalist alt-science? Drawing on the putative legitimacy of neo-eugenics, Saunders felt comfortable describing as an “intriguing proposal” alt-science supporter Toby Young’s idea that:

 genetic screening of embryos for intelligence should be offered to low-IQ parents (on a voluntary basis), but should be withheld from higher-IQ couples. This would then allow low-IQ parents to maximise their potential for producing bright children, and over time, this would increase social mobility rates as proportionately more bright children were born in lower class households.[41] (Saunders’ words - JDJ.)

 Saunders sees a few problems with this idea – all practical. None of them are that behind the crocodile promise that the screening will be voluntary (for how long, one wonders?), this does seem to have a strong whiff of the 1930s about it.

Alt-science is the new sociobiology. It is the same sociobiology in fact, only, now it uses statistical tests to link personality traits and intelligence scores to genes and brain scans. Well, brain scans aside, it always did; because the old sociobiology itself rang a death camp bell: it was the new Nazi eugenic social-psychology, which had attempted, amongst other appalling things, to scientifically prove that there was a genetic and pathological “Jewish personality type” that was degrading the national stock, and that this could be proven by eugenic science.[42] Sound familiar?

 Methods in the madness, or madness in the methods?

One of the ways that eugenic psychology gets away with appearing to be science is that its results are often presented in such a complex format, utilising such advanced models of statistical analysis, that it not only looks very scientific, but is often impenetrably mathematically obscure to most outsiders. Fortunately, the problems are not in the maths, they are in the methods. Unfortunately, dissecting methods isn’t always easy, as psychological eugenics is deeply fond of the scientific sounding ‘meta analyses’, which take the results from multiple studies, with various and sometimes wildly different research methodologies, often conducted over long periods of time, sometimes in very different circumstances (such as the racist 1960s), and pretends that their results can somehow be treated as mutually self-supporting.

Nevertheless, eugenic tripe can be opposed. Sociobiology was beaten by methodical dismissal of its pretensions to be science. In psychology, capitalist ideology found another chance to put on a white lab coat. Sociology had been rigorous in distinguishing scientific practices - such as statistical testing - from any claims that sociology was itself science in the same sense as natural science. However, the jury was still out on psychology. To cut a long story short, the migrating sociobiological ideology did not take any chances. It rebranded itself as ‘evolutionary psychology’ (evo-psych – note not evil-psych… easy mistake) and ‘neurobiology’, neuro science and/or cognitive science. The latter categories all too often being (although not always) psychology and philosophy with some brain scans and statistical ‘personality tests’ bolted onto it;[43] something described by Fredric Jameson as a new form of phrenology. The former has evolution in its title. Hence, it’s science. Or, that’s what the evo-psych people tell us. More than that, anyone who doesn’t agree, for example, that Black people are less intelligent than White people, is now an ‘evolution denier’, and, once again ‘anti-science’.[44] Nevertheless, Charles Murray assures us this is not white supremacism, as he doesn’t in any way think that society should treat the genetically inferior races as inferior. That would be racism.[45]

There are three interrelated problems that transform ‘evo-psych’ into alt-science. The first is that we have no need whatsoever of the hypothesis of gene-karma. The second is that perfectly reasonable, and often unanswerable, criticisms can be made regarding the methods and interpretations used in evo-psych studies that clearly render it not scientific. Note, not necessarily false, just not scientific. The third is the way that these criticisms are handled by alt-science; i.e. not by defending against the criticisms themselves, but by attacking the critics personally - particularly via a generalised anti-intellectualism that seeks to undermine critics, and particularly critical social science, as little more than stagnated left-wing pseudoscience.[46] Mirror, mirror… should be the response to this moronising (to use Marcuse’s prescient word)[47] charade. Nevertheless, let’s take each in turn.

Explanations that link phenomena such as unemployment, over-representation of ethnic minorities in crime and unemployment, gender pay gaps and rising levels of poverty to economic structures and cultural prejudices, are robustly supported. Still, stating that such explanations are wrong isn’t some terrible crime; many people do think that they are wrong, and many eminent theorists have attempted to support that position. But to say that genes are a credible alternative explanation is an extraordinary claim that, given Ockham’s razor and the massive counter evidence, requires some serious backing up. Serious enough to overturn an orthodoxy supported by some of the world’s most educated people, on all sides of the political fence, and none, who are experts on poverty, unemployment and so on, rather than, as the neurobiologists tend to present themselves, experts on personality. That evo-pscyhers should bethink themselves better suited than the former to dismiss structural causality (even if the ‘structure’ is the welfare system itself) is mind-boggling, and, one suspects, bordering on academic narcissism.

The alt-science response to this is to decry critics as default anti-science,[48] and akin to those who deny evolution or climate change. Serious academic response becomes mere ‘post-truth’ - as alt-science supporter and Harvard based cognitive scientist Steve Pinker puts it.[49] Or, as (genuine) biologist, but nevertheless alt-science supporter, Jerry Coyne puts it:

 The ideological embrace of an unevidenced but politically amenable view of science set back Russian genetics for decades. Other cases in point: the denial of evolution by creationists, and of anthropogenic global warming by conservatives. I needn’t belabor these. We see this in other areas, too—especially with issues like differences between the sexes, ethnic groups, and evolutionary psychology. The assumption here is that any research on these areas could only serve to reinforce sexism and bigotry, so not only is that research denigrated, but there is an a priori ideological assumption that all groups are genetically equal for areas like behavior, mentation, and so on.[50]

 We can use an insight gleaned from analysis of the ‘regular’ alt-right here. The alt-right universe isn’t just a landscape of egregious nonsense; it’s a mirror world of truth-reversal where PhDs are morons, incapable of thinking for themselves, while often uneducated tinfoil wearing froth-spitters who think Hillary Clinton worships Satan and runs a paedophile ring, Michelle Obama is a man, and the European Union is a communist super-state, self-identify as guardians of critical thinking. Alt-science plays the same game.

It is, in fact, the anti-intellectualism that dismisses  sociology in this way that is equivalent to evolution or climate change denial. And alt-science does it in precisely the same way that the alt-right dismisses climate change: by making direct, anti-intellectual attacks on the orthodox academics who support a consensus on the structural causes of numerous global economic and social problems. It is an outrageous strangulation of the truth to describe this as an “ideological embrace of an un-evidenced but politically amenable view.”

With often extremely strong associations between alt-science and militant atheism (Coyne supports both, for instance, as does Dawkins, and Pinker), it is perhaps no surprise that alt-science portrays sociology precisely as disingenuously as militant atheism presents religion: i.e. as a failed attempt at real science. As alt-scientist Adam Perkins puts it (with - or is it just me? - a rather purge-ish undertone) “For too long sociologists have been prancing around, peddling myths as science. But biological reality is starting to bite...”[51] The assumption - once again drawn from militant atheist anti-intellectualism - is that science is the only real means of garnering credible information about the world. While militant atheism uses this idea to attack religion, alt-science uses it to attack sociology. But this notion is simply false. Moreover, alt-science isn’t science anyway, so mirror mirror… Alt-science is poor sociology, not good science.

Let’s take another concrete example, this time from Coyne himself. Coyne argues that human males are bigger than human females because males competed for females in the distant past, and bigger males won. This is evidence for the ‘scientific fact’, Coyne claims, that there are “evolutionary differences in behavior and psychology between men and women” in the here and now..[52] Coyne uses this idea to attack what he calls left-wing “ideological opposition to biological truth”. In response, anthropologist Holly Dunsworth noted that “It’s not that Jerry Coyne’s facts aren’t necessarily facts…” Coyne argued back that this was absurd, and indicative of left-wing attempts to wriggle out of uncomfortable empirical truths.[53] Using the mantle of science, Coyne was able to appear scathing at the ridiculousness of Dunsworth’s apparently fact-shy opinions. But actually, Dunsworth was quite correct: the problem wasn’t Coyne’s facts. It was the creative empiricism that made fighting for females in the distant past seem like the same sort of empirical ‘thing’ as male psychology in the here and now, when they simply aren’t. So it’s little surprise, but nevertheless immensely revealing, to find that Coyne provides no evidence whatsoever for his clam that

 there are biological differences in behavior between males and females, and that those differences reflect the working of natural selection—in the form of sexual selection—in our ancestors.

 What Coyne has done – and it’s a standard sociobiological trick used extensively by Richard Dawkins – is conflate all human activity, whether that be voluntary, cultural, psychological, physical, biological or otherwise, under the animalising term ‘behaviour’, as if, via word laundering, they will all magically become the same ‘type’ of thing. (A category error.) And then he’s made the entirely specious argument that as fighting for females is behaviour, therefore bigger males are evidence of genetically encoded psychological behaviours in modern males, because they’re both ‘behaviour’, and modern males are descended from ancient males. But the two are actually very different uses and meanings of the term ‘behaviour’. But, untangled, ‘psychological behaviour’ borders on an oxymoron if we try to force modern male psychology to mean the same thing as early humanoids physically fighting for mates. It just seems like they could be the same, if you don’t read too carefully, and you let meanings merge, and maybe get distracted by thinking that arguing against it is anti-science leftist stupidity. But it’s not science, it’s rhetorical legerdemain.

We know Coyne knows this on some level, partly because he uses the sociobiological conflation trick, but also because he never gives us any definition or examples whatsoever of what he means by modern human psychological differences. He wants the reader to impute these. If he did give them, then it would become clear that his theory is absurd, un-evidenced, and, despite his claims otherwise, just a laundering of sexist and patriarchal notions into biological pseudoscience. Coyne even asserts excplicitly that he isn’t sexist, and that he isn’t saying that sexist notions are proven by biology. And that’s true. He doesn’t say it at all. His facts are quite correct there. He doesn’t say what the psychological differences are at all; he leaves the reader to draw on their pre-extant cultural stock of sexist ideas to impute for themselves what the ‘psychological differences’ are between sexes. Readers already know what they are supposed to be, because they’re ingrained, patriarchal cultural creations. Coyne tries to mask this with a sense that the ‘behaviour differences’ are in the background, and that “culture can influence behavior, including reinforcing biologically-innate behaviors.” They are indeed in the background in Coyne’s thesis – they have no empirical manifestation whatsoever in his writing. Bottom line being, Coyne’s supposedly scientific claim has no evidence, because he never directly states what the ‘psychological differences’ are supposed to be. Coyne dismissed his critics as fatuous – but it’s Coyne’s evidence-shy hypothesis that is fatuous.

 Genuinely Defending Science

Nevertheless, there is something special about natural science. Hence, while in many cases the vast body of work supporting structural explanations for poverty, unemployment and so on, utilises figures and statistical methods, one very rarely finds the research authors claiming that their work is ‘science’ in the sense of their conclusions having the same ontological supportability as natural science. This is despite the anachronistic term ‘social science’, which is used now idiomatically, not literally. (The same cannot be said for the evo-psych term ‘behavioural sciences’, which is meant literally.) The methodological journey involved in transforming qualitative data into numbers is simply too much of a chasm-leap to make such a claim credible in most cases. The capacity for error-creep is too great, and something is always lost, or perhaps added, in translation. Sociologists are generally proud of their methodological recognition of this fact. It doesn’t make their work false; it just recognises that it isn’t natural science, and that reflexivity and limitation recognition are required when dealing with this type of knowledge.

Herein lies the second issue: Evo-psych statistical analysis, just like sociological statistical analysis, needs to transform qualitative data into quantitative data in order to analyse it. Not only do precisely the same methodological pitfalls apply to evo-psych as to sociology, the qualitative data evo-psych needs to process are often more complex and numinous. Mental states and personality characteristics are experiential, and only ‘reachable’ via secondary interpretive mechanisms (including brain scans) or else self-evaluation; both of which are subject to numerous well-known pitfalls, including pre-extant researcher biases and the influence of enculturation, or even the research process itself.

Nevertheless, evo-psych does claim to be science. One of the ways that this assumption is made credible is the three monkeys approach: its use of statistical methods is often not articulated and problematised in the same way that sociology routinely problematises its methods; no one listens to those problematisations when they are made; and evo-psychers, by and large, choose not to see that as an issue.

The assumption is then made by many alt-science supporters that simply because evo-psych uses numbers and tests it is therefore ‘science’, and that that’s all anyone needs to know. But the science isn’t just in using numbers; it must also be in the initial data gathering methods. And the truth is, evo-psych often cannot justify all of its methods, and particularly its qualitative methods, as scientific. And this is so clearly demonstrable that denying it is nothing more than anti-intellectualism.

Perhaps the best-known example is the transformation of intelligence into an ‘IQ’ (intelligence quotient) score. Debates surrounding the extremely complex and difficult-to-define concept of ‘intelligence’, and whether this can be convincingly reduced to a simple numerical score (an absurd notion when one applies some cold intelligence to the idea), are well known. But that’s not even to say that IQs are invalid; merely that they are not science in and of themselves. Obviously. But let’s consider the latest evo-psych wheeze – ‘personality tests’. In some research areas, these tests now overtake IQ tests. As Lee et al. note of some tests performed on new mothers: “Brain  claims emphasise  emotions,  not IQ,  as  fundamentally determinate  of  future health, wealth and happiness.”[54]

People use the term ‘personality’ as a shorthand for something that we all know is extremely complex, difficult to define, and subject to multiple and multi-layered expressions at different times. It’s also dependent upon a wide variety of circumstances. Evo-psych ‘personality tests’ seek to reduce this complexity to a score, and scores to ‘types’. (Yes, that’s right – just like the Nazis did.) Entirely subjective, culturally constructed (and loaded) judgments magically transubstantiate into figures, e.g. “the stability of personality increases from a stability coefficient of approximately .3 to .7 by middle adulthood”.[55]

Once the scores have been gathered, the evo-psycher can be as ‘scientific’ as they like with the numbers. What makes it not science is usually much farther back down the research journey. The ‘stability’ of a personality, for instance, is an entirely arbitrary judgment made by privileged authority figures who get to choose what types of personality ‘traits’ are most acceptable within a given society. Let’s take another example. A longitudinal study, conducted in New Zealand and led by Professor Terrie Moffitt, claims to show that

 Following a population-representative cohort of 1000 New Zealand children from their birth in 1972 to age 38 in 2011, we show that childhood self-control predicts unplanned single-parenting, high-school drop out, criminal offending, addiction, heavy smoking, personal finances, savings for retirement, and physical health and illness.[56]

 It doesn’t take any scientific analysis – nor much research - to discover that ‘levels of childhood self-control’ is a qualitative judgment attributed to children primarily by others who had power relationships over them, particularly their teachers. Nor is it a ranting left-wing conspiracy to note that teachers may display hostility and prejudice to poorer children: a vast literature exists exploring this phenomenon. So how robust can this data really be? Crucially, not enough to be ‘scientific’ in the sense of being precise quanta of empirical truth.

And what about the criteria for determining ‘low self-control’ in the first place? No matter how ‘robust’ it is argued to be, it’s still clearly subjective and culturally influenced, not scientific. You can’t have a scientific definition of low self-control. Obviously. Failure to kill your enemies could be classed as your inability to control your cowardice on the battlefield, but as an appropriate level of self-control on the high street. And were the teachers properly qualified to make these judgments? Why? The authors tell us that “reports by researcher-observers, teachers, parents, and the children themselves gathered across the ages of 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11 y were combined into a single highly reliable composite measure.” Bottom line being, no matter how scientific the study was after the data were gathered, the fundamental data themselves were not scientific particles, but the products of partial, qualitative human judgment. To say that they were reliable is simply to state that correlations were found to exist with later life outcomes. But the implication is given that the scores were reliable as data, in and of themselves. But can a child give a ‘scientific’ account of their level of self-control? No.

This is not to say that the study has no merit, but simply that there is little merit in the claim that the study is scientific. Straightforward non-partisan, non-political, problematisation of its methods demonstrates this. It is the people who refuse to accept this who are knowledge deniers.

And what about Perkins’ ‘work resistant personality type’? Perkins argues that his theory is based upon testable quanta of unemployed peoples’ ‘disagreeableness’, which Perkins links to a ‘welfare trait’ encoded in genes. Hence, it is science… Apparently. Because it involves genes and ‘neurobiology’ and ‘personality tests’. Notwithstanding the absurdity of reducing a human personality to a test score, or the fact that ‘disagreeableness’ is a subjective judgment, the slightest reflection will indicate that gene-karma is entirely unneeded as an explanation for why people who are unemployed, impoverished and experiencing the UK’s often appalling welfare system, might also be experiencing stress, anger and ‘disagreeableness’. Test almost anyone, save a saint, in those circumstances, and you are likely to find a ‘personality’ that is – temporarily - above average grumpy.

Which brings me to the final aspect of alt-science – the way it deals with critics. This can be divided into several types, and probably more than I’m covering here. Some we already know. For example, attacking social science en masse with ad hominem claims of ‘Leftist bias’. Another is to egregiously self-reference, for example by arguing that as all evo-psych alt-scientists agree that they are scientists, therefore anyone who says that they aren’t is anti-science and an evolution denier. But as well as falsely donning a white lab coat, alt-science has also clothed itself in liberal values, much as the far right has in France and other European countries, by claiming to be victims of a ‘politically correct’ clampdown on free speech. This is somewhat odd as no one has prevented the alt-scientists from publishing their books and articles at all. The issue is, rather, that they are, occasionally, being prevented from speaking at universities by protests, or threat of protest. (Although several actually teach at universities, so this is somewhat disingenuous.) Multiple issues are mixed together here – probably because that artificially boosts the credibility of the alt-science position. One is that alt-scientists don’t think it’s fair that protesters should protest. It is, they argue, a clampdown on free speech to allow freedom of protest. Another is the pernicious notion that universities have become blizzards of ‘special snowflakes’ who are protected by liberal-lefty university lecturers from hearing the slightest non-PC ideas. There seems to be no coherent differentiation in the minds of the people who make these allegations between discussing ideas like racism, sexism and homophobia, and permitting students to be subject to them directly by on-campus hate speech. Both have to be permitted, apparently, in order to protect free speech. Which is clearly bonkers. It is obviously not acceptable to allow the latter in any professional environment. But that doesn’t logically exclude the former – and clearly doesn’t if a further aspect of the alt-scientists’ allegation-suite is true: i.e. that students are subjected to nothing but liberal-lefty, PC university courses on feminism and left-wing politics.

The final alt-science approach is somewhat more worrying, because it is an affront to knowledge itself. That is, simply refusing to accept that a hypothesis has been debunked. Mangling words and meanings – such as redefining selfish gene as cooperative gene is one example. Another is Adam Perkins’ response to critics of his work.

In circular fashion, much alt-science – including Perkins’ - now falls back on the golden mean claim that ‘it’s a bit of both’ – i.e. it is partly genes, partly environment, or ‘environmental interplay’, that determines personality and life course. As one recent study puts it:

 A plausible effect of these developmental, social, and evolutionary pressures, when combined with active and evocative processes, may be that trajectories of personality development canalize relatively late in development and respond to idiosyncratically and arbitrarily experienced environments, superimposed on a backdrop of genetically influenced tendencies.[57]

 In other words, the authors really have no idea. All this passage says is that children’s personalities develop over time, and in relation to their environment. The authors go on to concede that

 If environmental disadvantage prevents the expression of genetic potentials for positive psychological outcomes and/or magnifies the expression of genetic risks for maladaptive psychological outcomes, social inequality may be exacerbated.

 Alt-science is a hypothesis, seeking a point. The more they look into the realities of socio-economic disadvantage, the more evo-psychers are forced to acknowledge that it is socio-economic disadvantage that counts, not genes or putatively inherited ‘traits’. The word mangling used, for example in the above quotes, to avoid admitting this, is as impenetrably vacuous as any ‘postmodernist’ writing that alt-scientists cite as being deployed to smear purported scientific fact.[58]  

To be against all of this, to rail against it, and not go quietly along with it as some actual scientists dangerously are, is not to be against science; it’s to be science’s champion in a world of reality mangling far-right, potentially horrifying, alternative histories. 

*Many thanks to the countless people who have already written on the various aspects of this subject.

 [1] http://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2017/03/14/sean-spicer-wiretap-timeline-orig-bw.cnn ; http://people.com/politics/sean-spicer-backs-down-on-trump-wiretapping-claims/

[2] https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/03/16/sean-spicer-angrily-defends-trumps-wiretap-claims-in-wild-cont/21898623/

[3] See UK politician Michael Gove’s version of this narrative at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2298146/I-refuse-surrender-Marxist-teachers-hell-bent-destroying-schools-Education-Secretary-berates-new-enemies-promise-opposing-plans.html

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxQGsLchD8Q

[5] http://patriotupdate.com/americas-liberal-universities-destroying-critical-thinking-skills/

[6] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/15/people-may-have-had-enough-experts-like-need-find-voices/

[7] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2298146/I-refuse-surrender-Marxist-teachers-hell-bent-destroying-schools-Education-Secretary-berates-new-enemies-promise-opposing-plans.html

[8] https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/page/3/ ; https://www.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/37jxd9/david_buss_and_richard_dawkins_on_evolutionary/?st=j0dqzn9e&sh=a8d91c13

[9] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25041562 ; The Bell Curve, page 195.

[10] https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/parentingculturestudies/files/2014/03/UAB-Key-Findings-Report.pdf

[11] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/apr/30/jobseekers-bogus-psychometric-tests-unemployed

[12] http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1894291-state-benefits-negatively-affect-personality-heres-how/

[13] https://storify.com/PsychologyBrief/criticisms-of-adam-perkins-and-the-welfare-trait

[14] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/18/uk-employment-rate-hits-highest-level-since-records-began

[15] https://twitter.com/AdamPerkinsPhD/status/833405356793532418

[16] Perkins - The welfare trait: Hans Eysenck, personality and social issues.

[17] https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/01/tell-the-truth-about-benefit-claimants-and-the-left-shuts-you-down/

[18] https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/blog/2016/03/10/a-comment-on-the-use-of-results-from-does-welfare-reform-affect-fertility-evidence-from-the-uk

[19] https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/blog/2016/03/10/a-comment-on-the-use-of-results-from-does-welfare-reform-affect-fertility-evidence-from-the-uk

[20] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886916307449

[21] https://twitter.com/AdamPerkinsPhD/status/819926725488496640

[22] https://twitter.com/AdamPerkinsPhD?lang=en ; https://twitter.com/AdamPerkinsPhD?lang=en ; https://twitter.com/AdamPerkinsPhD/status/824675000875622401

[23] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-38156985

[24] https://blacklabellogic.com/2017/02/13/the-virtue-signalling-of-social-justice/

[25] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/14/dwp-punishing-low-paid-full-time-workers-under-new-benefits-rule

[26] http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/former-breitbart-staffers-criticize-trump-hire-steve-bannon

[27] http://www.jaegerresearchinstitute.org/articles/merge.htm

[28] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxQGsLchD8Q

[29] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XdgRBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq=sociobiology+feminism&source=bl&ots=IDGXwDnNSi&sig=qs_yCpiNi3kPHye2JPiuWkcmdAo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiW28fbr9vSAhVoKsAKHZoaD2MQ6AEISjAJ#v=onepage&q=sociobiology%20feminism&f=false

[30] Why Truth Matters page 103.

[31] See Leach Social Anthropology

[32] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_11_12.htm

[33] Social Anthropology See also Uses and Abuses of Biology by anthropologist Marshall Sahlins

[34] The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life

[35] Dawkins says “But I doubt that there is any experiment that could be done to prove my claim” – Extended Phenotype, page 1.

[36] Extended Phenotype p.111.

[37] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004723521630099X

[38] See Gellner, Legitimation of Belief.

[39] See https://thebiologist.rsb.org.uk/biologist-features/158-biologist/features/903-crime-genes

[40] http://www.petersaunders.org.uk/toby_youngs_the_fall_of_the_meritocracy.html

[41] http://www.petersaunders.org.uk/toby_youngs_the_fall_of_the_meritocracy.html

[42] https://academic.oup.com/hgs/article/21/1/55/583762/Otmar-von-Verschuer-and-the-Scientific

[43] (See Ray Tallis’s - a genuine cognitive scientist and medical doctor - Aping Mankind for a radical critique of evo-psych.)

[44] https://notpoliticallycorrect.me/2016/11/25/evolution-denial/

[45] https://twitter.com/charlesmurray/status/836596150501326849

[46] http://quillette.com/2017/03/05/sociologys-stagnation/

[47] One Dimensional Man

[48] https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/12/21/the-evolution-of-sexual-dimorphism-in-humans-part-2/

[49] https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/839912030526189569

[50] https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/page/3/

[51] https://twitter.com/AdamPerkinsPhD/status/839071361125466114

[52] https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/12/21/the-evolution-of-sexual-dimorphism-in-humans-part-2/

[53] https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/12/21/the-evolution-of-sexual-dimorphism-in-humans-part-2/

[54] https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/parentingculturestudies/files/2014/03/UAB-Key-Findings-Report.pdf

[55] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jopy.12186/full

[56] https://vimeo.com/119840048

[57] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jopy.12186/full

[58] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1pJ8vYxL3Q

[muslimamericannews]

Parents in Southern Indiana are upset by a middle school worksheet's portrayal of "Sharia law," which they say casts the Islamic code in a positive light while ignoring human rights violations and the oppression of women.

“The way that the worksheet is left would be like describing how effective Hitler was at nationalizing Germany and creating patriotism but leaving out that he slaughtered 6 million Jews," said Dean Hohl, one of several parents who spoke out against the assignment at a recent New Albany-Floyd County school board meeting.

He added: "I’m just not OK with my daughter – or any child that age – leaving class with the understanding that anything about Sharia law is OK.”

The worksheet, assigned to seventh-graders at Highland Hills Middle School, presents a passage written by a fictional 20-year-old Saudi woman named Ahlima, who feels "very fortunate" to live under Sharia law in Saudi Arabia. She writes about how she will soon become a man's second wife and explains her modest dress: "I understand that some foreigners see our dress as a way of keeping women from being equal, but ... I find Western women's clothing to be horribly immodest.”

“That document by itself, it’s almost propaganda,” said Jon Baker, whose daughter also received the worksheet. “If you read that, you would think everything’s wonderful in that world.”

Bill Briscoe, a spokesman for the district, said the curriculum is being reviewed in light of the complaints, per district policy.

The same worksheet, created by InspirEd Educators Inc., caused a controversy when it was used at a middle school in Smyrna, Ga., in 2011. Sharon Coletti, the creator of the worksheet and president of InspirEd Educators, said she received death threats and was accused of "indoctrinating" children at the time.

Coletti, who is a Christian and longtime educator, said in an interview with the Courier-Journal that she wasn't trying to indoctrinate anyone. She said she was just trying to create a lesson that was more engaging than dry, expository text pulled from a textbook.

“If I can shape something so that kids have to decide for themselves, once I get them involved in the situation, they never forget it,” she said.

She added later: "I want (students) to be patriotic. I want them to be problem-solvers." But she said that she will remove the worksheet from the curriculum going forward because of unwanted media attention.

Hohl said his daughter told him that the purpose of the assignment at Highland Hills was to help students identify stereotypes. He said he travels often for work to Malaysia, where Sharia courts play a role in the judicial system, according to the CIA World Factbook. Hohl said he doesn’t have a problem with Islam but with extremism, and he wants his daughter to understand the difference between “moderate Muslims” and extremists.

“Let’s tell the whole truth," he said. "Let’s help people understand what’s really happening and what the rest of the world is like so when they are interacting with the rest of their global peer group, we can reduce the likelihood of conflict and misunderstanding.”

Indiana University professor Asma Afsaruddin, who teaches in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, said there is often a misunderstanding of Sharia by non-Muslims, which could be contributing to the concerns felt by the parents protesting the worksheet. The Sharia is not in itself law, she said. Rather, it is a broad ethical code based on the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, from which people can derive legal rules.

She added that interpretation of the Sharia can change over time and so can the rules derived from it – just as attitudes and laws about slavery in the United States did. “Notions of democracy and women’s rights and human rights are actually now being derived from the Sharia in Muslim-majority societies.”

But when the Sharia is mentioned in Western media, she said, it tends to focus on “gross abuses of religious principles,” like stoning as a response to adultery or honor killings, which Afsaruddin said “actually have no religious basis whatsoever” but are instead “cultural practices that pre-date Islam.” This contributes to fears which she feels are unjustified.

“For the majority of Muslim men and women, the Sharia is a very positive concept because they understand what the Sharia means,” she said.

Coletti said she developed the original lesson nearly 20 years ago to fulfill state social studies standards requiring middle school students to learn about culture in the Middle East. Ahlima, the character in the lesson, is based on an interview she saw on an interview in a news program with a woman who held many of the same ideas about Sharia law, she said.

Initially, the curriculum was two consecutive activities – one focusing on Ahlima and one focusing on an Israeli woman of a similar age who served in the army and wanted to attend college. Coletti said she later combined the two lessons for clarity.

She said that despite the change, the goal of the assignment was the same: to help students think for themselves and arrive at the conclusion that the Israeli has more rights and freedoms than the Saudi woman of the same age. If they don’t arrive at that conclusion, she said, the teacher is expected to help the student understand.

Coletti said the assignment is the only one that has ever caused a stir.