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dragoneyes618 · 5 months ago

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Psychological explanations of antisemitism have become very popular. Given the widespread belief that psychology can ultimately account for nearly all human behavior, this is to be expected. But there are additional reasons why psychological explanations of antisemitism are so attractive, especially to Jews. Most important, they offer grounds for optimism. By describing Jew-hatred as a psychological abnormality and labeling antisemites sick, psychology renders antisemitism curable. If antisemites are sick people, then Jews have nothing to fear from the normal men and women among whom they live. An additional comfort to many is that psychological explanations universalize and thus dejudaize Jew-hatred, thus placing it under the general heading "prejudice." Such psychological explanations make the abnormality of the antisemites rather than the Jewishness of the Jews the cause of Jew-hatred.

The most widely acclaimed psychological explanation of antisemitism is in a multivolume work on prejudice commissioned by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). The preface to the study's major volume, The Authoritarian Personality, summarizes its thesis: "The central theme of the work is a relatively new concept - the rise of an 'anthropological' species we call the authoritarian type of man....He seems to combine the ideas and skills...of a highly industrialized society with irrational or anti-rational beliefs....This book approaches the problem with the means of socio-psychological research."

The entire study revolves around this theme, that prejudiced people are disturbed and irrational, and that antisemitism is merely one more form of prejudice, though perhaps a more virulent one than others. That orientation also is reflected in the title of and contents of another volume in this work, Anti-Semites and Emotional Disorders. A third volume, Dynamics of Prejudice by Bettelheim and Janowitz, analyzes the connection between personality traits and prejudice. A fourth volume, Prophets of Deceit, attempts to "expose the psychological tricks" used by demagogues to attain power.

Four years after the publication of the American Jewish Committee's study of prejudice, one of the most widely acclaimed books ever written on that subject was published, the Nature of Prejudice, by the Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport. The essential thesis of this work, which includes substantial discussions of antisemitism, is that prejudiced people are psychologically abnormal. In his preface, Allport refers to the long and tragic history of group hatreds, but he concludes, "Yet the situation is not without its hopeful features. Chief among them is the simple fact that human nature seems, on the whole, to prefer the sight of kindness and friendliness to the sight of cruelty. Normal men everywhere reject, in principle and by preference, the path of war and destruction. They like to live in peace and friendship with their neighbors."

Thus, ten years after the Holocaust, Jew-haters were pronounced sick by a preeminent organization of American Jewry and a preeminent psychologist of Harvard University.

This explanation of Jew-hatred generally and of the Holocaust specifically must have come as welcome news to Jewry after Auschwitz. The Nazis were sick, as are all deeply prejudiced people. That was the lesson to be learned. There was one other lesson for American Jews that the authors of The Authoritarian Personality noted: "The major concern [is] with the potentially fascistic individual." Antisemitism is a function of Fascism, and the danger to Jews is on the Right. Hitler was a Fascist, therefore the Right is the threat to Jews. But this single-minded concern with Fascist individuals is wrongheaded. Why not an equal concern with Communist antisemites? The lesson that these authors, like so many contemporary Jews, have drawn from the Holocaust is that six million Jews were murdered because their murderers were sick and Fascist - not because the six million were Jews.

While there is little doubt that Adolf Hitler and many of his associates were psychologically disturbed, this fact did not cause antisemitism, let alone the Holocaust. Were the tens of millions of Germans and other Europeans who supported Nazi antisemitism also sick? Did tens of millions of Christians in medieval Europe hate Jews because they were sick? Was Soviet antisemitism a function of some psychosis? Are all Muslims and Arabs who want Israel destroyed psychopaths?

We do not believe that antisemites are models of psychological health. But until we recognize that it is possible to be psychologically unhealthy and not be an antisemite, and that to be an antisemite does not necessarily imply psychopathology, we will never be able to combat antisemitism. Antisemitism is evil, and evil is not necessarily sick. Unfortunately.

- Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism, Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, pages 61-63

#why the jews the reason for antisemitism #dennis prager #joseph telushkin #rabbi joseph telushkin #jumblr #antisemitism #history #jewish history #human nature

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odinsblog · 11 months ago

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National broadcast and cable networks are barely covering Trump’s recent gaffes and incoherent statements

Trump: “Viktor Orban... he's the leader of Turkey.”

Fact: Viktor Orban is Hungary's authoritarian leader.

Yet Trump’s gaffe received less than three minutes of total coverage across all three major cable news networks.

National broadcast and cable networks are failing to cover a series of verbal gaffes and incoherent statements recently made by disgraced former President Donald Trump, the front-runner to win the Republican nomination again in 2024.

As Media Matters has already extensively documented, media outlets have repeatedly obsessed over President Joe Biden's age since he announced his campaign for reelection. The same attention has not been given to his likely challenger, former President Donald Trump, even though the two men are nearly the same age. In fact, in just the last two months, Trump has made a number of nonsensical statements: He has mixed up the authoritarian leaders of Hungary and Turkey; confused his former Republican opponent Jeb Bush and Jeb’s brother, the former president George W. Bush; mixed up a number of his Democratic opponents with former President Barack Obama; and made a garbled statement accusing President Joe Biden of leading the country into “World War II.”

On Monday, a New York Times article finally brought some much-needed attention to the dichotomy between Trump’s own attacks on Biden, compared to Trump’s actual behavior:

But as the 2024 race for the White House heats up, Mr. Trump’s increased verbal blunders threaten to undermine one of Republicans’ most potent avenues of attack, and the entire point of his onstage pantomime: the argument that Mr. Biden is too old to be president. Mr. Biden, a grandfather of seven, is 80. Mr. Trump, who has 10 grandchildren, is 77.

An analysis by Media Matters found that TV broadcast news has given no coverage to these false and incoherent statements from Trump, and cable news has barely covered them. Overall, MSNBC has covered the four recent Trump gaffes the most, still just 35 minutes, and the majority of this coverage has come from just one program, Morning Joe. CNN has covered the gaffes a mere 9 minutes. Fox News, meanwhile, mentioned the gaffes just twice for less than a minute total in the periods studied.

Mixing up Hungarian, Turkish strongmen

Trump commented on October 23 during a campaign speech in New Hampshire: “You know, I was very honored — there’s a man, Viktor Orbán. Did anyone ever hear of him? He’s probably, like, one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world. He’s the leader of Turkey.”

Orbán is the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary; autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is president of Turkey. This remark also could have brought renewed attention to Trump’s long-established affection for dictators.

Media Matters reviewed transcripts from October 23 thorough 29 and found that the comment received less than 2 minutes of TV news coverage, mostly spread across MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and Deadline: White House, plus a single comment on Fox News’ The Five lasting 6 seconds. Broadcast news didn’t cover it at all.

Warning that Biden might start “World War II”

During a September 15 speech at a right-wing event in Washington, D.C., Trump claimed that Biden was “cognitively impaired” and “in no condition to lead,” while warning that his leadership could imperil the United States in “dealing with Russia and possible nuclear war.” Trump then added: “Just think of it. We would be in World War II very quickly if we’re going to be relying on this man.”

World War II happened 80 years ago, a detail Trump missed while he was calling Biden “cognitively impaired.” During the same speech, Trump also seemed confused about whom he is running against in 2024, and whom he ran against in 2016.

(continue reading)

#politics #donald trump #viktor orban #journalism fail #media bias #i s2g msm wants trump to have a 2nd term

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dailyanarchistposts · 3 months ago

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Effective Affect: Between Realism and Idealism

I draw upon Spinoza's theory of emotions according to which when "the mind is assailed by any emotion, the body is at the same time affected with a modification whereby its power of activity is increased or diminished."[12] This is what Deleuze and Guattari more specifically call "affect."[13] Often emotions are considered a mere inner phenomenon, a subjective state, something with little to no relevance in the objective world of political theory and processes. But with Spinoza's connection between emotions and power they become highly political. They are no longer a subjective epiphenomenon but something that changes the world by increasing or decreasing the agent's capacity to act in certain ways.

This is a material and physiological process, as should be evident if you consider something you might be very afraid of - for example spiders or heights. If you suffer from a phobia you might rationally know that there is no real danger, and you might be able to force yourself to go against your fear, but you also know that it is not merely a matter of making a rational decision to override a purely mental feeling: In the decision to act you will feel your muscles tighten and your adrenalin rushing as your entire body resists doing the particular act. Your power to perform that act is diminished; even thinking about it might be hard. If you suffer from sociophobia or anthropophobia your ability to engage with other people is similarly affected. This is the goal and function of the Hobbesian narrative: To instill in people a fear of each other, to prevent them from trusting each other too much, to make them unable to even imagine that cooperation and mutual aid could be possible without a system of domination.[14] In short, to make another world not only impossible but also unimaginable. For Hobbes, emotions were deeply relevant to the maintenance of political systems, making him perhaps the first political affect theorist.

While climate change is certainly frightening, it is crucial that we reflect upon how the narrative of social collapse, whether it is from scientists or popular fiction, affects our power to act, because if nothing else is true, our survival depends on us acting as if a different social system is both possible and desirable. Exaggerating the threat of social collapse is more likely to make us cling to the social system that exists, to make us want to preserve the status quo and the system of domination and exploitation that is causing the crisis. Panic is easily exploitable by authoritarian figures that promise to maintain order.[15] Alternatively, the belief in the Hobbesian "state of nature" can lead to an obsession with individualist survival and solitary retreat[16] which is a misguided reaction when we need collective solutions both to halt climate change and to survive it. As the sociologist Eric Klinenberg has documented in his studies of disasters, it is isolation that leads to death while social connections and community is what helps us to survive.[17] Seen this way, the narrative of social collapse might be part of the problem, leading to counterproductive and even harmful affective states and behaviors.

The Hobbesian version of politics, based on an account of "human nature" as fixed and ahistorical,[18] is often portrayed as the "realist" view. It eschews normative commitments and values and proclaims to work exclusively from the premise of how the world "actually" is. Morality it leaves to the philosophers; it does not belong in the political realm. This is in contrast to the political "idealists" who aim to realize a normative vision of how the world "should be" and insists that politics should be committed to a set of values and principles. I believe both are partially wrong. Political "realists" like to believe they are beyond ideologies and sentiments, but their cynical worldview is deeply affective and ideological. It does not just take the world "as is" but actively creates the world: By thinking about the world and humans in a particular way we can only act in particular ways, and that shapes our social world. Idealists on the other hand, tend to forget how the political realities shape our ideals. Our normative imaginations and principles do not come out of nowhere. They come from embodied experiences and social practices in the present. That means that it is only by doing new things we can think new things, and only by thinking them can we do them.

We do not have to start with an entire vision about how the world should be, in the sense Karl Marx would call "utopian," as that would not necessarily provide us with the steps towards its realization or the convincing belief that it is possible. What we can do is to change our social practices in the here and now and look towards those who are already engaged in different practices. By doing that we can change our affective states and expand our imagination towards different possibilities. This, I believe, is the essence of the concept "prefiguration."[19] Contrary to what the realists would have us believe, the future is not determined and the present is not a monolith of mechanical forces. It contains a multitude of different practices and which of these we focus on matters greatly to our political and collective imagination about what is possible.

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gravitascivics · 10 months ago

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AVOID THE EITHER/OR

On February 13th, with the posting, “Early On,”[1] this blog began a series of offerings that argue American society has higher levels of deviant behavior than one finds in many other societies – particularly advanced countries. This claim is hard to define and measure. Here is what Statista reports:

In the United States, violent crimes are defined as incidents involving force or the threat of force. … Comparing the number of committed crimes in U.S. by category, property crime far outnumbers violent crime, while aggravated assault accounts for some two-thirds of all violent crime. Over the last two decades, the number of violent crimes in the United States has fallen dramatically; there were 1.93 million violent crimes in 1992 in comparison to 1.2 million violent crimes in 2022. A similar story is told by looking at the violent crime rate per 100,000 residents, which factors in the role population growth plays in increasing the overall number of crimes.[2]

Or as Data Pandas reports:

Despite being one of the world's most developed countries, the United States ranks 52nd, with a Crime Index of 47.81. The relatively high index in an advanced nation like the U.S. underscores the fact that crime is not merely a problem of underdeveloped or developing countries but a universal challenge.[3]

While there are other nations with higher rates of crime and other forms of deviance, the above amply reports levels that should capture the nation’s attention.

Of course, there are many factors involved in this state of dysfunction. Using a historical approach, recent postings described the effects of various constructs, e.g., transcendentalism and perceptual psychology, in the development of this deviance. The postings have attempted to explain how the claims of these constructs dispose their advocates to champion meaningful degrees of individualism and self-centeredness, mental dispositions one can see as disposing people to engage in deviant behavior.

Consequently, such socialization has even led to problematic levels of other anti-social mindsets, even nihilism. Of course, all of this can’t help affecting how civics education will be conducted in American schools. A good deal of those effects are underlying factors and not conscious to the educators who man those classrooms. But before describing what these forces mean to curriculum, it is important to keep in mind that this is a societal problem. In no way can schools be given the task, single-handedly, of definitively solving the problem.

While this disclaimer might seem obvious, it has been the practice of societal decision makers to dump many components of the above situation in the “laps” of educators. Of course, this is counterproductive and only serves to stretch the limited resources schools have at their disposal to try to meet the educational responsibilities cited in these earlier postings.

What this blog will describe is limited to how the curriculum can, from its perspective, consider the forces causing the dysfunctional elements of this state of being, i.e., a society full of deviant related strife. This blogger hopes that interested parties understand the central source of these problems has had a long history and goes to the core of American attitudes.

Again, it’s a cultural problem. Only societal wide changes can shift these attitudes. That aim is surely beyond the ability of schools to accomplish. So, given all of this, what are the implications for social studies – that portion of curriculum most relevant to societal concerns emanating from its culture.

And here, a bit of context is in order: The general custom among people, this blogger notes, is to think dichotomously. In this case, either a person is authoritarian or democratic; either loves children or is indifferent to their needs. These are lazy reactions. The problems these postings address and the problems they have caused, place educators on guard against the easy, sentimentalist answers to those problems.

In that vein, this blogger is not against many of the sentiments expressed by those expounding the virtues of individualism – often mistakenly treated as being synonymous with liberty. The concern here lies in the fact that reality does not exist only in the domain of one’s own house and family, but also in the communal parameters individuals and families find themselves.

The overall described conditions this blog has reviewed have implications for the social studies curriculum but also curriculum in general. With a more contained ambition than is usually expressed by curriculum writers, what follows are adjustments that can allow a more useful posture given the challenges. That is, a functional curriculum should adjust in certain dimensions:

There should be a heavy emphasis on the concerns of communities – that in which a school’s students live and, in the nation, generally.

Knowledge, as an element of a curriculum, should be treated beyond sets of facts to memorize, but as functional, useful elements in solving societal problems or addressing societal concerns.

Curriculum proposals should be in the form of options that a teacher can manipulate, tweak, or otherwise accommodate the students and/or social conditions teachers face. And …

Discipline, beyond the prescriptions from perceptual psychology or any other strategy, should be treated by teachers in a realistic manner – avoiding simplistic generalized approaches (either too lenient, ala perceptual psychology, or too demanding, ala “I take no guff” approach).

These dimensions are suggested by the pioneer work on deviance by Emile Durkheim and Robert Merton.[4]

While a formal development of an argument suggested by Durkheim and Merton is beyond the purposes of this presentation, these sociologists’ collective work presents a social model for explaining deviance. And this marks a good place to end this posting and invite readers to click onto this blog’s next posting for a description of these giants’ contribution to addressing deviance.

[1] See Robert Gutierrez, “Early On,” Gravitas: A Voice for Civics, February 13, 2024, “Representations of Reality,” February 16, 2024, “The TV Effect,” February 20, 2024, “The Perceptual Angle,” February 23, and The Ongoing Factors Affecting Nihilism, February 27, 2024, URL: https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/. Use archives feature to access individual postings,

[2] “Violent Crime in the U.S. – Statistics & Facts,” Statista, December 18, 2023, accessed February 28, 2024, URL: https://www.statista.com/topics/1750/violent-crime-in-the-us/#topicOverview.

[3] “Crime Rate by Country,” Data Pandas (n.d.), accessed February 29, 2024, URL: https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/crime-rate-by-country. Out of 136 countries, the US is ranked the 56th most crime ridden.

[4] Marshall B. Clinard, “The Theoretical Implications of Anomie and Deviant Behavior,” in Anomie and Deviant Behavior, edited by Marshall B. Clinard (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1964), 1-56.

#deviance #crime #curriculum #culture #communal concerns #individualism #civics education #social studies

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mbti-notes · 2 years ago

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In a previous post you mentioned having being a teacher in your own experience as one is it possible to teach children without the spare the rod spoil the child mantra because judging from the way we were raised the people who taught us often flipped and went on rampages and doled out punishments, warnings like you future will be dark if you don't do what they want which makes the notion that children can be taught otherwise well otherworldly I'd like to hear your thoughts, thank you.

Do you know that there are many ways to parent, teach, and discipline children? If you don't, you're not alone. Many people only know one way because they've only experienced one way with their own parents. If you were lucky, you might've discovered another way from observing other parents or you had a teacher in school who showed you a different way.

Parenting and teaching are skill sets. Learning, training, and practice are required for becoming a successful parent or teacher. How many places provide people with parenting courses before becoming parents? Very few. It is usually up to parents to learn for themselves and for the sake of their children. Much of the world's population is relatively poor and/or lacks access to educational resources. In the absence of educational opportunities, people generally fall back on the "default mode" of their own upbringing. Thus, cultural trends in parenting/disciplining are difficult to change and take a long time to change because they easily pass from one generation to the next.

Fortunately, there are educational requirements for becoming a teacher. But are you confident that all the teaching programs in your country are based on the most recent empirical research and data? Are you confident that, even with their post-secondary degree, teachers are not unduly influenced by their own childhood upbringing when they face students in their classroom?

Actually, there's really no need to ask for my personal opinion on the matter. There is already a large body of research about parenting/disciplining styles that speaks very loudly for itself. Unlike many areas of psychology, there is strong general consensus on this topic.

You are describing the authoritarian style of parenting/discipline, so what do the studies indicate about how it compares to other styles?

It devalues and can damage the emotional well-being of the child, which makes them more susceptible to unhappiness and serious mental health issues like depression/anxiety later in life.

It teaches children that their voice doesn't matter, which impedes the learning of assertiveness and good communication skills. This can do serious damage to their self-esteem and lead them to suffer from unhealthy shame-driven behaviors.

It fails to teach children healthy coping mechanisms, which makes them less resilient in the face of stress/failure and more likely to resort to self-destructive or violent behavior.

It fails to teach children healthy boundaries (and bodily integrity in the case of physical punishment), which makes them less socially competent and more likely to accept/do harm in their interpersonal relationships.

It implicitly instills a naive "might is right" worldview in children, which can impede their moral development and leave them with poor ethical reasoning skills.

It often leaves children with deep trauma-related scars, which makes them more likely to grow up to perpetuate cycles of intergenerational dysfunction and violence.

It is inefficient because the punishments are often too crude to fit the crime, so children are more likely to walk away merely fearful, angry, or confused and don't learn what they need for nurturing personal growth.

Generally speaking, if a child manages to grow up and become a psychologically healthy and well-adjusted adult in an authoritarian environment, they have not done so because of the disciplining style but in spite of it.

#parenting style #authoritarian parenting style #parenting #teaching #discipline #education #ask

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youryanderedaddy · 3 years ago

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Unity

I can't believe I actually wrote this monstrosity 😩

Tw: gender - neutral reader, hinted genocide, death, slight mention of blood, mention of "communism" ( authoritarian regime actually), mention of anarchism, politics, patronizing behavior, obsessive behavior, misconceptions, stereotypes, unnironical usage of comrade, crack taken seriously

*lapochka (rus) = sweetheart

*kotenok (rus) = kitten

You couldn't believe your eyes. The world around you was sparkling, trembling, literally burning the old regime away. Your whole body was shaking as you watched the parliamentary melt down into ash, flames and smoke so thick in the air you could practically smell the fall of the hierarchy, and the rise of another one - much crueler and tyrannical. You looked down at your hands - one of them was wet with blood and your own tears, the other was tightly bound together with your friend's. Aleksei was smiling into the deadly nothingness, something sinister underneath the victorious grin of satisfaction on his lips. He sighed loudly, finally at peace, and rested his head against your left shoulder. Your bat hit the scarlet ground.

"We did it, comrade." The Russian spoke out suddenly, his voice low and smooth, almost stealthy, just like before the rebellion when he used to tell you all of his theories and plans, quiet and secretive like a church mouse. "We can finally have the perfect utopia." He paused to squeeze your wrist gently. "A place where everyone can be equal. Where the state helps the people instead of obeying the corporations mindlessly." Aleksei exhaled slowly, studying your delicate features. No reaction. "The bourgeoisie oppression ends today, with us." He added quickly, then kicked the open vodka bottle on the ground somewhere far away.

"The state..." You whispered suddenly, the hot blood pumping in your veins at full force once the realization hit you. Your heartbeat fastened and you had to hold onto the man so you wouldn't fall down all over the corpes of the people your little riot had just killed, some friends, some enemies. "You told me there will be no state." You spat out with newly found poison, the type you had reserved mostly for capitalists and conservative old men. "You promised us freedom. You promised me freedom." The tears were falling down now, your cheeks red with dissapoinment and bitterness. "All this talk about leftist unity just so you can stab me in the b-back." Your voice broke at the end, the mere thought of the betrayal sending you into miserable sobs and high - pitched whimpers. "I can't believe I trusted you, comrade." The dirty word lingered on your tongue for just a moment too long, like a curse.

You tried to push the Russian away and break free of his hold, but to no avail. The communist was far too strong to fight off, too determined to put you in your place to let you go before watching you struggle for a while like the feral cat you were. "Lapochka, did you really think that everyone could just get along without the fear of retribution?" Aleksei murmured against your ear, his warm breath tickling the hairs on the back of your neck as he embraced you tightly against his chest. What once felt like a gesture of assurance, alliance and the promise of liberty was now simply a way to show ownership and superiority. "You are nothing but a silly idealist kid with no understanding of the real world. You are lucky that I found you before your childish beliefs got you hurt." The man continued firmly, his hands wandering underneath your torn black hoodie, gripping the soft battered skin and pressing on the fresh bloody scars. "Now I can protect you forever, Y/N, with the party by my side." The Russian stated warmly, hoping that the love he felt in his heart softened the obvious authority in his tone.

"Let me go, you damn control - freak!" You shouted, squirming in the cage of arms around your body, still finding it was too hard to break free. You had managed to overthrow one oppressive government just to be met with another one, potentially worse than the first. The only difference this time was that the fucking leader of the party wanted you as their house pet. It must have been such a power trip for Aleksei to see you crumble slowly, rely on him more and more over the months as you lost your edge and driving force, opposing everything you believed in just to become his domesticated little playing. And for what? For partnership? For resources? For a better world? As if you had wanted all these people dead. As if you had wanted all your civil right stripped away to a handful the government controlled anyways.

"I will never let you go, kotenok. I love you." The Russian insisted, his face serious, his eyes deep and black like the part of his flag that had long been burnt along the other symbols of defiance. "My allies wanted me to kill you after the new order, but I could never bring myself to do it." He muttered as he kissed your cheek, licking the salty trail of tears. "I know I can bring some sense into your pretty little head, Y/N. I will be patient, I promise. Soon enough you will see all of the wonders of the new world." The man smiled against your cold skin. You were freezing, but that wasn't the reason behind your trembling. Aleksei grabbed your hand again and put it over his golden medal, right next to his bumping heart.

"Let's go home, comrade."

#yandere #male yandere #male yandere x reader #yandere oneshot #yandere male x reader #yandere oc #yandere x you #yancore #yandere oc x reader #tw politics mention #crack taken seriously #inspired by JrEg #inspired by centricide #go watch it rn its super funny

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nicklloydnow · 3 years ago

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"According to a "parasite stress" hypothesis, authoritarian governments are more likely to emerge in regions characterized by a high prevalence of disease-causing pathogens.

(...)

Why is governance in some states and societies more authoritarian than in others? Economic variables—including the overall availability of economic resources and the manner in which those resources are distributed—provide partial answers to that question [3], [4], [5], [6]. Ecological variables may play a role as well. Recently, it has been suggested that societal variability in authoritarian governance may result, in part, from variability in the prevalence of disease-causing parasites [7]. (In this context, “parasite” is used to refer broadly to any pathogenic organism, including bacteria and viruses as well as helminths).

(...)

Why might there be a causal link between the prevalence of infectious diseases in the local ecology and an authoritarian system of governance? The hypothesis follows from an analysis of several defining characteristics of authoritarian political systems (such as institutionalized emphasis on social conformity, intolerance of dissent, and ethnocentrism) that may have implications for the spread of infectious disease. Because many disease-causing parasites are invisible, and their actions mysterious, disease control has historically depended substantially on adherence to ritualized behavioral practices that reduced infection risk [9]. Individuals who openly dissented from, or simply failed to conform to, these behavioral traditions therefore posed a health threat to self and others. Thus, while there can be societal costs associated with any collective behavioral tendency toward obedience and conformity (e.g., inhibition of technological innovation), there can be disease-specific benefits too (presuming that a greater proportion of these behavioral traditions serve to mitigate, rather than propagate, the spread of disease). These benefits would have been greater (and more likely to outweigh the costs) under circumstances in which disease-causing parasites placed greater stress on human welfare—circumstances in which those parasites were especially virulent and/or prevalent.

This logical analysis has implications for predictable variation in individuals' attitudes and values, and for worldwide societal differences too. At a psychological level of analysis, empirical evidence reveals that the subjective perception of infection risk causes individuals to be more conformist, to prefer conformity and obedience in others, to respond more negatively toward others who fail to conform, and to endorse more conservative socio-political attitudes [10], [11], [12], [13], [14]. At a societal level of analysis, empirical evidence reveals that in countries and cultures characterized by historically higher prevalence of parasitic diseases, people are less individualistic, exhibit lower levels of dispositional openness to new things, are more likely to conform to majority opinion, and more strongly endorse "binding" moral values that emphasize group loyalty, obedience, and respect for authority [15], [16], [17], [18], [19].

In addition to their intolerance of nonconformity, authoritarian political systems are also characterized by nepotism and ethnocentrism [20]. These behavioral tendencies too have been empirically linked to the threat of disease. At a psychological level of analysis, individuals who are—or who merely perceive themselves to be—more vulnerable to infection tend to endorse more xenophobic and ethnocentric attitudes [21], [22], [23]. At a societal level of analysis, countries characterized by higher prevalence of parasitic diseases are also characterized by stronger family ties, increased frequency of intrastate ethnic conflict, and several indicators of increased ethnocentrism [24], [25], [26], although the interpretation of some these results remains a matter of some disagreement [27], [28].

To the extent that institutionalized forms of governance reflect the attitudes and values of the individuals who populate the local ecology, these lines of research have implications for predicting worldwide variability in authoritarian governance: In places where parasitic diseases have posed greater stress on human health and welfare, authoritarian forms of governance may be especially likely to emerge and to persist over time.

(...)

One issue pertains to the history of European colonization, and its consequences. When countries colonize other geographic regions, they often impose their own political and economic institutions onto those regions; those institutions may persist even after those regions attain independence. It has been argued that ecological variables (such as the prevalence of infectious diseases) predict societal outcomes primarily because of their influence on particular patterns of colonial settlement, such that European colonial powers were more likely to establish long-lasting democratic political systems and economic institutions in regions characterized by lower incidences of infectious diseases [31], [32]. This represents a very different causal process than that implied by the parasite stress hypothesis.

(...)

In addition to testing the alternative explanation, the results of this study also have implications for our understanding of individual-level authoritarian attitudes as they relate to societal outcomes. Research on “the authoritarian personality” of individuals indicates some relation between politically entrenched authoritarian systems of governance and individually expressed authoritarian personality traits (as such governments and individuals have in common their emphasis on adherence to conventional values, repression of dissent, and devotion to order and hierarchy [1], [2], [33]). But the direction of causality is unclear: To what extent does the correlation reflect the influence of government institutions on individuals' personalities, versus the influence of individuals' personalities on systems of governance? By introducing an additional variable into the analysis, and testing statistical mediation, our results may contribute toward some resolution to this question.

(...)

Although one cannot confidently draw inferences about individual-level processes from population-level data, the results of Study 1 may have other implications at the psychological level of analysis. It has been suggested that an authoritarian personality serves a self-protective function [54]. Consequently, rather than being a stable trait, individuals' authoritarian tendencies may temporarily increase when threats are psychologically salient [39], [55], [56], [57]. Our results provide novel evidence of a relationship between a conceptually distinct form of threat—the threat of infectious disease—and individuals' authoritarian tendencies. This relationship is consistent with a wide range of additional evidence indicating that individuals are sensitive to disease-connoting cues within their immediate environment, and respond to these cues with functionally adaptive shifts in cognition and behavior [58], [59].

These results have further implications for understanding the direction of the presumed causal relation between individual-level authoritarian attitudes and state-level authoritarian governance. Are people who live within authoritarian states more likely to adopt authoritarian attitudes? Or are people who hold authoritarian attitudes more likely to give rise to authoritarian governments? By including an additional variable (parasite prevalence), and using mediation analyses to test the direct and indirect implications of this variable, Study 1 addressed these questions in a novel manner. Results suggest that, consistent with some lines of speculation [56], individual-level authoritarianism shapes political systems, rather than political systems shaping individual attitudes (although, of course, neither causal path necessarily operates at the exclusion of the other).

In addition to their conceptual implications, these results may also have useful implications for predicting the collateral consequences of health-related public policies. If indeed parasite stress has unique causal implications for authoritarian governance, then disease-eradication programs may not only have direct consequences for human health, they may also have indirect consequences for individual rights, civil liberties, and political freedoms. (Thornhill and colleagues [7] noted that the democratic transitions in North America and Europe were preceded by dramatic reductions in the prevalence of infectious disease.) There may also be implications for reduced levels of xenophobia and other prejudices that are linked to authoritarian attitudes [1], [2], [60], [61], and for increased levels of creativity, innovation, and open-mindedness more generally."

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dragoneyes618 · 5 months ago

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Thus, ten years after the Holocaust, Jew-haters were pronounced sick by a preeminent organization of American Jewry and a preeminent psychologist of Harvard University.

- Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism, Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, pages 61-63

#why the jews the reason for antisemitism #antisemitism #history #jewish history #jumblr #dennis prager #joseph telushkin #rabbi joseph telushkin

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blackfreethinkers · 5 years ago

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This is where helicoptering and black mothering diverge. While helicopter moms are busy multiplying their children’s privilege and advantages, many black moms are fighting to protect their children from the structural disadvantages that keep opportunity just out of reach.

The burden of inequality

Even in an age of rising inequality, white children find socioeconomic mobility easier to come by than do black children. In Richard Chetty’s landmark study of 20 million Americans, one in 10 black kids who grew up poor made it to the top two quintiles of earners as adults. For white kids, that figure was one in four.

Inequality follows black children to school, a place traditionally seen as a vehicle for mobility. Black children are disciplined more often and more harshly than their white classmates. They are more likely to be arrested in school—in part because they are more likely to have police officers stationed at their schools. From preschool (pdf) onward, black children are suspended at almost four times the rate of their white peers, and research shows that teachers are more likely to expect black children, and especially black boys, to display “challenging behavior” even before they do anything wrong.

The threats extend beyond the classroom. Black teens go to jail for committing fewer crimes than their white counterparts. Black children are overrepresented in arrests for nebulous, low-level charges like loitering, breaking curfew, and suspicion. During the admissions scandal, many observers pointed out that black mothers had faced criminal charges for trying to get their kids into better schools, too—under very different circumstances. Tanya McDowell (sometimes written as Tonya) was charged with larceny for “stealing” $15,000 from Norwalk, Connecticut by sending her son to a public school there when they actually lived in homeless shelters in nearby, poorer Bridgeport. Kelley Williams-Bolar was sentenced to jail in Ohio for using her father’s address to send her kids to a better-funded public school.

“When my child comes to me and tells me something is wrong, I believe my children first.” These fundamentally different odds create separate motivations for black and white parents to be protective, even when they share class backgrounds. Riché Barnes, an anthropologist at Yale and the author of Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood, and Community, says the term “good school” holds different meanings for some black families. While white parents might be looking for schools that are mostly white and have high test scores, those same environments can actually hurt black students.

Research shows that non-black teachers routinely underestimate black children’s academic potential. Black kids who have had at least one black teacher by third grade are 7% more likely to graduate from high school and 13% more likely to enroll in college than their counterparts without black teachers.

In light of these statistics, Barnes says black parents are beginning to think, “Maybe my kids are better off in a school where the teachers love them and care about them and their heritage and want to teach them to love themselves and their heritage. And that ends up being just as important as if you do well on that test.”

For Winnie Caldwell, a 30-year-old mom raising her son in St. Louis, the challenge of finding the right school for her child came into focus in 2014, when her son was one of two black children in his third grade class. It was the year that Michael Brown, a black teenager, was killed by a white police officer in nearby Ferguson, Missouri. Caldwell says her son’s teacher, who was white, asked the class about the shooting and made it clear that she believed Brown was at fault. When Caldwell’s son came home that day, he asked, “Is that what’s going to happen to me when I’m 18? If I’m walking down the street, and the police find me, am I gonna die?”

Aisha Wadud, a 36-year-old mother of four from Minneapolis, says she is “very stern with other adults when it comes to [her] children and their care.” She’s a fierce advocate for them the way her mother was for her—Wadud remembers her mother taking on her younger sister’s school after a teacher called her a racial slur, the culmination of a trend of purposefully neglecting black students. “When my child comes to me and tells me something is wrong, I believe my children first,” Wadud says of her own approach to parenting. “And then I take action.”

The mothers who shared their stories with Quartz were clear that not all interactions with their children’s educators have been negative. “There are teachers and staff out here that advocate for our kids when we don’t have the time to do so. As a single mom, I know both sides,” Caldwell says. Alston, the Atlanta mother, is pleased with her children’s schools and appreciates that when she raises concerns, the teachers and administrators take them seriously.

Still, the toll of adversarial interactions with other authority figures in their children’s lives weighs on black parents. Just under half of parents of black children are very satisfied with their children’s schools, compared with 60% of parents overall and 65% of parents of white children. Dissatisfaction and concern over their children’s ability to feel confident and succeed in schools where they might be overlooked or mistreated leads some black parents to seek alternatives to traditional school settings—including schools with Afrocentric curricula or homeschooling.

Since the 2014 incident, Caldwell’s son, now 13, has moved to a majority-black, all-boys school. He also founded a nationwide book club for black boys. Though Caldwell says she did not choose her son’s new school based on its racial composition, she enjoys seeing him surrounded by other boys who look like him. “They have this sense of brotherhood, and I can tell that that’s infinitely helped his education.”

Parenting while black

Black parents who are forced to teach their children how to cope with inequality have to contend with another set of prejudices themselves, including being blamed for their children’s supposed misdeeds. A Google search of “African American parenting” or “Black parenting” returns results on authoritarianism, hostility, and toxic stress. Featured articles blame black parents for preschoolers’ bad behavior, adolescents’ obesity, and teens’ drug use. In the top results, there is nothing to be found about watchful protectiveness. (Much of this is about black mothers—black fathers are often excluded from conversations about parenting because academia and pop culture alike have perpetuated the stereotype that they do not parent, though research shows that black men actually spend more time with their children than men of other racial groups, regardless of whether they live full-time with their kids.)

“They’re seen as bad mothers,” says Barnes. “That’s a historical stereotype: That black women were bad mothers to their own children while at the same time being the women who raised white people [as enslaved caregivers and domestic servants].”

“They’re seen as bad mothers.”

Black mothers’ vigilance and protectiveness long predates the intensive parenting boom in the 1990s. According to Barnes, whose work examines contemporary strategic mothering, black women have been watchful parents since slavery. “The community of enslaved women was charged on their own with ensuring the survival of those children, whether biological or not. And that’s a framework that has lasted throughout the African American experience,” she says.

Reporter Dani McClain agrees. In her account of Black motherhood, We Live for the We, she writes, “Black women have had to inhabit a different understanding of motherhood in order to navigate American life. If we merely accepted the status quo and failed to challenge the forces that have kept black people and women oppressed, then we participated in our own and our children’s destruction.” McClain’s words point to another reality of black motherhood—that raising healthy, happy black children is political. Under slavery and Jim Crow, when racial violence routinely stole black children away, keeping a black family together was an act of rebellion. McClain points out that even today, black mothers are charged with organizing movements while still mourning children lost to shootings by police and vigilantes.

Even so, mainstream narratives of motherhood exclude black women. When the author Neferti Austin began the process of adopting a child, she struggled to find books written by or for black mothers. The resources she found seemed to assume all moms were white and overlooked experiences common to black mothers and mothers-to-be: navigating higher-risk pregnancies, caring for children’s natural hair, explaining and combating systemic racism, or having “the talk” about interacting with police.

Austin decided to publish a book of her own, titled Motherhood So White: A Memoir of Race, Gender, and Parenting in America. Similarly frustrated with the lack of resources for new black mothers, Dani McClain wrote her book on black motherhood, too. Neither is a how-to guide, but both offer a comforting and all-too-rare message to black mothers: you are not alone.

This message is perhaps the oldest strategy black women have employed to sustain themselves and their families. Throughout history, black women have collectively raised communities of children, biologically related and not. These “othermothers,” as black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins terms them, provide crucial support to black children and to one another. Together, they face down inequality and seemingly unbeatable odds to ensure their families survive—and thrive. In Barnes’ words, black women have always known, “[Mothering] is not just about raising children… It’s not just about making sure people are alive. It’s also about making sure that their spirits are intact, that their souls are intact, that they are finding joy.”

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arabfanon · 6 years ago

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Over more than a decade, the rise of the left in Latin American governance has led to remarkable advances in poverty alleviation, regional integration, and a reassertion of sovereignty and independence. The United States has been antagonistic toward the new left governments, and has concurrently pursued a bellicose foreign policy, in many cases blithely dismissive of international law.

2390

Jose M. Vivanco at Senate hearing in 2004. Photo by Jeremy Bigwood.So why has Human Rights Watch (HRW)—despite proclaiming itself “one of the world’s leading independent organizations” on human rights—so consistently paralleled U.S. positions and policies? This affinity for the U.S. government agenda is not limited to Latin America. In the summer of 2013, for example, when the prospect of a unilateral U.S. missile strike on Syria—a clear violation of the UN Charter—loomed large, HRW’s executive director Kenneth Roth speculated as to whether a simply “symbolic” bombing would be sufficient. “If Obama decides to strike Syria, will he settle for symbolism or do something that will help protect civilians?” he asked on Twitter. Executive director of MIT’s Center for International Studies John Tirman swiftly denounced the tweet as “possibly the most ignorant and irresponsible statement ever by a major human-rights advocate.”

HRW’s accommodation to U.S. policy has also extended to renditions—the illegal practice of kidnapping and transporting suspects around the planet to be interrogated and often tortured in allied countries. In early 2009, when it was reported that the newly elected Obama administration was leaving this program intact, HRW’s then Washington advocacy director Tom Malinowski argued that “under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place” for renditions, and encouraged patience: “they want to design a system that doesn’t result in people being sent to foreign dungeons to be tortured,” he said, “but designing that system is going to take some time.”2

Similar consideration was not extended to de-facto U.S. enemy Venezuela, when, in 2012, HRW’s Americas director José Miguel Vivanco and global advocacy director Peggy Hicks wrote a letter to President Hugo Chávez arguing that his country was unfit to serve on the UN’s Human Rights Council. Councilmembers must uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights, they maintained, but unfortunately, “Venezuela currently falls far short of acceptable standards.”3 Given HRW’s silence regarding U.S. membership in the same council, one wonders precisely what HRW’s acceptable standards are.

One underlying factor for HRW’s general conformity with U.S. policy was clarified on July 8, 2013, when Roth took to Twitter to congratulate his colleague Malinowski on his nomination to be Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL). Malinowski was poised to further human rights as a senior-level foreign-policy official for an administration that convenes weekly “Terror Tuesday” meetings. In these meetings, Obama and his staffers deliberate the meting out of extrajudicial drone assassinations around the planet, reportedly working from a secret “kill list” that has included several U.S. citizens and a 17-year-old girl.4

Malinowski’s entry into government was actually a re-entry. Prior to HRW, he had served as a speechwriter for Secretary of State Madeline Albright and for the White House’s National Security Council. He was also once a special assistant to President Bill Clinton—all of which he proudly listed in his HRW biography. During his Senate confirmation hearing on September 24, Malinowski promised to “deepen the bipartisan consensus for America’s defense of liberty around the world,” and assured the Foreign Relations Committee that no matter where the U.S. debate on Syria led, “the mere fact that we are having it marks our nation as exceptional.”5

That very day, Obama stood before the UN General Assembly and declared, “some may disagree, but I believe that America is exceptional.” Assuming that by “exceptional” Obama meant exceptionally benevolent, one of those who disagreed was Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, who had opened the proceedings at the same podium by excoriating Obama’s “global network of electronic espionage,” which she considered a “disrespect to national sovereignty” and a “grave violation of human rights and of civil liberties.” Rousseff contrasted Washington’s rogue behavior with her characterization of Brazil as a country that has “lived in peace with our neighbors for more than 140 years.” Brazil and its neighbors, she argued, were “democratic, pacific and respectful of international law.”6 Rousseff’s speech crystallized Latin America’s broad opposition to U.S. exceptionalism, and therefore shed light on the left’s mutually antagonistic relationship with HRW.

Malinowski’s background is but one example of a larger scenario. HRW’s institutional culture is shaped by its leadership’s intimate links to various arms of the U.S. government. In her HRW biography, the vice chair of HRW’s board of directors, Susan Manilow, describes herself as “a longtime friend to Bill Clinton,” and helped manage his campaign finances. (HRW once signed a letter to Clinton advocating the prosecution of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes; HRW made no case for holding Clinton accountable for NATO’s civilian-killing bombings despite concluding that they constituted “violations of international humanitarian law.”)7 Bruce Rabb, also on Human Rights Watch’s Board of Directors, advertises in his biography that he “served as staff assistant to President Richard Nixon” from 1969-70—the period in which that administration secretly and illegally carpet bombed Cambodia and Laos.8

The advisory committee for HRW’s Americas Division has even boasted the presence of a former Central Intelligence Agency official, Miguel Díaz. According to his State Department biography, Díaz served as a CIA analyst and also provided “oversight of U.S. intelligence activities in Latin America” for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.9 As of 2012, Díaz focused, as he once did for the CIA, on Central America for the State Department’s DRL—the same bureau now to be supervised by Malinowski.

Other HRW associates have similarly questionable backgrounds: Myles Frechette, currently an advisory committee member for the Americas Division, served as Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean from 1990-93, and then became U.S. Ambassador to Colombia from 1994-97. Frechette subsequently worked as the executive director of a “nonprofit” group called the North American-Peruvian Business Council, and championed the interests of his funders in front of Congress. His organization received financing from companies such as Newmont Mining, Barrick Gold, Caterpillar, Continental Airlines, J.P. Morgan, ExxonMobil, Patton Boggs, and Texaco.10

Michael Shifter, who also currently serves on HRW’s Americas advisory committee, directed the Latin America and Caribbean program for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a quasi-governmental entity whose former acting president Allen Weinstein told The Washington Post in 1991 that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”11 Shifter, as current president of a policy center called the Inter-American Dialogue, oversees $4 million a year in programming, financed in part through donations from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the embassies of Canada, Germany, Guatemala, Mexico and Spain, and corporations such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Boeing, and Western Union.

To be sure, not all of the organization’s leadership has been so involved in dubious political activities. Many HRW board members are simply investment bankers, like board co-chairs Joel Motley of Public Capital Advisors, LLC, and Hassan Elmasry, of Independent Franchise Partners, LLP. HRW Vice Chair John Studzinski is a senior managing director at The Blackstone Group, a private equity firm founded by Peter G. Peterson, the billionaire who has passionately sought to eviscerate Social Security and Medicare. And although Julien J. Studley, the Vice Chair of the Americas advisory committee, once served in the U.S. Army’s psychological warfare unit, he is now just another wealthy real-estate tycoon in New York.

That HRW’s advocacy reflects its institutional makeup is unremarkable. Indeed, an examination of its positions on Latin America demonstrates the group’s predictable, general conformity with U.S. interests. Consider, for example, HRW’s reaction to the death of Hugo Chávez. Within hours of his passing on March 5, 2013, HRW published an overview—“Venezuela: Chávez’s Authoritarian Legacy”—to enormous online response. In accordance with its headline’s misleading terminology, HRW never once mentioned Chávez’s democratic bona fides: Since 1998, he had triumphed in 14 of 15 elections or referenda, all of which were deemed free and fair by international monitors. Chávez’s most recent reelection boasted an 81% participation rate; former president Jimmy Carter described the voting process as “the best in the world.”12 The article neglected to cite a single positive aspect of Chávez’s tenure, under which poverty was slashed by half and infant mortality by a third.

In contrast, HRW’s August 21, 2012 statement regarding the death of Ethiopian leader Meles Zenawi was decidedly more muted: “Ethiopia: Transition Should Support Human Rights Reform,” read the headline. Leslie Lefkow, HRW’s deputy Africa director, urged the country’s new leadership to “reassure Ethiopians by building on Meles’s positive legacy while reversing his government’s most pernicious policies.” Regarding a leader whose two-decade rule had none of Chávez’s democratic legitimacy (HRW itself documented Ethiopia’s repressive and unfair elections in both 2005 and 2010), the organization argued only that “Meles leaves a mixed legacy on human rights.”13 Whereas HRW omitted all mention of Chávez-era social improvements, it wrote, “Under [Meles’s] leadership the country has experienced significant, albeit uneven, economic development and progress.”

The explanation for this discrepancy is obvious: as a New York Times obituary reported, Meles was “one of the United States government’s closest African allies.” Although “widely considered one of Africa’s most repressive governments,” wrote the Times, Ethiopia “continues to receive more than $800 million in American aid each year. American officials have said that the Ethiopian military and security services are among the Central Intelligence Agency’s favorite partners.”14

HRW has taken its double standard to cartoonish heights throughout Latin America. At a 2009 NED Democracy Award Roundtable, José Miguel Vivanco described Cuba, not the United States, as “one of our countries in the hemisphere that is perhaps the one that has today the worst human-rights record in the region.” As evidence, he listed Cuba’s “long- and short-term detentions with no due process, physical abuse [and] surveillance”—as though these were not commonplace U.S. practices, even (ironically) at Guantánamo Bay.15 Vivanco was also quoted in late 2013, claiming at an Inter-American Dialogue event that the “gravest setbacks to freedom of association and expression in Latin America have taken place in Ecuador”—not in Colombia, the world’s most dangerous country for trade union leaders, or in Honduras, the region’s deadliest country for journalists (both, incidentally, U.S. allies).16

Latin America scholars are sounding the alarm: New York University history professor Greg Grandin recently described HRW as “Washington’s adjunct” in The Nation magazine.17 And when Vivanco publicly stated that “we did [our 2008] report because we wanted to show the world that Venezuela is not a model for anyone,” over 100 academics wrote to the HRW’s directors, lamenting the “great loss to civil society when we can no longer trust a source such as Human Rights Watch to conduct an impartial investigation and draw conclusions based on verifiable facts.”18

HRW’s deep ties to U.S. corporate and state sectors should disqualify the institution from any public pretense of independence. Such a claim is indeed untenable given the U.S.-headquartered organization’s status as a revolving door for high-level governmental bureaucrats. Stripping itself of the “independent” label would allow HRW’s findings and advocacy to be more accurately evaluated, and its biases more clearly recognized.

In Latin America, there is a widespread awareness of Washington’s ability to deflect any outside attempts to constrain its prerogative to use violence and violate international law. The past three decades alone have seen U.S. military invasions of Grenada and Panama, a campaign of international terrorism against Nicaragua, and support for coup governments in countries such as Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras, and Guatemala. If HRW is to retain credibility in the region, it must begin to extricate itself from elite spheres of U.S. decision-making and abandon its institutional internalization of U.S. exceptionalism. Implementing a clear prohibition to retaining staff and advisers who have crafted or executed U.S. foreign policy would be an important first step. At the very least, HRW can institute lengthy “cooling-off” periods—say, five years in duration—before and after its associates move between the organization and the government.

After all, HRW’s Malinowski will be directly subordinate to Secretary of State John Kerry, who conveyed the U.S. attitude toward Latin America in a way that only an administrator of a superpower could. In an April 17, 2013 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, a member of Congress asked Kerry whether the United States should prioritize “the entire region as opposed to just focusing on one country, since they seem to be trying to work together closer than ever before.” Kerry reassured him of the administration’s global vision. “Look,” he said. “The Western Hemisphere is our backyard. It is critical to us.”19

#to read #article #human rights watch #amnesty international #ngos

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theliterateape · 3 years ago

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The Regret Soup of Temper Lost and Reason Found

by Don Hall

Despite the ongoing parade of grown people acting like angry children in 2021 America, I'd like to hope that with age comes some modicum of temperance.

As I sit in the desert sun smoking Captain Black Cherry pipe tobacco and sipping on a Modelo, I drift into that perilous territory of regretful nostalgia. I remember those many times when, in an effort to exert control of a situation, I lost my ever-loving shit and resembled nothing less than a random Wal Mart customer throwing a tantrum at an insult or request to follow the rules in place.

It's a bit embarrassing to think of the occasions in my youth (and, in some cases, well beyond what any normal standard of youth could entail) when I lost control, screaming and thumping and doing my damnedest to intimidate someone enough to simply have them acquiesce to my demands. Tantrum-throwing is an art-form and I was a master at it.

The times they be a changing.

I'm no longer angry. I mean, pretty much at all. Either I wised up, find myself lacking the energy to become outraged, or am truly embracing my More Spock, Less Kirk mantra. Whichever the case the rage has all but subsided completely. That's good for me because so many others are in full-on battle mode at the drop of a hat and these days that can equal serious injury or death.

About 30 murders nationwide have been attributed to incidents that started with road rage. More than 12,500 injuries to driver violence, out of 10,000 car accidents since 2007. Of the deaths related to road rage, most have been considered deliberate murders.

SOURCE

Anger, frustration, and other mental stress can trigger abnormal heart rhythms that may lead to sudden death, new research shows. In the first study of its kind, a group of researchers has demonstrated that mental stress alone can provoke these dangerous heart rhythms.

SOURCE

Although anger can be channelled constructively, it seems clear that aggressive behaviour can compound. Aggressive actions most often increase the likelihood of further aggression, and enacted aggression does not reduce aggressive impulses.

Violence and aggression beyond a mild degree almost always involve additional factors. A tendency towards impulsivity and keeping company with delinquent peers are risk factors.

SOURCE

When I see a woman screaming at a convenience store employee because he refuses to sell her a case of Miller Lite until she puts on a mask, I start to judge. And then I remember that time when members of an improv group I was in decided to complain about the lack of audience to a point that I threw a bar stool across the room.

When I watch a video of a man so angry that the McDonald's he goes to consistently puts onions on his "made-to-order" hamburger that he starts pulling cash registers off the counter and smashing them, I think What a fucking asshole. Then I recall that one time when I jumped on top of the hood of a Subaru because he was banging into the back of my car in his own moment of pique due to my shitty parking.

When I hear about Frederick Joseph routinely provoking white people with his camera and charges of racism (including a woman putting her feet up on a plane and a drunk woman telling him to 'stay in his hood') I think that the only difference between him and the people he films is who is doing the filming. The idea that Joseph has never lost his temper in public would indicate a level of maturity that his ongoing obsession with garnering social status by instigating incidents does not support.

"Say it one more time and I'll kick your ass!"

The nerds were a little drunk on wine coolers and false bravado so I knew there would be no such ass-kicking in the near future. Having been a few bar fights in my day, I knew the louder the bark, the less vicious the bite.

It was an odd thing to get so ginned up about.

I had been invited to a party by a theater friend. I wanted to get out, thought I might meet a girl, and the prospect of free booze was always a winning strategy for me in those days.

The party was full-on nerd. There was a party-wide game of Vampire going on. Cosplay Nosferatu everywhere, pretending be the sexy creatures of the night in clothing that was perhaps a bit too tight and made many of the dudes in tow look like overstuffed sausages with capes and slicked back hair.

The thing I said that got me in trouble came when I encountered three incels arguing the merits of Star Wars. I love Star Wars but I'm not speaking in Wookie any time soon. At one point in the heated discussion over the feasibility of the Millennium Falcon to go into hyper-drive with a broken something one of the nerds looks at me. "You joining in or just lurking?"

"Oh. Just listening. When it comes to Star Wars, I think I was Lucas's audience of choice. I was twelve years old when it hit the theaters and the whole franchise is just a space opera written for twelve year olds."

It was as if I had shat right there in their punch bowl.

There was no parking lot melee. The thing that perplexes me is how angry the subject matter spun everyone up. Sure, it's a movie that has crossed cultural boundaries and inspired billions to "use the Force," a tale of heroism at a time when we desperately need heroes, a milestone. But it's just a movie, right?

You'll discover that losing your temper is just that—a loss.

We've been this angry as a nation before. We've been this divided. The margins of society have been at war this aggressively many times. 1984. 1968. 1933. This partisan divide we all bemoan as if the failure of democracy is at hand is overstated and old hat. What's different is the speed and frequency at which we communicate this sense of cultural outrage. What's new is a series of social media algorithms designed to push the outrage to the front over anything else.

These algorithms intentionally exaggerate the reasons for the anger. The media, in a complete paralysis on how to deal with Twitter, reports news that 10,000 retweeted some hyperbole about police racism or vaccine authoritarianism as if 10,000 was a serious number. So we spend more of our time dwelling on our frustration and our anger sits ready, at a moment's notice, to explode.

Like a section of society bracing for a fight all the time, spurred on by our smartphones, we lose our shit more often without a single thought to what the expression of that anger will actually accomplish. All practicality is tossed out the window in order to exact revenge upon the microaggression or the guy who cut you off in traffic.

When my mother—a kind and loving soul, the type of person who goes out of her way to show generosity to anyone in need—expresses that she hates Donald Trump or any supporter of him, I am alarmed. Hatehas never been in her vocabulary but she says it without a thought these days. When ordinary people routinely use social media to wish rape, mayhem, and death on strangers they encounter online with the same casual nature one might merely flip someone off, we're in trouble.

Limit Your Presence on Every Social Media Platform

Sure, I was a belligerent manchild in my earlier days without the internet but I can also say without contradiction that worst threat I ever threw out in those spewing babyman incidents was an ass-whopping. No guns. No threats of lethal violence. No wishes of rape. No desire to get someone fired.

Add the secret sauce of hour by hour contact with assholes is not the desirable behavior. We already know that Instagram fucks up young girls, that TikTok is more addictive than sugar, that Faceborg is more like a hostile foreign nation than a communication platform.

It's unreasonable to get you to eliminate these outlets because they’re ingrained at this point but you can moderate your presence.

Stop Doomscrolling

We already know how fucking skewed and biased almost all media is today so give them less of your attention. Less swimming in the putrid pond of how awful the world is and more time focusing on what's right in front of you.

Examine the Pragmatics of Losing Your Temper

You'll discover that losing your temper is just that—a loss. And you will lose far more than your temper in the equation. Practice patience rather than a need for vengeance. Be less judgmental and more understanding.

If that all sounds a bit too kumbaya, try this—grow the fuck up. As a former raging shitass, a recovering rage-aholic, I had to grow up and become more rational and less emotional. If a hardcore RageBaby like myself can grow up, so can you and you’ll regret less in life if you start now.

Yes. I'm saying to suppress some of your emotions. At least in the Wal Mart or a nerd party.

#anger

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yngwrthr · 7 years ago

Link

“II. Western Marxism

The formation of a Western Marxism61 arises from the crisis of the socialist workers’ movement in the wake of the First World War (the collapse of the Second International as a result of the policy of defense of the fatherland, the defeat of revolutions in Central and Southern Europe, the emergence of fascist forces, etc.). Here it is Georg Lukács’ and Karl Korsch’s texts published in 1923 which assume a paradigmatic character. Above all Lukács is considered the first Marxist theorist who at the level of social theory and methodology called into question the hitherto self-evident assumption of the complete identity of Marx’s and Engels’ theories. At the center of his critique stood Engels’ neglect of the subject-object dialectic as well as his concept of a dialectic of nature, to which the fatalism of Second International Marxism was oriented. Against this ontologization of historical materialism into a contemplative worldview, Lukács, like Western Marxism as a whole, understands Marx’s approach to be a critical revolutionary theory of social praxis. Against the scientistic talk of “objective laws of development” of social progress, Lukács posits the critique of ideology of reified consciousness, deciphering the capitalist mode of production as a historically specific form of social praxis ossified into a “second nature,” and emphasizing revolution as a critical act of practical subjectivity. Self-descriptions such as “philosophy of praxis” (Gramsci) or “critical theory of society” (Horkheimer) therefore do not constitute code words or conceptual equivalents for official party doctrine, but rather emphasize a learning process from which “arises a critical, action-oriented current of thought of Marxist heritage.”62 Although Western Marxism at first positively adopted the activist impulses of the October Revolution, its leading representatives would quickly come to reject the doctrine of Leninism, above all its continuation of a naturalistic social theory and its false universalization of the experience of the Russian Revolution. Georg Lukács’ critique of Bukharin’s “Theory of Historical Materialism” serves as an example of the former. In his critique, Lukács charges that Bukharin’s theory, with its concepts of the primacy of the development of the forces of production and the seamless application of the methods of natural science to the study of society, is fetishistic and obliterates the “qualitative difference” between the two subject areas of natural and social sciences, thus acquiring “the accent of a false ‘objectivity’ and mistaking the core idea of Marx’s method, namely the ascription of “all economic phenomena to the social relationships of human beings to one another.”63

In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci provided the exemplary critique of the fixation of revolutionary strategy upon the model of the October Revolution. Initially, he had greeted the October Revolution as a “revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital,”64 that is to say as a refutation of the allegedly proven impossibility of socialist revolution in industrially backwards countries. In an almost religious manner, he cited the voluntaristic “socialist annunciation” as a source of a collective socialist “popular will” against a class consciousness mechanically derived from the economy and the level of its forces of production. Later, Gramsci would confront the Marxism of the Third International with his theory of hegemony, which rejects the “war of maneuver” of a frontal attack upon the repressive state apparatus as being a useless revolutionary strategy for modern Western capitalist societies. According to Gramsci, within these social formations “civil society” is composed of a labyrinthine structure of apparatuses in which patterns of thought and behavior are generated which exhibit an inertia that cannot be shaken by grandiose political deeds. The Russian revolutionary model is also condemned to failure in the West because the belief in the universal nature of experience of the Bolsheviks with a centralist-despotic Tsarism leads to a disregard for the relevance of ideological socialization by means of the apparatuses of civil society, and their effect: subjection in the form of autonomous agency. However, both Lukács and Gramsci remain loyal to the “exclusively proletarian” conception of revolution to the extent that the former, despite his reflections upon reified consciousness, still attributes an epistemological privilege to the proletariat guaranteed by its economic position, while Gramsci’s strategically motivated theory of civil society is fixated upon the room for maneuver of the working class.

With the attempt at a social-psychological exploration of the drive/structural foundations of the reproduction of an “irrational society,” above all in the form of authoritarian and antisemitic attitudes, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, after Max Horkheimer’s assumption of its directorship in 1931, achieved a level of reflection that other representatives and currents of Western Marxism could not match, and which gives up on the reassuring support of an imagined class consciousness of the proletariat. Finally, the empirical class consciousness of the proletariat as the only existing class consciousness is subjected to analysis, while the “irrational,” emotional dimensions of social praxis ignored by other theorists, such as the social dimensions of the libidinal, are considered. This theoretical insight into the uncompromising nature of critical theory is at the same time an admission of the historical process of an increasing rift between emancipatory theory and the perspective of revolutionary praxis. With the propagation of socialism in one country, the Bolshevization of the Western Communist Parties, and the establishment of Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology of the Third International after the mid-1920s, there begins the characteristic isolation of the representatives of Western Marxism: this current is left with neither political influence nor (with the possible exception of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research) the institutional foundations for a normal scholarly praxis. The general characteristics of this Marxist formation – its sense for the Hegelian legacy and the critical-humanist potential of Marx’s theory, the incorporation of contemporary “bourgeois” approaches to elucidate the great crisis of the workers movement, the orientation towards methodology, the sensitization to social-psychological and cultural phenomena in connection with the question concerning the reasons for the failure of revolution in “the West”66 –provides the framework for a new type of restricted exegesis of Marx. This is essentially characterized by the neglect of problems of politics and state theory, a selective reception of Marx’s theory of value, and the predominance of a “silent orthodoxy” concerning the critique of political economy. Although the first to understand the character of capitalist rule the way Marx did – anonymous, objectively mediated, and having a life of its own – the “founding document” of Western Marxism, Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, avoids a reconstruction of Marx’s theory of capitalism. Instead of an analysis of Marx’s dialectic of the form of value up to the form of capital, which in the theory of real subsumption offers an explanation of the connection – so decisive for Lukács – between commodification and the alienated structure of the labor process, one finds merely an analogizing combination of a value theory reduced to the “quantifying” value-form (due to an orientation towards Simmel’s cultural critique of money) and a diagnosis, oriented towards Max Weber, of the formal-rational tendency of the objectification of the labor process and modern law. Until the mid-1960s it seems that no Western Marxists extended their debate with traditional interpretations of Marx into the realm of value theory. Some positions go even further than this silent orthodoxy, and – without having seriously engaged with the critique of political economy – contrast the “humanist cultural critic Marx” with the “economist Marx” or even regard a “Marxism” without a critique of political economy as being possible.67

[...]

IV. Learning Processes within Marxism

[...]

Marx’s theory is “a unified critical judgment on previous history, to the effect that men have allowed themselves to be degraded into objects of the blind and mechanical process of its economic development.”84 While Marx does succumb to a historical optimism that often tips over into a philosophy of history in the declamatory sections of his works, this is fundamentally contradicted by his scientific critique of philosophies of history and political economy.85 But it is precisely from these cliches that the Marxism of the Second and Third Internationals, as well as the more educated among those who disdain Marx, paste together an abstruse system of iron historical necessities, up to and including a “law of the sequence of social formations” which establishes the “general historically necessary tendency of the progress of the human species.”86

The critique of political economy, which in the form of Marx’s late works “does not withstand comparison with the immanent claim of the programmatic declaration in The German Ideology,”87 namely of presenting the capitalist mode of production in its totality, can be presented as a process of four critiques: 1) the critique of bourgeois society and its destructive “natural” forms of development, against the background of the real, objective possibility it generates of its own emancipatory transcendence, 2) the critique of the fetishized and backward everyday consciousness of social actors systematically generated by these social relations, 3) the critique of the entire theoretical field of political economy88, which uncritically systematizes these common perceptions, and 4) the critique of utopian social criticism, which either confronts the system of the capitalist mode of production with a model of social liberation, or presumes to bring isolated economic forms to bear against the system as a whole by means of reforms.89 The critique is therefore not immanent in the sense that it would affirm the determinations of exchange, bourgeois ideals, proletarian demands for rights, or industrial production (which is subsumed to capital) against capitalism as a whole.

The method of the critique of economy can be described as the “development” or “analysis of forms.” It aims to grasp the specific sociality of historically distinct modes of production. Whereas “bourgeois” approaches conduct at best a science of the reproduction of society within specific economic and political forms, a critique of political economy must be conceived of as a science of these forms.90 Political economy operates at the level of already constituted economic objects, takes them empirically as a given, or can only justify their existence in a circular manner, without conceptually penetrating the systematic process of their constitution. It succumbs to the self-mystification of the capitalist world of objects as a world of natural forms91, thus depriving humans of the ability to configure and alter their fundamental structures.

In contrast, form-analysis develops these forms (such as value, money, capital, but also law and the state) from the contradictory conditions of the social constitution of labor, “clarifies them, grasps their essence and necessity.”92 Form development is not to be understood as the retracing of the historical development of the object, but rather the conceptual deciphering of the immanent structural relationships of the capitalist mode of production. It unscrambles the apparently independent, apparently objectively grounded forms of social wealth and the political compulsion of the capitalist mode of production as historically specific and therefore – albeit in no way arbitrarily or in a piecemeal manner – as changeable forms of praxis.”

#Marx #Western Marxism #Marxism

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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The High Price of ‘Making the Numbers’ at the USPS

This article was sent on Tuesday to subscribers of The Mail, Motherboard’s pop-up newsletter about the USPS, election security, and democracy. It is the second in a multi-part series about working conditions at the USPS. Subscribe to get the next edition before it is published here, as well as exclusive articles and the paid zine.

This is Part II of a multi-part series looking at working conditions at the post office. If you missed Part I, click here.

For a brief period, it looked like the post office would finally be changing. On Valentine's Day in 1992, eight union leaders and USPS management signed the Joint Statement on Violence and Behavior in the Workplace (JSOV). Spurred by the Royal Oak shooting we covered last week, the one-page document was much more than the "thoughts and prayers" style platitudes we have since become accustomed to after a mass shooting. Instead, the JSOV declared that "grief and sympathy are not enough. Neither are ritualistic expressions of grave concern or the initiation of investigations, studies, or research projects."

The statement went on: "This is a time for a candid appraisal of our flaws and not a time for scapegoating, fingerpointing, or procrastination." It affirmed that "every employee at every level of the Postal Service should be treated at all times with dignity, respect, and fairness…'Making the numbers' is not an excuse for the abuse of anyone."

But among the missing signatories was the American Postal Workers Union, one of the biggest and most influential unions representing postal workers.

Years later, APWU Eastern Region Coordinator Mike Gallagher wrote a position paper to stewards about the continuous problem of workplace violence at the post office. He explained that his union chose not to sign because "quite frankly, we knew that the USPS would apply the principles of the Joint Statement against bargaining unit employees and not against managers." The APWU's position was this statement wouldn't change much, because the causes of workplace violence at the post office were fundamental to how it operated. Even a blanket zero-tolerance policy wouldn't change that.

Over the last few months, I have been interviewing postal workers about what it is like to work for the post office. They express a range of sentiments, from pride to gratitude to frustration and exhaustion. As I have said before, the post office is an impossibly vast and diverse organization that defies simplicity.

The most common sentiment I hear is postal workers are proud to work for the post office because it is inherently meaningful work. But they also wish it was a more humane place to work, that problems actually got fixed instead of ignored or passed along. Most of all, they wish the USPS was a place where being a good boss or being a good worker actually mattered. There is a maxim at the post office that doing your work well only gets you more work. It was a maxim 30 years ago, and it's still a maxim today.

I found the most revealing part of this reporting process came when I asked a few of the postal workers I interviewed what they thought of a 1994 Government Accountability Office study, its results succinctly summarized by the title: "U.S. Postal Service: Labor-Management Problems Persist on the Workroom Floor."

The seven postal workers from around the country who volunteered to read the study unanimously agreed the basic characterization of the postal service from 1994 is still accurate. It is an authoritarian, top-down organization in which policy is set by higher-ups who have often never done the work of sorting and delivering mail. The people actually doing the work—or even the people managing the people doing the work—have little to no say in how the work is done. There is a widespread perception that supervisors are not selected based on their management skills. As a result of the basic metrics and incentives upper management creates for both supervisors and workers, an "us vs. them" mentality between labor and management dominates daily routines.

To the question of "have things gotten better since the 'going postal' era?" I received a resounding "no."

"I cannot even begin to tell you how incredulous I was reading this," a 27-year-old mail handler at a processing and distribution facility in Oklahoma wrote in an email. "To know that my same daily complaints and laments were a problem back nearly as far as when I was born—and that they haven’t been resolved in the slightest!!—is so disheartening to me."

Another processing and distribution facility worker from the Pacific Northwest echoed similar sentiments. "That was 10 years before I started, and I have to say overall, No. It has not changed much."

Today's edition of The Mail is going to be about why so little has changed even after the rash of shootings that resulted in dozens of dead and wounded and permanently tarnished the post office's reputation. But it's important to acknowledge this is not just about the post office. Violence—both verbal and physical—in the American workplace was not a new phenomenon when Patrick Sherrill killed 14 coworkers in Edmond, Oklahoma in 1986. The U.S. workplace too often treats workers as little more than extensions of the machines they operate, measuring success and failure by "hitting the numbers," callous to what that sort of treatment does to human minds and bodies. We often think of the post office as a quintessential American institution. Unfortunately, when it comes to how it treats its workers, it is.

In 1994, two different letter carriers filed grievances against supervisors who were allegedly harassing them. The cases were consolidated into one national-level arbitration hearing in 1996. The national-level arbitration was not about the specific harassment allegations, but whether the JSOV, by then four years old, was an enforceable agreement. In other words, could a carrier file a grievance against an abusive manager for violating the JSOV and have that supervisor disciplined, transferred, or even fired? Or was the JSOV just another empty promise from management?

The JSOV itself appears to be quite clear on this question. "Let there be no mistake," the statement concluded, "that we mean what we say and we will enforce our commitment to a workplace where dignity, respect, and fairness are basic human rights, and where those who do not respect those rights are not tolerated."

But by 1996, USPS management didn't see it that way. They argued the JSOV was merely a "pledge" and did not override its right to manage the workforce as they see fit. They said the JSOV was nothing more than an effort to "send a message to stop the violence."

Just as the APWU predicted, management was using the JSOV to punish rank-and-file employees for offenses like cursing at managers while simultaneously arguing the JSOV was nothing more than a toothless document when wielded against abusive supervisors.

The arbitrator sided with labor. "The Joint Statement marked a departure from the past and pointed the way to organizational change," the arbitrator found. "This was a document that evidenced an intent to take action rather than a mere statement of opinions and predictions."

It's difficult to objectively evaluate the JSOV's effectiveness in curbing workplace violence at the post office. But the broad consensus among postal workers and union stewards I've spoken to is the JSOV is better than nothing but hasn't done much in practice.

On the one hand, there is some evidence that working conditions at the USPS have gotten better. In 2000, there were 10,553 Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) complaints filed against the USPS by employees out of a workforce of 786,516, or a rate of 1.34 percent. By 2018, the latest year for which these statistics were available, there were just 4,081 complaints out of 633,641 workers, or a rate of .64 percent, less than half what it was in 2000. But factors besides working conditions at the USPS—such as the perceived worthiness of filing complaints with the EEOC—can also impact those rates.

Likewise, grievances that went to arbitration show some tentative signs of progress. Since 1996, when the JSOV became contractually enforceable, there have been 1,195 grievances involving the National Association of Letter Carriers with a JSOV-related complaint, or about 50 per year on average, according to a copy of the grievance database reviewed by Motherboard. Of those, 611 of the complaints were denied by an arbitrator, leaving 584 cases ruled at least in part a violation of the JSOV.

But, again, this data is not capturing the whole picture. These numbers are not the total JSOV-related grievances, just those that reached arbitration for this one union. And although the years with more grievances came prior to 2000—the most was 145 rulings in JSOV cases in 1997—this is probably because workers had this new avenue to file grievances they didn't previously have, so it captures events dating back several years and conflicts that have been stewing for a while. Rulings per year gradually declined until 2008 with a low 14, before rising again to about 35 per year in recent years.

Source: NALC arbitration database obtained by Motherboard

Moreover, some of the rulings detail that postal management continues to look the other way on problem supervisors, a key issue highlighted by the Congressional investigation into the Royal Oak shooting.

For example, in 2008, an arbitrator found a supervisor in Oakland, CA had "a history of cease and desist orders…at stations throughout the Bay-View Postal District." Management was aware of these previous violations of the JSOV and the history of worker complaints against this one supervisor, but management "failed to take appropriate action." The arbitrator said the supervisor's actions of calling his employees "muthafuckers" and "bitches" was "exactly the type of work place behavior that the JSOV was intended to prevent." The arbitrator ruled the supervisor could no longer be anyone's boss, but only in the Pacific Area region.

Sometimes, the arbitrators themselves do little more than shuffle off problem supervisors to other locations. In 2009, a supervisor in Gaithersburg, MD repeatedly threatened and harassed workers, which the arbitrator found to be "abusive behavior which holds open the potential for violence." Nevertheless, the arbitrator's ruling was to reassign the supervisor to another nearby post office and receive sensitivity training.

Also in 2009, a union steward and postal supervisor in Stockton, CA got into a physical altercation when, after an increasingly escalating shouting match, the steward accused the manager of sleeping with the postmaster in order to get her job. The manager then slapped the steward, who restrained the supervisor and left. Despite the police being called and a statement taken, the supervisor received only a written warning while the steward was suspended for 21 days without pay. The arbitrator discovered this was not the first time local management had looked the other way on complaints of this particular supervisor violating the JSOV.

And these are just a few of the examples that have been documented. More often, postal workers and union officials say, violence and harassment in the workplace goes unreported as an accepted part of the job. In 2018, NALC Branch 343's newsletter succinctly summarized just how little has changed since the "Going Postal" era:

It has been my experience that seasoned carriers often times will ignore or shrug off this type of behavior because they have been exposed to it for such a long time. This speaks volumes. Many of these carriers have seen worse and nothing happened.

Why is the post office such an enduring hotbed of workplace conflict? This is a question I've asked postal workers around the country over the past few months. And the most surprising element of reporting this story, at least to me, is there is absolutely no mystery about it. Everyone knows exactly why the post office is rife with workplace conflict. It's even right there in the JSOV: "making the numbers."

Until recently, Josh Sponsler was a letter carrier in Ohio. He decided to quit the post office despite being a "career" employee with solid pay, good benefits, and a decent pension waiting for him at the end of the road. But he quit because the mounting stress and tension in the workplace took a toll on his mental health. When I asked what it was about the workplace that made it so stressful, Sponsler brought up "the 96."

The 96, officially known as Form 3996, is the form carriers have to fill out if they expect they will have to work overtime to deliver the mail that day. In the morning, when carriers show up for work, they will look over the various types of mail they have to deliver: the pre-sorted mail, the magazines and other "flats," and the packages. If they think work that day will take longer than eight hours and therefore trigger overtime, they reach for the 96.

But supervisors also have their own opinion about how many hours each route should take. The machines that pre-sort the mail automatically generate statistics about how much mail is going to each route. Those stats are then sent to supervisors each morning. Then, supervisors literally measure each route's unsorted mail with a yardstick. After plugging that number into the same software, the computer generates a final estimate for how long the mail should take to deliver.

Often, Sponsler says, the carrier's estimate will be very different from the computer's. For one, neither the computer programs nor measuring mail by the yard captures the most important factors about how long it takes to deliver mail. For example, what's the weather like? Are there mailers going to every business along the route? Every residential address? Is there road construction along the route?

And the computer's estimate is based on the regular inspection every route gets, where a postal supervisor will literally time with a stopwatch every move the carrier makes to determine how long that route "should" take. This estimate then becomes the baseline for that carrier's route estimates until the next inspection is done. But, for various reasons, that inspection may not be representative of the route year-round.

These two estimates for how long the day's mail will take to deliver is, as Sponsler put it, "the first thing that would cause tension" every day.

The tension is heightened because these estimates, multiplied by the thousands upon thousands of mail routes around the country are, in many ways, the main metric for how the modern post office functions. Supervisors are not given budgets in terms of dollars but in terms of work-hours. The more hours carriers say they'll need to finish their routes, the harder it gets for supervisors to meet their work-hour budgets, which will get them in trouble with their bosses.

The same goes for supervisors overseeing workers who don't deliver mail, such as mail handlers and other workers in processing facilities. In fact, for them it can be even worse, because they never leave the facility and are therefore constantly watched by their bosses. Throughout the JSOV grievances reviewed by Motherboard, workers report supervisors timing their bathroom breaks with stopwatches, looming over them so the workers can "feel their presence" while they work, or filing official warnings if they're too slow on a machine by a matter of seconds.

When carriers, union stewards, and post office managers talk about "making the numbers," they're talking about these numbers, the work-hour budgets. And they're also talking about the increasingly unreasonable requirements postal management puts on supervisors and postal workers alike, bringing mail to more and more delivery points every year with fewer and fewer workers, relying more and more on overtime that management consistently wants to slash. Talking to postal workers, an analogy that often comes up is that working for the post office feels like working in a pressure cooker. Everyone is being squeezed.

Reaching for the 96 has become an increasingly common occurrence. In August, the USPS Inspector General reported on the agency's soaring overtime costs which it largely attributed to "staffing challenges." Because the post office has consistently cut the number of people it employs even as it delivers to more locations, it relies on overtime to deliver all the mail every day. But, in many ways, keeping employees from filing their 96's is the most important thing a supervisor does from USPS management's perspective, because it saves the post office money.

Source: USPS OIG

There are, of course, good ways and bad ways for managers to handle this dynamic. Most postal workers I've spoken to said they've had at least one good boss who was reasonable and treated workers with respect. But, they are the exception, not the rule, because doing so requires actively ignoring or competing with the incentives put forward by their bosses.

For the not so great bosses, they have every incentive to bully workers that take longer to do the job, have routes with the greatest discrepancy between the computerized stats and the carrier's own work pace, or, as is all too often the case, just pick on someone they don't like for whatever reason. And they often do it under the guise of achieving operational efficiency, of hitting the numbers.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, this conflict by design can easily devolve into being about anything other than delivering mail. Mail carriers get frustrated and feel like they're being gaslit into doing a job that cannot be done. They get frustrated being told to do a job in a way they think will be slower while also being told to work faster. Their bosses think they're a liar for saying the work can't be done in eight hours. Supervisors tag carriers who they perceive as constantly asking for unjustified overtime as problem workers who need discipline.

This dynamic was represented in an extreme but not anomalous way in the Gaithersburg case. The supervisor testified to the arbitrator on the record that he "thinks that Carriers that apply for overtime are 'thieves.'" This view, he added, was the reason he felt empowered to harass carriers who said they would need overtime to finish their rounds. It was also backed up by his postmaster, who expressed similar sentiments.

"You just know there's a very good chance that, by filling this sheet out, you're getting into an argument about time," Sponsler said. And sometimes those arguments get out of hand.

If things haven't gotten any better at the post office, it's fair to wonder: why don't we hear about "going postal" anymore?

I put this question to Northeastern University Professor James Alan Fox, who has studied mass shootings and workplace violence since the early 1980s. He said shooting trends are more like a "general contagion," in that once they get publicized, a small group of people identify with the shooters and replicate their actions. For example, once the Edmond shooting was covered by the media in 1986, other postal workers started to think that might be a way for them to address their grievances, too. In a situation where these shooters likely saw no way out of their problems, they now had one.

But these trends pass just like any other. "There are fads in crime as there are in other aspects of life," Fox said. "Back in the 80s, the way that postal workers expressed their anger and grievance was with a gun…but that is not part of the culture now."

There is, however, a cohort of postal workers who report regularly higher job satisfaction than everyone else. They're called rural mail carriers. They do the same job as the so-called "city" carriers, even many times out of the same offices with the same supervisors, but for complex historical reasons, they fall under different salary structures. Whereas city carriers are hourly employees that get overtime for working more than eight hours in a day, rural carriers are given an annual salary to deliver the mail however long it takes. As a 1994 Government Accountability Office report put it:

"Rural carriers do not have to negotiate daily with supervisors regarding the time it will take to complete mail sorting or delivery, and their performance is not closely supervised. Rural carriers generally control their own workdays as long as all the mail is delivered on time each day."

I asked Sponsler if he thought putting everyone under the rural carrier structure would solve the workplace issue. He said he had never thought about it before, but he doubted it could ever happen because the entire organization, workers and management alike, have become too addicted to overtime. Many of the workers like the extra money and management won't hire enough people to avoid it.

Instead, he proposed different solutions, ones I had heard many times before. Abandon the autocratic management structure. Get rid of the computer metrics, or at least drastically curtail how they're used. Empower supervisors to run their post office the best way they see fit, not just follow orders from on high that apply to all the post offices in the area. They're big ideas, but not impossible ones.

Sponsler ended our interview by saying he didn't really want to quit the post office, but he had to. He liked most of the people he worked with. The carriers really do care about delivering the mail in that cheesy way you always hoped was true but never wanted to ask. It really is true, he said.

"Even with my experience, it can be a very good place to work," he assured me. But it's a far cry from making sure that experience applies to more than just a select few lucky ones with a good supervisor. "The service needs to work on a lot of stuff to get there."

The High Price of ‘Making the Numbers’ at the USPS syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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x0401x · 7 years ago

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Gakuen K Drama CD: Evacuation Drills – Case of Second Year Class E

Raw version here. Please feel free to message me about possible corrections. Warning: this drama has an elaborate punchline that simply cannot be properly adapted to English, so please see the end of the post for clarification.

Misaki: Gakuen K ~Wonderful School Days~ V Edition – Bonus Drama CD. Evacuation Drills – Case of Second Year Class 1.

Misaki: This is bad! I’m really late! Dammit! That woman! Crouching down in the middle of the road! *pants* I was sure she was feeling unwell, and while I was at loss on whether I should talk to her or not, ten minutes went by! In the end, it seems she was just waiting for someone! AH!! Isn’t it already time for homeroom to start?! *pants* At least I gotta make it in time for the last hour! *pants*

Kuro: Fushimi. If I’m correct, you were a member of the Committee, right?

Saruhiko: Ahn? That’s right.

Kuro: About the homeroom of just now, I have something to ask about the evacuation drills that Anna-sensei mentioned. If you’re a Committee member, you also work during the evacuation drills, right?

Saruhiko: Ah, what is it... that you want to ask?

Kuro: It’s my first evacuation drill in this academy. I want you to tell me about the evacuation system. Do you use the outer stairs? The inner ones? And also—

Misaki: D’AAAAAH!! *pants* Looks like I made it to the last hour somehow! Haaah! So hooot! *pants*

Kuro: Yata. It seems Anna-sensei thought you were absent without authorization and took note of it on her account book.

Misaki: Ah... S-Seriously?! It couldn’t be that she... gave me additional homework or something, right?

Kuro: If you’re curious, you can just ask. *sigh* Well, anyways. About the homeroom, it seems the two hours of PE were changed from soccer to indoor ping-pong, so beware.

Misaki: HAAH?? “Ping-pong”?! I came here looking forward to soccer and it’ll be ping-pong?! Out of all things, that tiny-ass game won’t be nearly enough!!

Kuro: And after that, we’ll have evacuation drills in the afternoo—

Misaki: It’s impossible that they’ve cancelled soccer!! What have I even come for today!? If it’s for something like this, it would have been better if I’d come super late and headed straight to the club room!

Saruhiko: How about you try studying a little? Well... for an idiot who only has a brain to move his body around, earnestly paying attention to class would serve as nothing but a lullaby, though.

Misaki: What did you say?!

Saruhiko: Hah! It’s the truth, right? I’ve never seen you awake and seriously listening to any lesson, after all. *gasp* Ah, I see...! It’s because, with that head of yours, you can’t understand classes even if you stay awake. If so, then it might be the right choice to use them as sleep time.

Misaki: Saru! You’re always, always talking so sarcastically... I’m not asleep all the time. I’m simply focusing on the lessons with my eyelids closed!

Saruhiko: Heeeh?

Misaki: WHAT’S WITH THAT SMIRK!?

Kuro: So it’s begun? I’ve got no choice. I’ll ask someone else about the evacuation drill.

Misaki: The meat and yakisoba bread I had for lunch was delicious... but... the gyuudon bread also looked tasty... Guess I’ll have that for tomorrow. Haah... the sunlight is warm on my back... so nice~... *snores*

[Alarm sounds]

Misaki: W-What?? A-A FIRE?!

Kuro: It’s started, huh? The hypothetical source is... the science room?

Misaki: W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W-What do we do!? That’s right! At times like this, if I’m not wrong, we’re supposed to follow the O-Ka-Shi-Mo! Huh? “O-Ka-Shi-Mo”? What was O-Ka-Shi-Mo supposed to mean?!? If... you’re a man, you gotta gather up even the guys you don’t know or have never talked to and save everyone! I’m certain that was what it stood for. But there’s no one I don’t know. The people her are all my classmates. I gotta protect everyone! Wait, those guys...! HEY, YOOOU!! STUPID BASTARDS! What’re you messing around for?! Do you get what kinda situation we’re in right now?! There’s a lot of people that would be sad if you died! You have family and friends that are precious to you, right?! You okay with making them cry?! There’s no way you are, right?! Protecting yourselves is the same as protecting them! Got that?! If you did, all of you, line up!

Saruhiko: *chuckles* That guy... is a true idiot.

Kuro: To think Yata would be so serious about the training... he has a wonderful form of thinking. From his usual attitude and behavior, I had thought he was but an unsteady guy... so this side of him existed?

Misaki: Alright! Everyone’s properly lined up! You’d better close your mouths! It’d be awful if you breathed smoke. HEY! You over there! Didn’t you hear me saying to close your mouth? What? You forgot your handkerchief? No choice, then. Use mine! I’m fine! It’s frustrating, but just as Saru says, my body’s resistance is my only valuable asset. Then, we’re leaving! I’ll take all of you to a safe place!

Okay, it seems the fire hasn’t spread much yet... If I’m not wrong, they said the source was... the science room, right? Let’s avoid it and head to the ground floor! But, man, it’s hot. So the temperature is rising because of the fire?

Saruhiko: Keh. “The temperature is rising because of the fire”? It’s just your brain making that up.

Misaki: Hey, Kamamoto! Why have you been looking at me with wet eyes since earlier? Ah? You didn’t know I had this much talent for leadership? It’s obvious that the next captain of the Red Club will be me? Stupid!! It’s not time to be talking about something like that! Damn! What an imprudent bastard... and you, Saru! What’re you grinning all alone for?! Could it be... you’re excited about the sudden fire?

Saruhiko: Nooope, nope. Don’t mind me and just move on... Leader-san.

Misaki: You...!

Kuro: Stop, Yata.

Misaki: Grrr...!

Kuro: So you were that heated? In these circumstances, we must follow the O-Ka-Shi-Mo, and act orderly until the end.

Misaki: That’s right... if it were the usual, I’d have hit him, but... this is an emergency. If you’re a man, you gotta gather up even the guys you don’t know or have never talked to and save everyone! Even if it’s someone you dislike, that doesn’t count as reason to abandon them.

Kuro: Yeah. That’s a great thinking.

Saruhiko: Hmph.

Misaki: *pants* We’ve finally arrived at the ground floor... everyone’s okay, right? No one got separated, right?

Kuro: It’s fine. Everyone’s assembled.

Misaki: Is that so? That’s good! But... the other classes are late... we’re still the only ones that have come here? Mikoto-san... Totsuka-san... they didn’t get caught in the fire, right?

Saruhiko: If the fire’s outbreak was from the science room, those people must have gotten caught up in the evacuation after the classroom assembled.

Misaki: That’s right... Totsuka-san kinda has some bad luck, and Mikoto-san naps a lot, so he might notice the fire too late... AGH!! I’m really worried! I’ll take a look at the situation right now—

Kuro: You can’t. “No pushing, sitting around, talking or going back”. These are the ironclad rules of evacuations, right?

Misaki: Aah...?

Kuro: You’ve managed to act so promptly that you could be the number one in the academy and evacuated all of us. What will you gain from breaking the regulations at the very last second?

Misaki: Yatogami... you’re a pretty heartless fellow. “No pushing, sitting around, talking or going back”? I don’t know any of those “ironclad rules”! During evacuations, we should follow the O-Ka-Shi-Mo, right?! There are times when a man has to do this!

Kuro: Hm? What are you saying? What I’m talking about is precisely the O-Ka-Shi-Mo...

Saruhiko: Pipe down, Misaki. If it’s Mikoto-san and Totsuka-san, they should be fine. You know better than anyone... that they don’t have the spirit of people... who would be taken down by a mere fire, right?

Misaki: Saru... you... have said something nice for the first time since you were born!

Saruhiko: Tsk...!

Misaki: That’s right! There’s no way those people would be doomed by something like this! My bad, Yatogami! I called you “heartless”...!

Kuro: No... I must apologize as well. It seems I have misunderstood you until now. From your normal behavior, I had thought you were a bit of a careless one. I had thought you were the reckless kind who did not know words such as “punctuality” or “solemnity”. However... I have learned today that this was my misinterpretation. You are... earnest to this extent, and had such an authoritarian side to you. I’m sorry for having looked at you so leniently.

Misaki: Ah, stop~! Being told things like these makes my back feel itchy.

Kuro: No... I honestly didn’t think you’d go through with the evacuation drill seriously.

Misaki: For real, nothing will come out of you saying th... “drill”?

Saruhiko: HAH! Have you fiiinally realized it, Misakiii?! Hah! You thinking that the fire was real and being all anxious was a feast to the eyes! Saying the temperature seemed to be rising because of a fire that wasn’t even happening... you really are an idiot, huh?

Misaki: T... Then... just now, you purposefully...?!

Saruhiko: Aah, me saying that “if it’s Mikoto-san and Totsuka-san, they should be fine”? It’s obvious they are fine. Rather... I’d like you to tell me how they could be burned by a non-existent fire.

Misaki: *sharp inhale* You... bastard...!

Kuro: Could it be... you thought the evacuation drill was a real fire? Even if it’s Yata, no one would make such a foolish mistake, right?

Saruhiko: So, how is it, “earnest and authoritarian” Misaki~?

Misaki: I... I... HATE EVACUATION DRILLS!!!

T/N: About the “O-Ka-Shi-Mo”....

I guess most of you guys know that Japanese alphabets don’t consist of letters but of syllabes. “O-Ka-Shi-Mo” are the syllabic initials of the rules Kuro cited as essential to evacuation drills; a shortened version of the phrase meant to make it easy to remember.

Its original meaning is “Osanai, Kakenai, Shaberanai, Modoranai” (no pushing, sitting around, talking or going back). But Misaki completely forgot about that and made up a new one based on his own reasoning, which was “Otoko nara, Kankeinai yatsu, Shabeta koto no nai yatsu zeiin Motomete tasukedasu” (If you’re a man, you gotta gather up even the guys you don’t know or have never talked to and save everyone). Because of course he would.

There’s literally no way to make a coherent adaptation out of this that wouldn’t twist the meaning of either Misaki’s or Kuro’s words, and that makes me so mad, lol.

#k project #gakuen k #fushimi saruhiko #yata misaki #yatogami kurou #k #drama cd #gohands #gora #my translation

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rad-archive · 5 years ago

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Stanford prison experiment article from the new yorker

On the morning of August 17, 1971, nine young men in the Palo Alto area received visits from local police officers. While their neighbors looked on, the men were arrested for violating Penal Codes 211 and 459 (armed robbery and burglary), searched, handcuffed, and led into the rear of a waiting police car. The cars took them to a Palo Alto police station, where the men were booked, fingerprinted, moved to a holding cell, and blindfolded. Finally, they were transported to the Stanford County Prison—also known as the Stanford University psychology department.

They were willing participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most controversial studies in the history of social psychology. (It’s the subject of a new film of the same name—a drama, not a documentary—starring Billy Crudup, of “Almost Famous,” as the lead investigator, Philip Zimbardo. It opens July 17th.) The study subjects, middle-class college students, had answered a questionnaire about their family backgrounds, physical- and mental-health histories, and social behavior, and had been deemed “normal”; a coin flip divided them into prisoners and guards. According to the lore that’s grown up around the experiment, the guards, with little to no instruction, began humiliating and psychologically abusing the prisoners within twenty-four hours of the study’s start. The prisoners, in turn, became submissive and depersonalized, taking the abuse and saying little in protest. The behavior of all involved was so extreme that the experiment, which was meant to last two weeks, was terminated after six days.

Less than a decade earlier, the Milgram obedience study had shown that ordinary people, if encouraged by an authority figure, were willing to shock their fellow-citizens with what they believed to be painful and potentially lethal levels of electricity. To many, the Stanford experiment underscored those findings, revealing the ease with which regular people, if given too much power, could transform into ruthless oppressors. Today, more than forty-five years later, many look to the study to make sense of events like the behavior of the guards at Abu Ghraib and America’s epidemic of police brutality. The Stanford Prison Experiment is cited as evidence of the atavistic impulses that lurk within us all; it’s said to show that, with a little nudge, we could all become tyrants.

And yet the lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment aren’t so clear-cut. From the beginning, the study has been haunted by ambiguity. Even as it suggests that ordinary people harbor ugly potentialities, it also testifies to the way our circumstances shape our behavior. Was the study about our individual fallibility, or about broken institutions? Were its findings about prisons, specifically, or about life in general? What did the Stanford Prison Experiment really show?

The appeal of the experiment has a lot to do with its apparently simple setup: prisoners, guards, a fake jail, and some ground rules. But, in reality, the Stanford County Prison was a heavily manipulated environment, and the guards and prisoners acted in ways that were largely predetermined by how their roles were presented. To understand the meaning of the experiment, you have to understand that it wasn’t a blank slate; from the start, its goal was to evoke the experience of working and living in a brutal jail.

From the first, the guards’ priorities were set by Zimbardo. In a presentation to his Stanford colleagues shortly after the study’s conclusion, he described the procedures surrounding each prisoner’s arrival: each man was stripped and searched, “deloused,” and then given a uniform—a numbered gown, which Zimbardo called a “dress,” with a heavy bolted chain near the ankle, loose-fitting rubber sandals, and a cap made from a woman’s nylon stocking. “Real male prisoners don't wear dresses,” Zimbardo explained, “but real male prisoners, we have learned, do feel humiliated, do feel emasculated, and we thought we could produce the same effects very quickly by putting men in a dress without any underclothes.” The stocking caps were in lieu of shaving the prisoner’s heads. (The guards wore khaki uniforms and were given whistles, nightsticks, and mirrored sunglasses inspired by a prison guard in the movie “Cool Hand Luke.”)

Often, the guards operated without explicit, moment-to-moment instructions. But that didn’t mean that they were fully autonomous: Zimbardo himself took part in the experiment, playing the role of the prison superintendent. (The prison’s “warden” was also a researcher.) /Occasionally, disputes between prisoner and guards got out of hand, violating an explicit injunction against physical force that both prisoners and guards had read prior to enrolling in the study. When the “superintendent” and “warden” overlooked these incidents, the message to the guards was clear: all is well; keep going as you are. The participants knew that an audience was watching, and so a lack of feedback could be read as tacit approval. And the sense of being watched may also have encouraged them to perform. Dave Eshelman, one of the guards, recalled that he “consciously created” his guard persona. “I was in all kinds of drama productions in high school and college. It was something I was very familiar with: to take on another personality before you step out on the stage,” Eshelman said. In fact, he continued, “I was kind of running my own experiment in there, by saying, ‘How far can I push these things and how much abuse will these people take before they say, ‘Knock it off?’ ”