dangerous scary-as-phuk thought-crime-space daily since 2007....,

NYTimes |  The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” Ms. Hall said.

Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material.

Some people trace safe spaces back to the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s, others to the gay and lesbian movement of the early 1990s. In most cases, safe spaces are innocuous gatherings of like-minded people who agree to refrain from ridicule, criticism or what they term microaggressions — subtle displays of racial or sexual bias — so that everyone can relax enough to explore the nuances of, say, a fluid gender identity. As long as all parties consent to such restrictions, these little islands of self-restraint seem like a perfectly fine idea.

 But the notion that ticklish conversations must be scrubbed clean of controversy has a way of leaking out and spreading. Once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that they should be made safer.

This logic clearly informed a campaign undertaken this fall by a Columbia University student group called Everyone Allied Against Homophobia that consisted of slipping a flier under the door of every dorm room on campus. The headline of the flier stated, “I want this space to be a safer space.” The text below instructed students to tape the fliers to their windows. The group’s vice president then had the flier published in the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper, along with an editorial asserting that “making spaces safer is about learning how to be kind to each other.”

A junior named Adam Shapiro decided he didn’t want his room to be a safer space. He printed up his own flier calling it a dangerous space and had that, too, published in the Columbia Daily Spectator. “Kindness alone won’t allow us to gain more insight into truth,” he wrote. In an interview, Mr. Shapiro said, “If the point of a safe space is therapy for people who feel victimized by traumatization, that sounds like a great mission.” But a safe-space mentality has begun infiltrating classrooms, he said, making both professors and students loath to say anything that might hurt someone’s feelings. “I don’t see how you can have a therapeutic space that’s also an intellectual space,” he said.

when their back is to the wall, don't forget they have NUKES....,

zerohedge |  With allies migrating en masse to China's new infrastructure bank (and even the US having to admit it will 'cooperate'), it appears America has fallen back on what has worked for it in the past to ensure the world's largest creditor remains the world's reserve currency ad inifinitum - rattle its nuclear missile sabre... As the following clip shows, The US Air Force just test-fired a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from California, providing a "visual to the world."

necropolitics: a family business of perpetual war

consortiumnews |  But don’t think that this unlocking of the U.S. taxpayers’ wallets is just about this one couple. There will be plenty of money to be made by other neocon think-tankers all around Washington, including Frederick Kagan, who works for the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, and his wife, Kimberly, who runs her own think tank, the Institute for the Study of War [ISW].

According to ISW’s annual reports, its original supporters were mostly right-wing foundations, such as the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, but it was later backed by a host of national security contractors, including major ones like General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and CACI, as well as lesser-known firms such as DynCorp International, which provided training for Afghan police, and Palantir, a technology company founded with the backing of the CIA’s venture-capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir supplied software to U.S. military intelligence in Afghanistan.

Since its founding in 2007, ISW has focused mostly on wars in the Middle East, especially Iraq and Afghanistan, including closely cooperating with Gen. David Petraeus when he commanded U.S. forces in those countries. However, more recently, ISW has begun reporting extensively on the civil war in Ukraine. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocons Guided Petraeus on Afghan War.”]

In other words, the Family Kagan has almost a self-perpetuating, circular business model – working the inside-corridors of government power to stimulate wars while simultaneously influencing the public debate through think-tank reports and op-ed columns in favor of more military spending – and then collecting grants and other funding from thankful military contractors.

To be fair, the Nuland-Kagan mom-and-pop shop is really only a microcosm of how the Military-Industrial Complex has worked for decades: think-tank analysts generate the reasons for military spending, the government bureaucrats implement the necessary war policies, and the military contractors make lots of money before kicking back some to the think tanks — so the bloody but profitable cycle can spin again.

The only thing that makes the Nuland-Kagan operation special perhaps is that the whole process is all in the family.

with a special friend like this one, who needs enemies?

fp |  The nuclear mess in Parks could hold clues to yet another mystery in this Pennsylvania community, one that has bedeviled nuclear analysts for decades. Beginning in the early 1960s, investigators from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the agency that regulated U.S. nuclear facilities at the time, began to question how large amounts of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium had gone missing from NUMEC. Any nuclear site had a certain amount of loss, from seepage into walls and floors, for instance. In fact, between 1952 and 1968, lax standards at 20 of the country’s commercial nuclear sites resulted in an apparent loss of 995 kilograms (2,194 pounds) of uranium-235. But investigators found that at NUMEC, hundreds of pounds went missing, more than at any other plant.

NUMEC’s founder, Zalman Shapiro, an accomplished American chemist, addressed the concern in 1978, telling Arizona Congressman Morris Udall that the uranium simply escaped through the facility’s air ducts, cement, and wastewater. Others, such as the late Glenn Seaborg, the AEC’s chairman in the 1960s—who had previously helped discover plutonium and made key contributions to the Manhattan Project—have suggested that the sloppy accounting and government regulations of the mid-20th century meant that keeping track of losses in America’s newborn nuclear industry was well near impossible. Today, some people in Apollo think that at least a portion of the uranium might be buried in Parks, contaminating the earth and, ultimately, human beings.

But a number of nuclear experts and intelligence officials propose another theory straight out of an espionage thriller: that the uranium was diverted—stolen by spies working for the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. In the 1960s, to secure nuclear technology and materials, Israel mounted covert operations around the world, including at least one alleged open-ocean transfer of hundreds of pounds of uranium. Some experts have also raised questions about Shapiro himself. He had contacts deep within Israel’s defense and intelligence establishments when he ran NUMEC; several of them even turned up at his facility over time and concealed their professional identities while there.

Fifty years after investigations began—they have involved, at various times, the AEC and its successors, Congress, the FBI, the CIA, and other government agencies—NUMEC remains one of the most confounding puzzles of the nuclear era. “It is one of the most interesting and important Cold War mysteries out there,” said Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “Mainly as a story of clandestine nuclear proliferation, intelligence, security bungling, and the limits of intelligence.” The questions about Shapiro, meanwhile, linger: Is he a great American innovator, a traitor, or both? (Shapiro, now 94, has never been charged with a crime or convicted of one, and he has steadfastly proclaimed his innocence.)

Answers could emerge, once and for all, during the upcoming cleanup in Parks. Residents of this corner of Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, could finally be told that the missing uranium has been beneath and around them all along—that large amounts of dangerous and volatile radioactive waste have been festering in the soil for more than half a century. Or they could learn that the material was indeed at the center of international intrigue. Either way, the small town of Apollo may long for boring anonymity.

what becomes of israeli prestige when not backed by american dominance?

theatlantic |  Here's something else Obama said in that interview last year: "I have not yet heard ... a persuasive vision of how Israel survives as a democracy and a Jewish state at peace with its neighbors in the absence of a peace deal with the Palestinians and a two-state solution. Nobody has presented me a credible scenario."

He went on, "The only thing that I’ve heard is, 'We’ll just keep on doing what we’re doing, and deal with problems as they arise. And we'll build settlements where we can. And where there are problems in the West Bank, we will deal with them forcefully. We’ll cooperate or co-opt the Palestinian Authority.' And yet, at no point do you ever see an actual resolution to the problem. ... And my assessment, which is shared by a number of Israeli observers, I think, is there comes a point where you can’t manage this anymore, and then you start having to make very difficult choices."

Over the past couple of days I've had several conversations with American Jewish leaders—those who are located in the broad middle, between the J Street/Sheldon Adelson ends of the spectrum—and they are uniformly, and deeply, anxious. The message was the same: Netanyahu's next, even-more-right-wing-than-usual government, they fear, will only take steps to further Israel's isolation, from America and from the world, and the Obama administration, which feels such deep, emotional anger toward Israel, will only make the situation worse, by misunderstanding, and downplaying, Israel's anxieties. (Sad but true: Some Israelis voted for Netanyahu because they're frightened of Obama.) 

nothing less than voluntary deference to the prestige of the rule of law hangs in the balance...,

theatlantic |  Ken White's sardonic response is about right:

Something unnatural is happening in Portland, and Police Union President Daryl Turner isn't going to put up with it. The proper order of things is upended. Black is white and white is black, cats and dogs cohabit. Madness! A judge has disbelieved a cop.

Last week Circuit Judge Diana Stuart acquitted teenager Thai Gurule on juvenile charges of assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, and attempted assault on a cop. She acquitted him even though the cops said he did it. Is Judge Stuart some sort of pro-criminal agitator? Apparently. In an extensive written order she weighed the testimony of sworn police officers against irrelevant trifles like actual videorecordings of their encounter with Gurule. Even though the cops swore that Gurule threw punches at them, Judge Stuart disbelieved them simply because she could not see any punches on the cell phone videos. Is she some sort of video-fisticuffs expert? Worse than that, she specifically stated that she didn't find some of their testimony credible.

As if they weren't cops.

There's a final aspect of this case that warrants a mention. In the video of this 16-year-old being stopped illegally, his older brother, who knew he was doing nothing wrong, can be heard shouting at police that the youngster played football for his high school, didn't drink, and didn't do marijuana. He was pleading with them and increasingly distraught as they punched the kid, threw him to the ground, and Tased him. What he's doing off camera isn't evident in the videos, though it is apparent that an increasingly hostile crowd was gathering. The end of the Oregonian story notes, "Gurule's brother went to trial in adult court in January. Judge Cheryl Albrecht found him guilty of misdemeanor interfering with a police officer and resisting arrest, but acquitted him of disorderly conduct. Albrecht sentenced him to 64 hours of community service and two years of probation." I don't know if the brother got a bogus conviction or if he really did criminally interfere with police by doing something stupid off camera.

Either way, he is a young black man who wouldn't have this criminal conviction, two years probation, and 64 hours of community service but for the fact that Portland police illegally stopped his brother, needlessly escalated the encounter, and meted out what has now been judged excessive force in the course of taking him into custody.

overseers punitively confiscate uppity arctic negress' belongings...,

adn | Anchorage police served a search warrant on the Alaska Cannabis Club's downtown clubhouse on Friday afternoon, taking boxes of evidence from the residence as club owner Charlo Greene watched.

Anchorage Police Department spokesperson Jennifer Castro told reporters on scene later Friday afternoon that police had received reports of illegal marijuana sales occurring at the clubhouse. No charges had been filed Friday, Castro said.

Police arrived about 1 p.m., Greene said. Greene, whose legal name is Charlene Egbe, is a former television news reporter who achieved national notoriety in September when she quit on-air after announcing she was the owner of the club.

A copy of the search warrant provided by Greene specified police were searching for evidence of "misconduct involving a controlled substance."

According to Greene, there were nine marijuana plants in one duplex and 14 in another. Five medical-marijuana cardholders live at the residence, Greene said. She said 10 to 12 medical marijuana cardholders were in the residence when the search warrant was served.

"I'm not surprised but I am disappointed," Greene said of the raid.

Two marked police cars were outside the residence on Friday afternoon, with a few more arriving as the search wore on. Greene said about seven officers were boxing up marijuana plants, computers, papers and other materials in the clubhouse. Greene said she was free to go but chose to wait while police took evidence from the home.

An officer on scene confirmed no arrests were being made Friday afternoon.

At 3:10 p.m., police began to load evidence in paper bags and cardboard boxes into a white van from the back door of the clubhouse. At about 3:15 p.m., a red pickup and black Jeep were towed away from the house.

Greene and boyfriend, Peter LoMonaco, watched as the vehicles were towed away.

Greene said the club would “open tomorrow morning at 11 a.m. and give free weed to all our members who come through.”

Greene said she would be hiring an attorney and was “gonna sue the s--- out of the city.”

read this and reflect on our own political situation...,

economic-undertow |  Many of the places that are suffering unrest and war were components of- or client states of the USSR during its heyday: Libya (client), Egypt (a Soviet client before becoming an American client), Somalia (client), Eritrea (client), Afghanistan (client) Yemen (client), Syria (long-term client), Iraq (client); Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, Dagestan, Nagorno-Karabakh (all components of USSR); also Vietnam, Laos, Angola and North Korea (all Soviet clients but wars have ended in these countries) … also Russia itself. Seen from a long-term perspective, the end of the Soviet Union government turns out not to be the bloodless event as was advertised, the rotting empire still has some collapse left in it. 

One of the duties of the Economic Undertow is to turn conventional historic narratives on their heads, to where they begin make sense. What Americans have been fed about the demise of the Soviet Union is a self-serving, political/ideological fairy tale: that the United States under the direction of Ronald Reagan’s brilliant conservative leadership outspent the USSR in an arms race that eventually — along with collapsing oil prices caused by new oil on the markets from Prudhoe Bay and the North Sea — bankrupted the Communist government. Once the economic and ideological fault lines were revealed, the various client/satellite states that made up the Soviet empire peaceably went their own way without interference from Moscow. All of this ‘revealing’ and ‘peaceable-ness’ took place over a remarkably short period of time in the early 1990s: here today, gone the next. 

The more realistic narrative has Soviet intelligence agencies — perhaps collaborating with those of the West along with Western interests (banks) — gaining control over Russian assets, shifting them to well-connected insiders, with the decrepit- and ossified Communist government powerless to do anything about it. This process began before- or during the Brezhnev period with matters well underway by the time of Gorbachev … Perestroika being a (feeble) attempt on the part of the Communist establishment to regain both credibility and some measure of control. What happened in Russia was not reform and the end of communism was an accident: what actually took place was the greatest crime of the modern era, the theft of an empire by the country’s intelligence services and criminal associates.

This outcome was a natural consequence of the Soviet Union as a regimented national security state with outsized spy agencies … as well as the slow commercial opening with the West beginning during the Khrushchev era. Within the immense ganglia of the Soviet intelligence- and internal security apparatus there was a kind of singularity or dawning self-awareness … the managers grasped in an instant they had access to the levers of control outside the reach of the Party, the Politburo and the Red Army. The rise of the agencies’ power was a consequence of Stalin’s paranoia; the Stalinist Russia was built on a foundation of intrusive spying and control/liquidation of potential internal enemies. Stalin held the agencies in check by way of periodic purges, no group of operatives could become too comfortable or entrenched, they had to constantly look over their own shoulders. Once ‘Uncle Joe’ was gone there were no further checks on spy agency power, they could act with impunity and did: what occurred was a silent coup d’etat with the KGB state first emerging publicly under Yuri Andropov. Once the looting and undermining was well-established in the center it spread out and took hold among the clients with consequences that can be seen clearly today. 

At the same time, contact with the West, as tentative as it was, informed the Russian intelligence elite what was possible … that the Western standards for wealth and success were both qualitatively- and qualitatively superior to what was available under egalitarian communism. In 1975, to be wealthy and successful as a Swiss or Londoner far exceeded what was possible in Leningrad or Kiev.

Under this scenario, ‘Nemtsov the reformer’ was either a co-conspirator — or, more likely a tool of intelligence services and/or Western business interests; an operative within the looting scheme along with Gaidar, Chubais and others. Instead of being the heir to Stalin’s strongman legacy, Putin recedes to become the technocratic figurehead who serves to distract public attention as the Russian Mario Monti or Antonis Samaras … meanwhile, the stealing takes place in the background.

psychopaths nucleate fraternities, gangs, mafias, churches, wherever weak cats give it up...,

hirhome |  This paper advances an ``information goods'' theory that explains prestige processes as an emergent product of psychological adaptations that evolved to improve the quality of information acquired via cultural transmission. Natural selection favored social learners who could evaluate potential models and copy the most successful among them. In order to improve the fidelity and comprehensiveness of such ranked-biased copying, social learners further evolved dispositions to sycophantically ingratiate themselves with their chosen models, so as to gain close proximity to, and prolonged interaction with, these models. Once common, these dispositions created, at the group level, distributions of deference that new entrants may adaptively exploit to decide who to begin copying. This generated a preference for models who seem generally ``popular.'' Building on social exchange theories, we argue that a wider range of phenomena associated with prestige processes can more plausibly be explained by this simple theory than by others, and we test its predictions with data from throughout the social sciences. In addition, we distinguish carefully between dominance (force or force threat) and prestige (freely conferred deference).

racism is an artifact of system 1 - work is transmutation of system 1 by system 2 - everything else is conversation...,

archive |  The distinction between fast and slow thinking has been explored by many psychologists over the last twenty-five years. For reasons that I explain more fully in the next chapter, I describe mental life by the metaphor of two agents, called System 1 and System 2, which respectively produce fast and slow thinking. I speak of the features of intuitive and deliberate thought as if they were traits and dispositions of two characters in your mind. In the picture that emerges from recent research, the intuitive System 1 is more influential than your experience tells you, and it is the secret author of many of the choices and judgments you make. Most of this book is about the workings of System 1 and the mutual influences between it and System 2.

The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 presents the basic elements of a two-systems approach to judgment and choice. It elaborates the distinction between the automatic operations of System 1 and the controlled operations of System 2, and shows how associative memory, the core of System 1, continually constructs a coherent interpretation of what is going on in our world at any instant. I attempt to give a sense of the complexity and richness of the automatic and often unconscious processes that underlie intuitive thinking, and of how these automatic processes explain the heuristics of judgment. A goal is to introduce a language for thinking and talking about the mind.

Part 2 updates the study of judgment heuristics and explores a major puzzle: Why is it so difficult for us to think statistically? We easily think associatively, we think metaphorically, we think causally, but statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is something that System 1 is not designed to do.

The difficulties of statistical thinking contribute to the main theme of Part 3, which describes a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight. My views on this topic have been influenced by Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan. I hope for watercooler conversations that intelligently explore the lessons that can be learned from the past while resisting the lure of hindsight and the illusion of certainty.

The focus of part 4 is a conversation with the discipline of economics on the nature of decision making and on the assumption that economic agents are rational. This section of the book provides a current view, informed by the two-system model, of the key concepts of prospect theory, the model of choice that Amos and I published in 1979. Subsequent chapters address several ways human choices deviate from the rules of rationality. I deal with the unfortunate tendency to treat problems in isolation, and with framing effects, where decisions are shaped by inconsequential features of choice problems. These observations, which are readily explained by the features of System 1, present a deep challenge to the rationality assumption favored in standard economics.

Part 5 describes recent research that has introduced a distinction between two selves, the experiencing self and the remembering self, which do not have the same interests. For example, we can expose people to two painful experiences. One of these experiences is strictly worse than the other, because it is longer. But the automatic formation of memories—a feature of System 1—has its rules, which we can exploit so that the worse episode leaves a better memory. When people later choose which episode to repeat, they are, naturally, guided by their remembering self and expose themselves (their experiencing self) to unnecessary pain.

The distinction between two selves is applied to the measurement of wellbeing, where we find again that what makes the experiencing self happy is not quite the same as what satisfies the remembering self. How two selves within a single body can pursue happiness raises some difficult questions, both for individuals and for societies that view the well-being of the population as a policy objective.

A concluding chapter explores, in reverse order, the implications of three distinctions drawn in the book: between the experiencing and the remembering selves, between the conception of agents in classical economics and in behavioral economics (which borrows from psychology), and between the automatic System 1 and the effortful System 2. I return to the virtues of educating gossip and to what organizations might do to improve the quality of judgments and decisions that are made on their behalf.

how conformism creates ethnicity creates conformism - there's no solving stupid

hirhome |  In this essay I will explore the important connection between conformism as an adaptive psychological strategy, and the emergence of the phenomenon of ethnicity. My argument will be that it makes sense that nature made us conformists. And once humans acquired this adaptive strategy, I will argue further, the development of ethnic organization was inevitable. Understanding the adaptive origins of conformism, as we shall see, is perhaps the most useful way to shed light on what ethnicity is—at least when examined from the functional point of view, which is to say from the point of view of the adaptive problems that ethnicity solves. I shall begin with a few words about our final destination.

Ethnicity is a phenomenon that rightly occupies much attention in lay and scholarly circles alike, because it is relevant to almost everything that humans do. What is it? From the descriptive point of view, ethnicity is normative culture. That is to say, an ethnie is a collection of human beings who more or less agree on how a human life should be lived: which foods should be avoided, which eaten, and how the latter should be prepared; what sorts of behaviors are funny, shameful, offensive (and which aren't); by what specific ritual displays should politeness be expressed in a million different contexts; what forms of dress and cosmetic enhancement are appropriate for members of either sex; etc. Ethnicity is a collection of 'oughts' and 'ought nots' that get passed down more or less as a package along with the associated social label inherited from one's parents; "I am an X." In some academic circles, the question "Which ethnie has figured out the right way to live?" will immediately be met with the following retort:

"Why, the premise is absurd! Why should there be one best way to live a human life?" Perhaps. But this cosmopolitan multiculturalist complaint belongs to a clear minority. To the same question, most human beings all around the world have a ready answer, and it is always the same; "My ethnie lives life the way a human should." Consequently, members of ethnie A can easily amuse, offend, or shock members of ethnie B merely in the act of conforming to the 'oughts' and 'ought nots' that As feel obligated to pass down from one generation to the next.

Such haughty or offended reactions are usually labeled 'ethnocentrism', or, depending on their intensity and negativity, 'prejudice' and 'racism'. Many academics consider ethnocentrism a "bad" thing in any of its forms. But is it? Yes, it is a bad thing, very much so. The values of science require that we root out from our observational methods any source of consistent, distorting bias; and believing that cultural difference implies error makes it well-nigh impossible for the social scientist to make much progress in the study of cultural variation. Even more important, by my lights at least, is that so long as we are not cosmopolitan and therefore tolerant and compassionate with respect to the ways of our neighbors, we are still moral failures.

Norm-conformism is an adaptive strategy that maximizes the number of potential interactants in the conformist's local population. It makes sense to lament and oppose specific outcomes of particular conformist processes, such as some silent majorities, and ethnic prejudice. But to treat "conformism" and its consequences as a generalized evil in the abstract would spill a narrowly applicable moral evaluation into domains where not only does morality not apply, but where even a non-moral interpretation of the negative judgment "bad" will also not fit, given that norm-conformism does a lot of useful work helping humans navigate their social world. As always, it is best to put our moral goals in charge of conduct directed towards our fellow human beings. If we turn them instead into axiomatic priors of a scientific analysis, we saddle our attempt to understand human perception and behavior with epistemological baggage that makes it harder to understand why people do the things they do. Such ignorance can lead us to hurt people when we meant to help, and it follows directly that this is ethically undesirable. Therefore, if we have a compassion-based obligation to, first, do no harm, then we have a moral imperative to be honest about what causes human behavior, even if we would prefer to have been designed differently. Wishful thinking will not heal a troubled world, but an improved understanding of it just may.

ethnic groups are biological species to low-functioning, primitive brains...,

hirhome |  If ethnic actors represent ethnic groups as essentialized “natural” groups despite the fact that ethnic essences do not exist, we must understand why. This article presents a hypothesis and evidence that humans process ethnic groups (and a few other related social categories) as if they were “species” because their surface similarities to species make them inputs to the “living kinds” mental module that initially evolved to process species level categories. The main similarities responsible are (1) category-based endogamy and (2) descent-based membership. Evolution encouraged this because processing ethnic groups as species—at least in the ancestral environment—solved adaptive problems having to do with interactional discriminations and behavioral prediction. Coethnics (like conspecifics) share many strongly intercorrelated “properties” that are not obvious on first inspection. Since interaction with out-group members is costly because of coordination failure due to different norms between ethnic groups, thinking of ethnic groups as species adaptively promotes interactional discriminations towards the in-group (including endogamy). It also promotes inductive generalizations, which allow acquisition of reliable knowledge for behavioral prediction without too much costly interaction with out-group members. The relevant cognitive-science literature is reviewed, and cognitive field-experiment and ethnographic evidence from Mongolia is advanced to support the hypothesis.

The evidence from Mongolia supports the hypothesis that humans process ethnies as natural living kinds (theoretical considerations suggest that they do so at the “species” level). My Torguud subjects have a blood-based model for assigning individuals to ethnies. Beyond this, they consider such assignment to carry implications for ethnic category-based behavior even without any exposure to other members of their ethnic category, and they seem to believe that the ineffable “something” responsible for this is carried somehow “inside.” All of these parallel essentialist thinking in natural living kinds, suggesting that my subjects’ thinking about ethnies is not only primordialist but essentialist and that there is no difference between an ethnic group and a species from the point of view of the schemas that are primed to process them. Processing endogamous norm groups as species, I have argued, was adaptive in the ancestral environment because (1) it allowed us to learn a lot about out-groups in a very inexpensive way, in particular by making inductive inferences about nonobvious properties, and (2) it made possible processes of discrimination that prevented us from incurring the costs of coordination failure. The reason these benefits have been obtained specifically by processing these groups as species results from the fact that ethnies exhibit the most diagnostic features of species: group-based endogamy and descent-based membership. This made it easy for a blind evolutionary process to exapt a preexisting architecture by simply failing to discourage the priming by ethnies of the living-kinds module. This is not, I think, how we think of social categories in general but only how we think of those categories which, as in ethnies, exhibit the strongly diagnostic features of biological species, such as feudal classes and castes.

pookie in the log cabin playing with hard balls when he gets abruptly taken to the woodshed...,

alternet |  In his desire to placate white folks and appear reasonable, Jonathan Capehart lets Wilson off the hook. The implication of Capehart’s argument is that Michael Brown is an acceptable, justifiable casualty in this decades-long police war on a small Midwestern community. But if you believe that All Black lives matter, that is an unconscionable conclusion, one that “offends my sense of right and wrong.” As “respectable” Blacks are wont to do, the Capeharts of the world need to believe that if Black people would just “act right” and “do right,” we would be all right. But in a system of white supremacy, there isn’t that much act right in the world.

Jonathan, surely you know a suit and tie won’t protect you. So we’re going to keep on marching, as you said. And we will keep holding aloft the banner of Michael Brown. We will do so, because Black folks have already tested out your theory of respectability. We’ve been trying to save our lives by dressing right, talking right and never, ever fucking up since about 1877. That shit has not worked.

In an ideal world of crime and punishment, the officer would have had the legal leeway and good sense to pick these boys up, take them back down to the convenience store, make them apologize and work out an arrangement to work off the cigarillos they stole. That is one example of restorative justice and of the world we are fighting for. We are trying to get free, and that means we bring everybody with us, whether your suit is tailored or your pants sag. When the revolution comes, we will leave no one behind.

chomsky speaks truth - kahneman explains why many notsee it...,

NYTimes |  The neoliberal reaction that set in from the late ‘70s, escalating under Reagan and his successors, hit the poorest and most oppressed sectors of society even more than the large majority, who have suffered relative stagnation or decline while wealth accumulates in very few hands. Reagan’s drug war, deeply racist in conception and execution, initiated a new Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s apt term for the revived criminalization of black life, evident in the shocking incarceration rates and the devastating impact on black society.

Reality is of course more complex than any simple recapitulation, but this is, unfortunately, a reasonably accurate first approximation to one of the two founding crimes of American society, alongside of the expulsion or extermination of the indigenous nations and destruction of their complex and rich civilizations.

    ‘Intentional ignorance’ regarding inconvenient truths about the suffering of African- Americans can also be used to frame the genocide of Native Americans.

G.Y.: While Jefferson may have understood the moral turpitude upon which slavery was based, in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” he says that black people are dull in imagination, inferior in reasoning to whites, and that the male orangutans even prefer black women over their own. These myths, along with the black codes following the civil war, functioned to continue to oppress and police black people. What would you say are the contemporary myths and codes that are enacted to continue to oppress and police black people today?

N.C.: Unfortunately, Jefferson was far from alone. No need to review the shocking racism in otherwise enlightened circles until all too recently. On “contemporary myths and codes,” I would rather defer to the many eloquent voices of those who observe and often experience these bitter residues of a disgraceful past.

Perhaps the most appalling contemporary myth is that none of this happened. The title of Baptist’s book is all too apt, and the aftermath is much too little known and understood.

There is also a common variant of what has sometimes been called “intentional ignorance” of what it is inconvenient to know: “Yes, bad things happened in the past, but let us put all of that behind us and march on to a glorious future, all sharing equally in the rights and opportunities of citizenry.” The appalling statistics of today’s circumstances of African-American life can be confronted by other bitter residues of a shameful past, laments about black cultural inferiority, or worse, forgetting how our wealth and privilege was created in no small part by the centuries of torture and degradation of which we are the beneficiaries and they remain the victims. As for the very partial and hopelessly inadequate compensation that decency would require — that lies somewhere between the memory hole and anathema.

Jefferson, to his credit, at least recognized that the slavery in which he participated was “the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.” And the Jefferson Memorial in Washington displays his words that “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Words that should stand in our consciousness alongside of John Quincy Adams’s reflections on the parallel founding crime over centuries, the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty…among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgment.”

What matters is our judgment, too long and too deeply suppressed, and the just reaction to it that is as yet barely contemplated.

10 things that black people fear that white people don't...,

alternet |  The following is the latest in a new series of articles on AlterNet called Fear in America that launched this March. Read the introduction to the series.

When black people wake up and begin the day, we have a wide range of issues we have to think about before leaving our homes. Will a police officer kill us today? Or, will some George Zimmerman vigilante see us as a threat in our own neighborhoods and kill us? We brace ourselves for those white colleagues who are pissed Barack Obama won both elections and take out their racist rage on us. When we drive our cars, we have to wonder if we’ll be pulled over because our cars look too expensive for a black person to be driving. If we’re poor and sick, we wonder if we'll be able to be treated for our illness. We have a lot on our minds, and sometimes it’s overwhelming.

Here are a few examples of things we have to be afraid of that white people don’t (or not nearly as much).

well-intended thought-leaders and diversity window-dressers need to read some kahneman...,

NYTimes |  Scrawled on Starbucks cups, the words “Race Together” were intended to stimulate conversations about race relations in America, beginning just days before the company’s annual shareholders meeting on Wednesday. But the coffee company’s campaign has instead unleashed widespread vitriol and derision.

The company effort, which began this week, lit up social media, drawing criticism and skepticism. The attacks grew so hostile that Corey duBrowa, the senior vice president for global communications at Starbucks, temporarily deleted his Twitter account on Monday. “Last night I felt personally attacked in a cascade of negativity,” Mr. duBrowa wrote in a post on Medium on Tuesday.

The fury and confusion boiled down to a simple question: What was Starbucks thinking?

Reactions have ranged from video parodies of customer interactions with baristas to some hostile online attacks aimed at corporate executives. Many have pointed out that the company’s leadership is predominantly white, while many of its baristas are members of minorities.

Others pleaded for a more traditional relationship with the businesses they patronize.

Gwen Ifill, the co-anchor of “PBS NewsHour,” wrote in a tweet on Tuesday: “Honest to God, if you start to engage me in a race conversation before I’ve had my morning coffee, it will not end well.”

At the Wednesday gathering in Seattle, Howard D. Schultz, the chief executive of Starbucks, addressed the nascent public relations campaign accompanied by the stagecraft of African-American guest speakers like the Academy Award winner Common and ending with Jennifer Hudson’s rousing rendition of “Hallelujah” at the close of the presentation.

“Race is an unorthodox and even uncomfortable topic for an annual meeting,” he acknowledged. “Where others see costs, risks, excuses and hopelessness, we see and create pathways of opportunity — that is the role and responsibility of a for-profit, public company.”  Fist tap Arnach (for instigating me to read Thinking Fast and Slow)

smdh at "leaders" like rev. johnson in ferguson...,

kcur |  There have been two Department of Justice Reports, two police officers shot, and several high-level resignations since our last conversation about the whirlwind of events in Ferguson, Missouri. A reporter, a professor and a reverend give us their perspectives on the latest news.

Guests:

• Reverend Willis Johnson, pastor, Well Springs Church
• Clarence Lang, professor, department of African and African-American Studies, The University of Kansas
• Emanuelle Berry, reporter, St. Louis Public Radio

steven pinker is wrong about violence and war

guardian |  For an influential group of advanced thinkers, violence is a type of backwardness. In the most modern parts of the world, these thinkers tell us, war has practically disappeared. The world’s great powers are neither internally divided nor inclined to go to war with one another, and with the spread of democracy, the increase of wealth and the diffusion of enlightened values these states preside over an era of improvement the like of which has never been known. For those who lived through it, the last century may have seemed peculiarly violent, but that, it is argued, is mere subjective experience and not much more than anecdote. Scientifically assessed, the number of those killed in violent conflicts was steadily dropping. The numbers are still falling, and there is reason to think they will fall further. A shift is under way, not strictly inevitable but enormously powerful. After millennia of slaughter, humankind is entering the Long Peace.

This has proved to be a popular message. The Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: a history of violence and humanity (2011) has not only been an international bestseller – more than a thousand pages long and containing a formidable array of graphs and statistics, the book has established something akin to a contemporary orthodoxy. It is now not uncommon to find it stated, as though it were a matter of fact, that human beings are becoming less violent and more altruistic. Ranging freely from human pre-history to the present day, Pinker presents his case with voluminous erudition. Part of his argument consists in showing that the past was more violent than we tend to imagine. Tribal peoples that have been praised by anthropologists for their peaceful ways, such as the Kalahari !Kung and the Arctic Inuit, in fact have rates of death by violence not unlike those of contemporary Detroit; while the risk of violent death in Europe is a fraction of what it was five centuries ago. Not only have violent deaths declined in number. Barbaric practices such as human sacrifice and execution by torture have been abolished, while cruelty towards women, children and animals is, Pinker claims, in steady decline. This “civilising process” – a term Pinker borrows from the sociologist Norbert Elias – has come about largely as a result of the increasing power of the state, which in the most advanced countries has secured a near-monopoly of force. Other causes of the decline in violence include the invention of printing, the empowerment of women, enhanced powers of reasoning and expanding capacities for empathy in modern populations, and the growing influence of Enlightenment ideals.

in the hamlet of ferguson, nearly everyone is a wanted criminal

HuffPo |  This complete penetration of policing into everyday life establishes a world of unceasing terror and violence. When everyone is a criminal by default, police are handed an extraordinary amount of discretionary power. "Discretion" may sound like an innocuous or even positive policy, but its effect is to make every single person's freedom dependent on the mercy of individual officers. There are no more laws, there are only police. The "rule of law," by which people are supposed to be treated equally according to a consistent set of principles, becomes the "rule of personal whim." 

And this is precisely what occurs in Ferguson. As others have noted, the Ferguson courts appear to work as an orchestrated racket to extract money from the poor. The thousands upon thousands of warrants that are issued, according to the DOJ, are "not to protect public safety but rather to facilitate fine collection." Residents are routinely charged with minor administrative infractions. Most of the arrest warrants stem from traffic violations, but nearly every conceivable human behavior is criminalized. An offense can be found anywhere, including citations for "Manner of Walking in Roadway," "High Grass and Weeds," and 14 kinds of parking violation. The dystopian absurdity reaches its apotheosis in the deliciously Orwellian transgression "failure to obey." (Obey what? Simply to obey.) In fact, even if one does obey to the letter, solutions can be found. After Henry Davis was brutally beaten by four Ferguson officers, he found himself charged with "destruction of official property" for bleeding on their uniforms.

None of this is even to mention the blinding levels of racism, which remain the central fact of police interactions in Ferguson and nationwide. The overwhelming force of this violent and exploitative policing system is directed at the African American population. In 2013, 92 percent of Ferguson's arrest warrants were issued against African Americans, and black Fergusonians were 68 percent less likely than others to have their court cases dismissed. The racism is so blatant and comprehensive that the DOJ concluded that "Ferguson law enforcement practices are directly shaped and perpetuated by racial bias." Considering the qualified and colorless language typically deployed in government documents, this is an astonishingly forceful statement.

Ferguson's racism has been central to the media coverage of the release of the DOJ report. But in a certain way, by focusing entirely on disparate racial impacts without examining the sheer scale of the brutal state juggernaut, one misses crucial facts. MSNBC listed as the DOJ's number one "most shocking" finding the fact that "at least one municipal employee thought electing a black president was laughable." But the existence of racist views in the department is not the most shocking fact, not by a country mile. Rather, endemic racism in policing comes standard. However, that racism occurs in the wider context of an ever-enlarging interlocking system of administrative bureaucracy and police violence. 

The other pitfall in analyzing the Ferguson report is to see it as being about Ferguson. There are 19,492 municipal governments in America, and the chances that Ferguson happens to be the worst are extremely slim. In fact, there is strong evidence that in the world of better funded, more militarized, more technologically advanced police departments, Ferguson is simply a high-profile case study. While the Ferguson nightmare may dwarf the problems in cities like Boston, American policing is so out-of-control that Ferguson-style practices can occur on at least some level in almost every department.

It's hard to believe, but the Ferguson police department's massive deliberate racism only represents one of its problems. The DOJ report shows not just a racist criminal justice system, but one in which the very act of being alive has been made a crime, and in which nearly every resident is wanted by the law at every moment of every day.

which tribes of the north atlantic are empire-building?

spectator |  Just for once, let us try this argument with an open mind, employing arithmetic and geography and going easy on the adjectives. Two great land powers face each other. One of these powers, Russia, has given up control over 700,000 square miles of valuable territory. The other, the European Union, has gained control over 400,000 of those square miles. Which of these powers is expanding?

There remain 300,000 neutral square miles between the two, mostly in Ukraine. From Moscow’s point of view, this is already a grievous, irretrievable loss. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the canniest of the old Cold Warriors, wrote back in 1997, ‘Ukraine… is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.’

This diminished Russia feels the spread of the EU and its armed wing, Nato, like a blow on an unhealed bruise. In February 2007, for instance, Vladimir Putin asked sulkily, ‘Against whom is this expansion intended?’

I have never heard a clear answer to that question. The USSR, which Nato was founded to fight, expired in August 1991. So what is Nato’s purpose now? Why does it even still exist?

There is no obvious need for an adversarial system in post-Soviet Europe. Even if Russia wanted to reconquer its lost empire, as some believe (a belief for which there is no serious evidence), it is too weak and too poor to do this. So why not invite Russia to join the great western alliances? Alas, it is obvious to everyone, but never stated, that Russia cannot ever join either Nato or the EU, for if it did so it would unbalance them both by its sheer size. There are many possible ways of dealing with this. One would be an adult recognition of the limits of human power, combined with an understanding of Russia’s repeated experience of invasions and its lack of defensible borders.