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Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?

#3261 User is offline   onoway 

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Posted 2016-November-30, 17:08

double post
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#3262 User is offline   onoway 

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Posted 2016-November-30, 17:09

View Postjonottawa, on 2016-November-30, 16:01, said:

Correction:

That's Trump's America. If you wish to join us, that's up to you.

I find your posts - those few I have forced myself to struggle through - idiotic, trite and thoroughly boring when they aren't being hysterical..and not in a funny way. Like fleas on a dog,or woodticks in spring, I wish you would just go away. Your attempts to hijack threads are juvenile and thank goodness I'm not forced to read any more of them, I can just scroll past to get to a post from someone who actually has something original to say. This one is that last of yours I will read or answer. If you really thought what you claim to think, then you are not doing your cause any favors by being so dense and irritating.

I am eternally grateful that Mikeh and Mycroft are around to demonstrate that not all Canadians are like you, indeed few of us are, but being as you all like to yell and scream and try to get attention any possible way you can it would be reasonable to think that more of us are emotionally and intellectually dishonest and slow than is the truth.
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#3263 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2016-November-30, 17:32

From I Am a Dangerous Professor by George Yancy:

Quote

Those familiar with George Orwell’s “1984” will recall that “Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought.” I recently felt the weight of this Orwellian ethos when many of my students sent emails to inform me, and perhaps warn me, that my name appears on the Professor Watchlist, a new website created by a conservative youth group known as Turning Point USA.

I could sense the gravity in those email messages, a sense of relaying what is to come. The Professor Watchlist’s mission, among other things, is to sound an alarm about those of us within academia who “advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” It names and includes photographs of some 200 professors.

The Watchlist appears to be consistent with a nostalgic desire “to make America great again” and to expose and oppose those voices in academia that are anti-Republican or express anti-Republican values. For many black people, making America “great again” is especially threatening, as it signals a return to a more explicit and unapologetic racial dystopia. For us, dreaming of yesterday is not a privilege, not a desire, but a nightmare.

George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University, the author of “Black Bodies, White Gazes” and “Look, a White!” and a co-editor of “Pursuing Trayvon Martin.”
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#3264 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2016-November-30, 19:30

View Postmike777, on 2016-November-29, 15:36, said:

R-E-L-A-X WINSTON

NOTHING LASTS FOREVER :)


Mike,

You and I experienced the Republican Revolution in the 90's that brought a Republican Congress and President - and you and I know that it was nothing like this. This is something outside our collective experiences: this is granting intolerance and hate a voice and accepting those voices into the mainstream of American politics and life. It is unacceptable, but we have to survive it somehow.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#3265 User is offline   Kaitlyn S 

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Posted 2016-November-30, 20:20

View PostWinstonm, on 2016-November-30, 19:30, said:

Mike,

You and I experienced the Republican Revolution on the 90's that brought a Republican Congress and President - and you and I know that it was nothing like this. This is something outside our collective experiences: this is granting intolerance and hate a voice and accepting those voices into the mainstream of American politics and life. It is unacceptable, but we have to survive is somehow.
Serious question. What do you think it is that is creating this aura of open intolerance and hate that barely existed before?

I hope I get a couple of credible answers before MikeH comes on here and says I'm too ignorant to be discussing these issues and causes others to ignore me.
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#3266 User is offline   Al_U_Card 

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Posted 2016-November-30, 20:37

View PostKaitlyn S, on 2016-November-30, 20:20, said:

Serious question. What do you think it is that is creating this aura of open intolerance and hate that barely existed before?

I hope I get a couple of credible answers before MikeH comes on here and says I'm too ignorant to be discussing these issues and causes others to ignore me.

The guilt mind-set. Being middle-class,with a liberally educated and progressively oriented experience, we are led to feel badly for the under-privileged and ashamed of our advantages. This creates an intolerance to those that celebrate their privilege or accept as given the fate of the less fortunate. They are no less charitable nor more misogynistic, but that different approach just "feels" wrong and from the prism of perception, it must rightly be castigated.
It takes a lot of openness and tolerance to accomodate and appreciate. Some of us are just not able to see our way through it, is all.
The Grand Design, reflected in the face of Chaos...it's a fluke!
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#3267 User is offline   hrothgar 

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Posted 2016-November-30, 20:51

View PostAl_U_Card, on 2016-November-30, 20:37, said:

The guilt mind-set. Being middle-class,with a liberally educated and progressively oriented experience, we are led to feel badly for the under-privileged and ashamed of our advantages. This creates an intolerance to those that celebrate their privilege or accept as given the fate of the less fortunate. They are no less charitable nor more misogynistic, but that different approach just "feels" wrong and from the prism of perception, it must rightly be castigated.
It takes a lot of openness and tolerance to accomodate and appreciate. Some of us are just not able to see our way through it, is all.


I wouldn't say that I am ashamed of the fact that I have a pair of upper middle class university professors as parents rather than being being born in a village in Ethiopia or Bangladesh,
Rather, I appreciate the fact that luck has a hell of a lot more to do with where I ended up in life than does anything else.
Alderaan delenda est
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#3268 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2016-November-30, 20:56

View PostKaitlyn S, on 2016-November-30, 20:20, said:

Serious question. What do you think it is that is creating this aura of open intolerance and hate that barely existed before?

I hope I get a couple of credible answers before MikeH comes on here and says I'm too ignorant to be discussing these issues and causes others to ignore me.


Simple - infiltration of politics by religion. I would trace it back to Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. Now there is no longer a MM group but the entire entity has been assimilated into the Party itself. When I have called the far right "The American Taliban" it has not been "snark" but a genuine assessment of how inflexible they are in their beliefs.

When an entire political party preaches a black/white worldview with no room for negotiation, it invites other types of intolerance into its midst. Now, with a leader who both needs and welcomes all those intolerant voters, they have a voice they never had before.

Hate and intolerance have always been with us - but this election has legitimized them. That is a tragedy and travesty.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#3269 User is offline   hrothgar 

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Posted 2016-November-30, 21:06

View PostKaitlyn S, on 2016-November-30, 20:20, said:

Serious question. What do you think it is that is creating this aura of open intolerance and hate that barely existed before?



I think that the aura of open intolerance and hate has always existed.

The major difference now is that that the intolerance and hate isn't just directed at minorities.
Alderaan delenda est
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#3270 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2016-November-30, 21:58

I don't mean to sound overly dramatic, but I think it is critical we all understand how close this kind of intolerance of open exchange of ideas can lead to state-allowed excesses such as McCarthyism, and if left unchecked even worse state-run excesses, such as the HY in 1930's Germany.

That these kinds of groups feel empowered to operate openly and without fear of reprisal is a serious warning sign we should heed. We can never allow intolerance and hate to become our normality.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#3271 User is offline   mikeh 

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Posted 2016-November-30, 22:50

View PostKaitlyn S, on 2016-November-30, 20:20, said:

Serious question. What do you think it is that is creating this aura of open intolerance and hate that barely existed before?

I hope I get a couple of credible answers before MikeH comes on here and says I'm too ignorant to be discussing these issues and causes others to ignore me.

Hey, I love you too!

However, had you read what I have posted, you'd know that I am happy to discuss and debate value judgements, so long as the underlying facts are real and not memes, or urban myths. I don't care for such myths whether they be right or left wing....the problem I have had with you is that your myths are almost always right wing and, far more importantly, demonstrably false.

But to your question...being value based and being based on what is undoubtedly a high level of intolerance and hate, it is a valid topic, altho I suspect that you are overstating your assertion that this 'aura' hardly existed 'before'.

However, we need to define some terms. Where is this aura?

On a petty level I suppose maybe it is here in the WC. If so, then as (I assume) one of those you see as responsible for the aura, then it really isn't my place, nor does it makes sense, for me to debate the issue. I've made my position clear and if you see me as intolerant, I have already explained the basis for that intolerance. I don't like intellectual laziness. I don't like bigots.

I suspect and hope that you are talking about a broader aura...perhaps the one separating liberals and conservatives in the US.

This is, imo, multifactorial and I am no social scientist, but here is my take on some of the main factors.

The first is cable television, which created the first massive splintering of media audiences. As individual network audiences shrank, networks began to focus on maintaining their core audience rather than seeking to appeal to everyone.

Television news was always in part about selling advertising, about being entertainment but in the 1970s (when I was a young adult) the Big 3 at least tired to have their National News be a serious attempt at journalism. I think that they prided themselves on being descendants of Edward Murrow. Think of the esteem in which Walter Cronkite was held.

With the advent of cable, and the growth of Fox News, which was and remains blatantly dishonest in its reporting, audiences became isolated from each other. It wasn't and isn't just a different slant on the news...the differences extended to what news was published.

Two examples spring to mind, one recent one a number of years ago. When a republican congressman got into trouble for exchanging lewd photos with male interns, Fox did report it in a timely fashion and named the congressman and showed his photo...over a legend that identified him as a democrat.

More recently, when the infamous pussy video came out, Fox was, shall we say, slow to broadcast it. They preferred to air criticisms of HRC's emails and to cover Hurricane Mathew. When forced to cover it several guests defended the comments, and some even said that the actress in the purple dress had it coming because of the way she dressed.

Now, I am not suggesting that only conservative media lie. Bill Maher, for one, is someone I find as mendacious and smarmy as Hannity.

My point is we experience reality on a small scale through direct experience and we rely on others to provide us with the big picture. The picture one gets depends on where you go looking for it, and cable created multiple sources, increasingly with a specific agenda.

The internet has magnified the problem.

My sense is that you are a decent person, who means well and sincerely sees herself as moderate. My sense is that the most left wing of those of your friends with whom you are comfortable talking politics would appear to me to be an intolerant right wing idiot.

Because the world you believe to exist is not the world I believe to exist.

In my world, whether something is true depends on the evidence. In your world, it is a matter of opinion, and the evidence of an ignorant politician, media celebrity, preacher or fake journalist is entitled to as much respect as the collective opinion of thousands of PhD specialists on the topic.

Hence, in your world, global warming 'may' be happening, and maybe humans play a role in it, but, you know, we can't be sure and meanwhile we can't and shouldn't do anything about it that might require higher taxes.

In my world, in which each of the last 3 years has been hotter, around the world, than any other in history, and each year worse then the year before; in which viruses previously unknown in temperate zones are spreading north and south; in which polar ice and Greenland glaciers have been literally melting away and not coming back for more than 30 years (you can watch videos online compiled from satellite imagery....this is real!); in which there is clear evidence that we are in the midst of an epic extinction event...in my world global warming should be the number one priority for all governments.

So we live in different worlds and the differences make it very difficult to discuss values. I suspect that there is a good chance that if you lived in my world, you'd be as outraged at the anti-science idiocy of the US conservative movement as I am. I also suspect, much as I hate to admit it, that if I lived in your world, I'd be as lazy as you and parrot the same bullshit that you do, because to me, as to you, those truthy facts are so much nicer than those harsh, intolerant facts.

There are other hates and intolerances alive in the world, of course.

In the US, as an example, racial tensions are high due to BLM and the police shootings. However, maybe you recall the summers of the late 1960s and the riots that devastated urban black areas. Maybe you recall the anti war demonstrations and the murder of 4 student protestors in Ohio, by the National Guard.

I am too young to really remember the stories of the Civil Rights struggle in the US, especially as a schoolkid in the UK, but I am pretty sure that there was a lot of hate and intolerance in the US then...and of course, Sessions, about to head the Federal Justice Department, spoke favourably of the KKK in the 1980s, as a federal prosecutor.

What about hatred and intolerance of gays? There is a lot of it around these days and likely to be more now that Pence, who believes in torturing gays to make them straight (I am not lying...look at his support for gay conversion therapy, including electroshock treatment) is going to be the VP.

So I am not sure what you mean when you refer to an aura of hate and intolerance so much worse that used to exist.

In fact, the only explanation I could come up with for why you think things are worse now than before is that you belong to a class that is accustomed to being respected and accepted no matter how bigoted your views are. Now, you are realizing that many, many people hold your views in disdain, and you are so upset that you aren't being allowed to babble nonsense without being challenged on it. How horrible it must be for you.

Nothing like this was tolerated back when America was great. Blacks knew their place (as janitors, maybe bank tellers for the nice ones) and gays kept their horrible behaviours out of sight. Heck, it wasn't that long ago that one could enjoy a nice lynching or two. No...there never was an aura of hatred or intolerance in the good old USA like there is today!

Btw none of these historical issues were unique to the US...the UK in its colonial days was no better. Canada even now wrestles with racism pf many forms, most notably against 1st nations people. We're all far more alike, in our good attributes and our bad, than we are different.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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#3272 User is offline   onoway 

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Posted 2016-November-30, 23:52

Unfortunately Canada does have issues with race as well, I remember hearing somebody on a call in show years ago saying " I'm not at all prejudiced, I just don't see why they have to come into town, they've got the reserves." OTOH I was proud to hear that a bunch of Canadian Veterans are going to join the protesters at Standing Rock.Apparently about 2000 US Veterans are also going to go support the protesters. And still nothing happening according to mainstream media as far as I've seen.

An article in the Huffington Post said that originally the pipeline wasn't even supposed to be going anywhere near the reservation, but the people in the town near where it was originally supposed to go, said they didn't want it there, so they figured they'd just run it through the Sioux territory instead, no problem.

no racism here, everyone is treated equally, nothing to see, move along folks.
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#3273 User is offline   kenberg 

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Posted 2016-December-01, 07:54

View Posthrothgar, on 2016-November-30, 20:51, said:

I wouldn't say that I am ashamed of the fact that I have a pair of upper middle class university professors as parents rather than being being born in a village in Ethiopia or Bangladesh,
Rather, I appreciate the fact that luck has a hell of a lot more to do with where I ended up in life than does anything else.


I not only agree with this last sentence, I would like to emphasize it. Honestly, it starts at conception with the genetic structure you are given. I have known people whose bodies, if their bodies were cars, would have been recalled. At 77 I have decent health and, while I don't behave totally irresponsibly, nobody would accuse me of being overly careful. And I was born in the U.S. in the twentieth century. You don't have to claim the U.S. is exceptional (I make no such claim) to realize that there are many worse places and many worse centuries to be born into. As to choices, you can bid and play a hand perfectly and go down because of weird distribution, you can be off the wall and survive with luck.. I have made good choices and I have made bad choices, but here I am.

Gratitude for and recognition of good fortune is highly appropriate.

How does this translate? Most people, not every person but most of them, deserve our respect and our restraint in judging them. "Watch where you're going, step light on old toes" as Bob Seger put it. "Faith hope and charity, but the greatest of these is charity" as Paul put it in his letter to the Corinthians.

Recognizing luck in our own lives in no way negates the importance of effort and good judgment. But luck plays a far larger role than it is generally given credit for.

Reading this over, it sounds a little corny. I'll post it anyway.
Ken
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#3274 User is offline   Al_U_Card 

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Posted 2016-December-01, 08:49

View Postkenberg, on 2016-December-01, 07:54, said:

I not only agree with this last sentence, I would like to emphasize it. Honestly, it starts at conception with the genetic structure you are given. I have known people whose bodies, if their bodies were cars, would have been recalled. At 77 I have decent health and, while I don't behave totally irresponsibly, nobody would accuse me of being overly careful. And I was born in the U.S. in the twentieth century. You don't have to claim the U.S. is exceptional (I make no such claim) to realize that there are many worse places and many worse centuries to be born into. As to choices, you can bid and play a hand perfectly and go down because of weird distribution, you can be off the wall and survive with luck.. I have made good choices and I have made bad choices, but here I am.

Gratitude for and recognition of good fortune is highly appropriate.

How does this translate? Most people, not every person but most of them, deserve our respect and our restraint in judging them. "Watch where you're going, step light on old toes" as Bob Seger put it. "Faith hope and charity, but the greatest of these is charity" as Paul put it in his letter to the Corinthians.

Recognizing luck in our own lives in no way negates the importance of effort and good judgment. But luck plays a far larger role than it is generally given credit for.

Reading this over, it sounds a little corny. I'll post it anyway.

Philosophy is only naive if it is inaccurate. :) Why we have been so phenomenally "lucky" begs the question of what to do with such good fortune. ( The term "creme de la creme" comes to mind concerning our variance with the mass of humanity.) Guilt is not an effective response as is taking that cream and dispersing it such that it loses its characteristics. The parable about the talents relates a similar conundrum.
The Grand Design, reflected in the face of Chaos...it's a fluke!
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#3275 User is offline   blackshoe 

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Posted 2016-December-01, 11:16

Not all of the students killed or wounded at Kent State were protestors. Some were simply passers-by.

From the wikipedia article on Kent State, quoting, apparently, a public statement later by ... somebody ... "The students may have believed that they were right in continuing their mass protest in response to the Cambodian invasion, even though this protest followed the posting and reading by the university of an order to ban rallies and an order to disperse." When I read this, what came to mind was "“Disperse Ye Rebels, Ye Villains Disperse”, an order given by Major John Pitcairn, Royal Marines, at Lexington, April 19, 1775.

One idiot's "solution" to what happened at Kent State was "don't give any bullets to the National Guard when they're dealing with students". A better answer would be "don't use the National Guard". These days, though, the answer would probably be to give them tanks. Then we could have our own Tienanmen Square.

For the record, not that it matters, I was company clerk in A Company, 1st Battalion, 81st Armored Regiment, 1st Armored Division, at Fort Hood, Texas, on May 4th 1970. A month and a half later I was a civilian student at Cornell University. There were protests and "riots" there that summer and fall, in which I didn't participate. There was tear gas (which was amusing to watch from a nearby rooftop, as many protestors had gas masks), but afair, nobody got shot.
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#3276 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2016-December-01, 11:37

View Postblackshoe, on 2016-December-01, 11:16, said:

Not all of the students killed or wounded at Kent State were protestors. Some were simply passers-by.

From the wikipedia article on Kent State, quoting, apparently, a public statement later by ... somebody ... "The students may have believed that they were right in continuing their mass protest in response to the Cambodian invasion, even though this protest followed the posting and reading by the university of an order to ban rallies and an order to disperse." When I read this, what came to mind was "“Disperse Ye Rebels, Ye Villains Disperse”, an order given by Major John Pitcairn, Royal Marines, at Lexington, April 19, 1775.

One idiot's "solution" to what happened at Kent State was "don't give any bullets to the National Guard when they're dealing with students". A better answer would be "don't use the National Guard". These days, though, the answer would probably be to give them tanks. Then we could have our own Tienanmen Square.

For the record, not that it matters, I was company clerk in A Company, 1st Battalion, 81st Armored Regiment, 1st Armored Division, at Fort Hood, Texas, on May 4th 1970. A month and a half later I was a civilian student at Cornell University. There were protests and "riots" there that summer and fall, in which I didn't participate. There was tear gas (which was amusing to watch from a nearby rooftop, as many protestors had gas masks), but afair, nobody got shot.


To me Kent State was and still is the blackest of all black days in U.S. history, an awakening that the freedom we believe we have is illusory.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#3277 User is offline   mikeh 

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Posted 2016-December-01, 11:52

View PostWinstonm, on 2016-December-01, 11:37, said:

To me Kent State was and still is the blackest of all black days in U.S. history, an awakening that the freedom we believe we have is illusory.

I have been watching a series on PBS, 'Soundbreaking', which is all about the changes in how we listen to recorded music. It was done in collaboration with George Martin, and each episode deals with a narrow topic.

This wouldn't seem to have much to do with the topics here, but there was a very short segment in one episode about the Vietnam protest movement and how it impacted popular music. Then there was reference to Kent State, and the narrator said that this led to a change in popular music. Whereas much popular music was, prior to Kent State, about protests, afterwards the music culture mostly abandoned all efforts to effect or reflect pressure for change, and became hedonistic....'young people' (which would have included me at the time!) gave up.

This ties in precisely with your comment about the shootings bringing home to the idealistic youth that they had no real power and no hope of ever having such power.

Personally, my reaction to what happened is encapsulated in CSN&Y's live album version of Ohio, with its line: Four dead in Ohio. I haven't played that album in many years...maybe I will again soon.

Btw, to anyone with interest in popular music, this series, if you can find it, is great.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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#3278 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2016-December-01, 12:23

From Enough of hate! (2003) by Robert J. Sternberg, Professor of Human Development in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at Heidelberg University, Germany.

Quote

The No. 1 problem facing the world today may be hate. Although psychologists have had quite a bit to say about love, they have had much less to say about hate. And yet, arguably, the terrorism, massacres and genocides the world has faced, seemingly throughout human history, may have part of their origins in the development and even cultivation of hate.

I do not use the word "cultivation" lightly. There are many thousands of schools and probably millions of families where children are being taught to hate--to believe that people who somehow are supposedly "not like them" are worthy only of eradication. How could terrorists mercilessly murder the victims of the plane crashes of Sept. 11, 2001? How could terrorists or soldiers anywhere, anytime, wantonly commit mass murder? After World War II, many in the world said, "Never again." They were wrong. Massacres and genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Burundi and many other places showed just how wrong.

What is hate, anyway? One conception is that posed by my "duplex theory" of hate, according to which hate has two basic components. The first component is structural and involves negation of intimacy, passion and commitment.

In negation of intimacy, an individual sees another individual or group as somehow less than human. One cannot possibly feel care or compassion for such targets because they are not really people: They are more like bacteria, vermin or scum, to use just three of the metaphors the Nazis and others applied to their targets. Through passion, the individual becomes aroused toward fight or flight--either to strike at the hated target or to run away from it. So it is not enough just to view the target as nonhuman; one must do something about it. Commitment provides a belief system that supports the feelings of hate.

Children are taught stories about the target group that allegedly justify the feelings of hate toward that group--and it is these stories that constitute the second component of the duplex theory. In the duplex theory, the stories are drawn from the work of Keen (1986) and others who have analyzed the kinds of propaganda used to foment hate. Such stories include targets as enemies of God, vermin, rapists, savages, power-crazed and greedy people, and so forth. My analysis of hate-provoking propaganda throughout the ages suggests that the propaganda leads people to internalize stories about their targets, which in turn promote negation of intimacy, passion and commitment. The Nazis, of course, were master propagandists. But all of the major genocides started with similar kinds of propaganda, and the heads of today's terrorist groups are being filled with such vicious material.

When we speak of hate, it is easy to think we are speaking of a problem that other people have. The truth, however, is that we all need to be on guard. Ugly incidents against members of all religions are occurring around the world at this very time. Some of these incidents have been in the United States. We need to remember that people often experience hate not as hate, but as self-righteous feelings of anger or aversion. Moreover, there are different kinds of hate (Sternberg, in press). For example, cold hate occurs in the presence of the commitment component alone, whereas burning hate occurs in the presence of all three elements. The more elements of hate that are present, the greater the threat of hate-based action.

Working with members of APA's Div. 48 (Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence) and Public Interest Directorate, I have formed a task force to explore the nature of hate and how we can combat hate and terrorism to achieve lasting peace. As part of my efforts, I also am editing a book on the psychology of hate, to be published by APA. Our goals are to have an impact on science and on the world.

I believe that the best ways to combat hate are to understand it, to recognize it in oneself and to reject it. Moreover, I believe that wisdom ultimately may be the best cure. Wise people do not hate because they understand things from other people's points of view, including those of people with whom they may have strong disagreements. Teaching people to think wisely, therefore, may be the best way to teach them to reject hate.

Sternberg recently published The Psychology of Hate
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#3279 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2016-December-01, 12:24

View Postmikeh, on 2016-December-01, 11:52, said:

I have been watching a series on PBS, 'Soundbreaking', which is all about the changes in how we listen to recorded music. It was done in collaboration with George Martin, and each episode deals with a narrow topic.

This wouldn't seem to have much to do with the topics here, but there was a very short segment in one episode about the Vietnam protest movement and how it impacted popular music. Then there was reference to Kent State, and the narrator said that this led to a change in popular music. Whereas much popular music was, prior to Kent State, about protests, afterwards the music culture mostly abandoned all efforts to effect or reflect pressure for change, and became hedonistic....'young people' (which would have included me at the time!) gave up.

This ties in precisely with your comment about the shootings bringing home to the idealistic youth that they had no real power and no hope of ever having such power.

Personally, my reaction to what happened is encapsulated in CSN&Y's live album version of Ohio, with its line: Four dead in Ohio. I haven't played that album in many years...maybe I will again soon.

Btw, to anyone with interest in popular music, this series, if you can find it, is great.


I have been watching Soundbreaking, also. Really good.

On a sadder note, in 1970 I was 19, and it was not a very good year. Netflix had a really good documentary on Kent State and its aftermath called The Day the Sixties Died. I highly recommend it. It pretty much said what you did - Kent State pretty much ended the organized resistance to the Vietnam War. It is amazing what you can accomplish by killing innocents and innocence.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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#3280 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2016-December-01, 12:55

Here lies the problem -

Quote

CNN’s Alysin Camerota sat down with several long-time Trump supporters for a focus group-style interview on Thursday’s “New Day” and pressed them for their thoughts on the president-elect’s transition and postelection performance....

Johnson continued that many anti-Trump voters had little room to complain if they failed to vote in the election. “Voting is a privilege in this country,” Johnson said, before adding, “and you need to be legal, not like California where three million illegals voted.”

A confused Camerota asked Johson, “Where are you getting your information?”

“From the media!” Johnson insisted. “Some of them were CNN, I believe.”

“CNN said that 3 million illegal people voted in California?” an incredulous Camerota asked.

Johnson then decided to source her false report directly to President Obama.

“I think there was a good amount because the president told people that they could vote,” Johnson claimed. “They said, ‘The president said I could vote. I’m here illegally.’”

To her credit, Camerota kept up the line of questioning while seemingly holding back laughter.

“Did you hear President Obama said that illegal people could vote?” asked Camerota, to which nearly all the participants nodded their heads and replied, “Yes.”

“Tell me, where?” Camerota demanded.

At that point, another Trump voter directed Camerota to, “Google it. You could find it on Facebook.”
So she did.

Camerota, a former long-time Fox News host, was then forced to read a recent Mediate headline to the group that read, “Fox deceptively edits Obama interview to falsely claim he told illegal immigrants to vote.”

The Trump voters were apparently referring to Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney’s false claim that the president “appears to encourage illegals to vote, and he promises no repercussions if they do.”

While the above clip is clearly deceptively edited to conflate undocumented immigrants with all Latino voters in the U.S., Fox Business Network not only failed to make that distinction but falsely implied such a distinction was never even made. In fact, Fox Business Network left out the portion of Obama’s comments in which he explicitly stated that undocumented immigrants do not have the legal right to vote.

Still, Trump voters remained wedded to the fake news nearly a month after the election.

“You as you sit here today think that millions of illegal people voted in this country and you believe that there was widespread voting abuse? In the millions of people?” a clearly exasperated Camerota continued to challenge the Trump voters.

“California allows it,” Johnson said.

“They do not allow illegals — you mean voter fraud, California allows?” asked a dumbfounded Camerota.

“I believe there was voter fraud in this country,” she insisted, remaining steadfast to her false belief.

And that is how a misinformation campaign can propels a conman who lost the popular vote to the White House, while his supporters continue to believe they were somehow cheated.


I haven't the faintest how to find a solution...
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
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