The Fall
It's Gonna Hurt
Stay Away From Me
Syrup and Honey
Medium
Death Cap
Aug 24, 2018
Brain Science
Raw Story - Bobby Azarian:
As a journalist and a cognitive scientist, I often write about the psychology underlying the seemingly-nonsensical and unwavering support for President Donald Trump, and a very common response in the comments section goes something like, “It’s not that complicated. They are racists, plain and simple.”
While that may be true for a portion of Trump supporters (and perhaps Trump himself), is it really simple? What do we mean exactly when we say someone is racist? An even better question—what are the neural and psychological characteristics of a racist mind? By analyzing the pathways in the brain that underlie racist thought and behavior, we can better understand how this nasty bias is created, and potentially, how to mitigate it.
First of all, how do we know that racial biases actually exist? While some may claim that they have no biases, a clever psychological experiment provides objective evidence supporting the notion that the vast majority of us do. In the implicit bias task, participants are shown words on a computer screen like “happy” and “fear,” which they must categorize as positive or negative. What results have consistently shown is that if a black face is quickly flashed before the words, individuals will be faster to correctly categorize negative words, while the same people will be quicker to correctly categorize positive words when they follow white faces. These troubling findings suggest that over 75 percent of Whites and Asians have an implicit racial bias, which affects how they process information and perceive the social world around them.
However, this bias is subconscious and implicit. Whether or not it leads to overtly racist attitudes and behavior depends on an interplay between different brain areas—specifically those that create feelings of fear and promote tribalism, and those that help us regulate and suppress those bad instincts.
- and -
So yeah - they are the whiny-butt pussies I've been trying to ya they are. And it seems part of the cause for it is that they're a might brain-damaged as well.
I think one conclusion that isn't changed by this newer information is that while most rubes may have an organic predisposition for bias - and an inadequately developed mechanism for coping with it - a lot of them are racist assholes because they choose to be racist assholes.
Today's Tweet
It should seem weird that this didn't get more coverage. The fact that it didn't makes me worry even more about "normalization".
There's no more dog-whistling, folks. He's now pushing outright white supremacist propaganda. https://t.co/LGH4iWXyGh— Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) August 23, 2018
Aug 23, 2018
Today's Tweet
Show up or shut up.
America is calling YOU. To Register, To Vote. Turnout! Hanx🇺🇸 https://t.co/I6BptOBGsj pic.twitter.com/zgWu2O4AH9— Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) August 22, 2018
And I'm not interested in hearing your whiny-butt bullshit about how you hate all of them and so you're going to pick up your jacks or your marbles or whatever and go play where nobody's being mean to each other.
You're a fucking grownup now. You can't hide from the fact that you're supposed to have come to some understanding of how things are interconnected - the ripple effect - how everything you do has some effect on everything everybody else does.
You choose not to do something, and you've created a vacuum, and somebody else is only too glad to step in and exercise your power for you - almost always not to your benefit.
When you have the opportunity to vote against the greater of two evils, what the fuck are doing sitting on your ass?
Today's Fitness Goal
Stay alive long enough to see any member of the Trump family having to face the consequences of their actions.
Aug 21, 2018
Randy Sings Omarosa
Randy Rainbow:
"Excuse me ... I'll do the blowing around here."
"Excuse me ... I'll do the blowing around here."
BTW - what's with the shoe?
Aug 19, 2018
The Message
Families torn apart.
A man arrested and deported as he drives his pregnant wife to the the hospital.
Kids in cages.
Girls sexually assaulted by ICE agents.
And...
Susan Ferriss, WaPo:
Tameika Lovell was retrieving luggage at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport when Customs and Border Protection officers detained her for a random search. It was Nov. 27, 2016, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and the school counselor from Long Island had just returned from a short Jamaica vacation. Lovell, who is black, had been stopped before, but this time a CBP supervisor began asking questions she hadn’t heard previously.
“Don’t you think you’re spending too much money traveling?” Lovell, 34, recalls a CBP supervisor asking.
What happened next is the subject of a harrowing lawsuit pending in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Inside a secure room, Lovell’s litigation alleges, a female CBP officer searched Lovell’s belongings, presumably for illegal drugs, and asked if she was using a tampon or sanitary pad. The question upset her, but Lovell replied “no” and complied when told to remove her shoes, lift her arms and spread her legs.
As a second female officer observed, hand on her firearm, the lawsuit says, the first officer touched Lovell “from head to toe” before ordering her to squat. Lovell was clothed, but the lawsuit claims that the officer squeezed Lovell’s breasts, and, “placed her right hand into [Lovell’s] pants ‘forcibly’ inserting four gloved fingers into plaintiff’s vagina” before parting Lovell’s buttocks “for viewing.”
The Banality of Evil tells us that eventually, abuse of power happens just because people have the power (and understand that having that power lessens the likelihood of being held to account), so the abuse becomes an end in itself. Torture for the sake of torture. Power is abused simply because people have the power to abuse.
A man arrested and deported as he drives his pregnant wife to the the hospital.
Kids in cages.
Girls sexually assaulted by ICE agents.
And...
Susan Ferriss, WaPo:
Tameika Lovell was retrieving luggage at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport when Customs and Border Protection officers detained her for a random search. It was Nov. 27, 2016, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and the school counselor from Long Island had just returned from a short Jamaica vacation. Lovell, who is black, had been stopped before, but this time a CBP supervisor began asking questions she hadn’t heard previously.
“Don’t you think you’re spending too much money traveling?” Lovell, 34, recalls a CBP supervisor asking.
What happened next is the subject of a harrowing lawsuit pending in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Inside a secure room, Lovell’s litigation alleges, a female CBP officer searched Lovell’s belongings, presumably for illegal drugs, and asked if she was using a tampon or sanitary pad. The question upset her, but Lovell replied “no” and complied when told to remove her shoes, lift her arms and spread her legs.
As a second female officer observed, hand on her firearm, the lawsuit says, the first officer touched Lovell “from head to toe” before ordering her to squat. Lovell was clothed, but the lawsuit claims that the officer squeezed Lovell’s breasts, and, “placed her right hand into [Lovell’s] pants ‘forcibly’ inserting four gloved fingers into plaintiff’s vagina” before parting Lovell’s buttocks “for viewing.”
The Banality of Evil tells us that eventually, abuse of power happens just because people have the power (and understand that having that power lessens the likelihood of being held to account), so the abuse becomes an end in itself. Torture for the sake of torture. Power is abused simply because people have the power to abuse.
There are reasons for all of this. There's nothing particularly random about it, even if it's more stochastic than scripted.
So at this point, I have to conclude that while plenty of the shitty things happening to immigrants at the hands of ICE and CBP are happening just because people are people and people can get real shitty real fast when unrestrained, I have to remember that the policy behind these shitty occurrences is intended to engender these shitty things in order to send a message that "we'll fuck you up if you come here - don't come here'.
The Daddy State is on the porch, and it's bangin' on the door.
So at this point, I have to conclude that while plenty of the shitty things happening to immigrants at the hands of ICE and CBP are happening just because people are people and people can get real shitty real fast when unrestrained, I have to remember that the policy behind these shitty occurrences is intended to engender these shitty things in order to send a message that "we'll fuck you up if you come here - don't come here'.
The Daddy State is on the porch, and it's bangin' on the door.
A Poem
Another one from Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
What seems like an admonition - "Just cheer up and everything is peachy" - turns out to be a kind of an ironic lament.
Really glad to have been turned on to Ms Wilcox. I stumbled across her work when I went in search of a quote misattributed to Abe Lincoln.
What seems like an admonition - "Just cheer up and everything is peachy" - turns out to be a kind of an ironic lament.
Really glad to have been turned on to Ms Wilcox. I stumbled across her work when I went in search of a quote misattributed to Abe Lincoln.
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