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Shabbat On Christmas (12-26-21)
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Self-Verification And Self-Flaggellation Theory
I just had a friend ask me when I’m going to stop self-flaggellating. Hmm, I thought, I don’t think I beat myself down anymore. I feel like I have been largely free of this for five years. I think I like myself. But maybe I’m missing something.
So I looked up emotional self-flaggellation on Google and found this: “In line with the predictions of self-verification theory, which posits that people generally feel more comfortable with the treatment that is familiar and consistent with their self-views, the researchers found that participants with low self-esteem were less motivated to feel good because feeling good was inconsistent with their negative self-views, and because they didn’t feel they deserved to feel good.”
That rocked me back. I’ve often chosen to stay in abusive relationships. I’ve often had abusive bosses. When I’d tell friends about how I was treated, they’d say they wouldn’t put up with that for five minutes, let alone five years like I had done. I struck some friends as the prototypical abused husband who wouldn’t do anything about it beyond cry, moan and journal.
Self-verification theory strikes me as true. We do seek out situations and groups and people who verify our own sense of ourselves. That’s why it is so hard to change. Some of us get addicted to losing. When you hate yourself, as I have for vast sections of my life, you can’t respect those who like you.
I notice that some people are uncomfortable with joy and happiness and prosperity. They don’t feel they deserve good things.
My experience of 12-step recovery is that my self-hatred lurks under the surface and if I don’t keep up with my spiritual program, my negative self-view returns along with feelings of fear, resentment and loathing. Usually I catch it fairly quickly and return to the recovery basics of admitting my powerlessness, believing that there is a power out there who can restore me to sanity, and make a choice to turn my life over to the care of this Higher Power.
* Self-verification theory is based on the premise that people have a powerful desire to confirm and thus stabilize their firmly held self-views. This idea was first articulated by Prescott Lecky (1945) who proposed that chronic self-views give people a strong sense of coherence. For this reason, people are motivated to maintain their self-views. Self-verification theory (Swann 1983) developed Lecky’s idea that stable selfviews organize people’s efforts to maximize coherence. This emphasis on the crucial role of chronic self-views in organizing efforts to attain coherence distinguishes self-verification theory from consistency theories such as cognitive dissonance.
Self-verification involves efforts to bring actual or perceived social reality into harmony with longstanding beliefs about the self rather than maximizing the logical or psychological consistency of relevant cognitions present in the immediate situation.
This desire for stable self-views can be understood by considering how and why people develop self-views in the first place. Theorists have long assumed that people form their selfviews by observing how others treat them (e.g., Mead 1934). People become increasingly certain of these views as they acquire more and more evidence to support them. Once firmly held, selfviews enable people to make predictions about their worlds and guide their behavior, while they maintain a sense of continuity, place, and coherence. In this way, stable self-views not only serve a pragmatic function of stabilizing social relations but also serve an epistemic function of affirming people’s sense that things are as they should be. Indeed, firmly held self-views serve as the centerpiece of an individual’s knowledge system. As such, when people strive for self-verification, the viability of that system hangs in the balance. It is thus unsurprising that by mid-childhood, children begin to display a preference for evaluations that confirm and stabilize their self-views (e.g., Cassidy et al. 2003). Indeed, when adults provide inflated praise to children with low self-esteem, it can backfire by lowering these children’s selfworth in the face of setbacks (Brummelman et al. 2016).
If stable self-views are essential to human functioning, those who are deprived of them should be seriously impaired. Evidence supports this proposition. Consider a case study reported by the neurologist Oliver Sacks (1985). Due to chronic alcohol abuse, patient William Thompson suffered from memory loss so profound that he forgot who he was. Thompson desperately attempted to recover his previous identity. For instance, he sometimes developed hypotheses about who he was and then tested these hypotheses on those who happened to be present. Thompson was doomed to enact such tests repeatedly for the remainder of his life. His case not only shows that stable self-views are essential to psychological well-being, but also that self-views are essential to guiding action. Plagued by a sense of self that kept disappearing, Thompson did not know how to act toward people. In a very real sense, his inability to obtain self-verification deprived him of his capacity to have meaningful interactions with the people around him. No wonder, then, that people enact numerous strategies designed to elicit support for their self-views.
People may use three distinct processes to create self-verifying social worlds. First, people may construct self-verifying “opportunity structures,” i.e., social environments that satisfy their needs. They may, for example, seek and enter relationships in which they are apt to experience confirmation of their self-views (e.g., Swann et al. 1989) and leave relationships in which they fail to receive self-verification (Swann et al. 1994). A second self-verification strategy involves the systematic communication of self-views to others. For example, people may display “identity cues” – highly visible signs and symbols of who they are. Physical appearances are a particularly important type of identity cue. The clothes one wears, for instance, can advertise numerous selfviews, including one’s political leanings, income level, religious convictions, and so on (e.g., Gosling 2008).
People may also communicate their identities to others though their actions. Depressed college students, for example, were more likely to solicit unfavorable feedback from their roommates than were non-depressed students (Swann et al. 1992a). Doing so, moreover, actually elicited negative evaluations. That is, the more unfavorable feedback they solicited in the middle of the semester, the more their roommates derogated them and convinced them to make plans to find another roommate at the end of the semester. And what if people’s efforts to obtain selfverifying evaluations fail? Even then, people may still cling to their self-views through yet another strategy of self-verification – “seeing” nonexistent evidence. Self-views may guide at least three stages of information processing: attention, recall, and interpretation. For example, an investigation of selective attention revealed that participants with positive self-views spent longer examining evaluations they expected to be positive, and people with negative self-views spent longer scrutinizing evaluations they expected to
be negative.
Thousands Of Flying Foxes Fly Through Tannum Sands (12-23-21)
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Family Law In Australia
In Australian law, parents don’t have rights to see their kids. Family Law courts in Australia make rulings on child custody and parental access on the basis of what it believes is best for the children. As this is unknowable, the Court just does its own thing, say critics.
Divorce law here is no-fault. Notes Wikipedia: “Australia is an equitable distribution country, meaning that on divorce or death of a spouse net wealth is not split evenly (50/50) as community property. Instead courts have wide powers, taking into account 27 or so statutory factors, to determine what a “just and equitable” division of wealth would be. The vast majority of outcomes result in a division of 55-65% in favour of the wife, or economically weaker spouse, before payment of legal fees.”
“Just and equitable” may strike conservative American ears as incredibly subjective. It sounds like the Court just does its own thing.
From a Yank perspective, freedoms are more objective while equity is more subjective.
What freedom is for Americans (the number one value), fairness is for Australians.
John Hirst writes in this 2005 Quarterly Essay:
One of the gravest failings of the Family Court derives from the noble intentions of its founders.
The Family Law Act of 1975 which established the Court was a progressive social reform of the Whitlam Labor government. It was not an exclusively government measure; members on both sides were allowed a free vote and Liberals had been among those working for divorce law reform. The Act removed fault as a ground for divorce and replaced it with irretrievable breakdown, to be indicated by a one-year separation. The aim was to allow couples to part without the trauma and contrivance of one partner proving fault against the other. Marriages would be buried decently and humanely. The business of dividing property, arranging maintenance and determining custody of children would remain, but these were to be settled in a simple, flexible and inexpensive way. Litigation was to be discouraged and the Court was to be staffed by social workers and counsellors as well as judges. It was to be a court of an entirely new sort, a “caring court” or a “helping court”.
If proceedings were to be simple, flexible and cheap, why, say the wits, were lawyers put in charge of them? Proceedings quickly became complex, rule-bound and expensive – which was not entirely the fault of the lawyers because property settlements and custody cases can be very complex. But though the “caring court” looked more and more like an ordinary court, it hesitated to act like an ordinary court when its orders were disobeyed.
The disobeying of a court order is known as contempt of court and is the offence that threatens the foundations of our society. We are governed by the rule of law and once courts have settled the law, it has to be obeyed by governments and citizens alike. To ensure that their orders are obeyed, courts have large, discretionary powers to fine and imprison those who defy them. Though it was to be a court of a new sort, the Family Court had been equipped with these powers.
Within months of the Court opening, a Family Court judge used these powers to deal with a man who had defied a court order. His offence was indeed gross. His former wife had custody of their children and since he had been violent towards her, he had been put under a restraining order.
One day he burst into her house unannounced, waving a gun, and threatened to kill his son if he did not come with him. The judge sent him to prison for twenty-eight days. From his prison cell, he appealed to the Full Family Court to release him.
The Full Court under the leadership of its first chief, Elizabeth Evatt,was embarrassed at their new “caring court” acting in this crude, old-fashioned way. It immediately set down for itself rules to limit the powers it had been given to punish contempt. An offender had to be properly tried for the contempt, and imprisonment was to be used only as a last resort; counselling, fines and recognisances should be considered first. In the case before them, the appeal judges were disturbed at the trial judge opting immediately for imprisonment, which seemed the more unnecessary since the offender was to face charges in a criminal court, which could well result in a gaol sentence. They released the man from gaol. (The trial judge had been well aware that the offender was facing criminal charges; he reasoned that since the man was still at large he needed to be taught a lesson immediately so that his former wife might feel safe.)
However, the Court quickly became much more hard-headed, as it regularly had to deal with cases of men abducting children from their mothers. The offenders were given gaol sentences. The Court declared that though it was a helping court, its orders had to be obeyed. “Others who may contemplate disobedience of the Court need to know that calculated and grave contempt of its orders will not be tolerated.”
One abduction case, G and G (1981), was of great significance. A father had abducted his son from the mother and lived with him for four years before they were discovered. The man was sent to gaol for two and a half years for defying the Court’s orders. His offence was that he had isolated his son from his mother, but was the Court now going to damage the boy further by depriving him of his father, with whom he got on well? The judge gave the matter earnest consideration because judges are charged under the Family Law Act to give paramount consideration to the welfare of the child. The judge decided that “in a contempt matter the welfare of the child is not the paramount consideration, though it is a matter that must be considered”. This approach was upheld by the Full Court when the father appealed against his imprisonment. Chief Judge Evatt, conceding that the imprisonment of the father may cause suffering to the child, nevertheless said: “If no punishment is imposed, or if lenience is shown, the court’s power to protect not only the individual child concerned, but also many other children, may be diminished.”
These hard-headed pronouncements were all made in cases where fathers did not have custody of their children and had taken matters into their own hands. When the Court came to consider breaches of orders by custodial parents (chiefly mothers), it returned to soft-headedness. The typical case was where a mother contrived to deny a father access to his children, even though he had court orders allowing access (usually it is for every second weekend and half the school holidays). In considering its response to such breaches, the Court declared that the paramount interests of this particular child must prevail. Since the Court could scarcely fine or imprison a custodial mother without having some effect on the child, these options were effectively abandoned. So the “caring court” re-emerged.
The Court was not impelled to this decision by the Family Law Act , which gave untrammelled power to punish for contempt, and in adopting it the Court ignored its own judgements in the abduction cases. Just as the Court had there imagined, leniency had disastrous consequences for children. Since access orders were defied with impunity, thousands of children were kept from their fathers, though the Court had ruled that their best interests required that they see them.
Mothers contrive to deny access to fathers by being away when the father calls, or claiming that the child is ill or does not want to go, or alleging that the father is mistreating the child – or simply moving to a new location. Mothers frequently have good reason to fear access: violent fathers use the contact to re-open old quarrels, to attack the mother and unsettle the children. The Court allows that the custodial parent can deny access with reasonable excuse. If the father is violent, the mother can ask the Court to vary its order and deny him access. If the Court allows access to continue, the pick-up point will be a supervised contact centre where the man will not see his ex-wife. But mothers are not simply keeping away unsatisfactory fathers; decent fathers are being denied access to their children. Mothers who have nothing more to fear from the Court than a slap on the wrist, can, if they wish, exclude fathers from their children’s lives.
The Court itself is not in any matter responsible for enforcing its orders. A father who is denied access must bring action in the Court and either bear the costs of a lawyer ($3000 a day minimum) or conduct the case himself. But even if he wins the case, the mother will not suffer a penalty that will deter her. When the next contact visit falls due, she may well behave in exactly the same way. The Court has made clear in its judgements that the custodial parent is not to be the judge of whether contact is beneficial. However, by making the best interests of the particular child the test when enforcement is being considered, the Court has given the custodial parent de facto control over access.
So the logic of the Family Court is as follows:
The best interests of the child require that they have contact with both parents.
However, if the custodial parent is determined to deny access to the other parent, Then the best interests of the child require that the child have contact with only one parent.
Of course one would prefer that a custodial parent did not have to be coerced into providing access. But if the custodial parent is to determine the matter, why have a court at all? This is not to suggest that the best interests of the child should be overlooked in enforcement; rather that they should not be the paramount consideration – which is what the Court accepted in G and G. The paramount consideration when the Court has been deliberately and persistently defied must be the upholding of the authority of the Court.
The constant refrain of the recently retired Chief Justice of the Court, Alastair Nicholson,was that you cannot fine a custodial mother or put her in gaol. Other jurisdictions do not accept this limitation. A single mother has to pay fines for parking and traffic offences, and many women in gaol are mothers. A single mother who cheats the social security system may occasionally be put in gaol, a necessary act to preserve the integrity of the system. The Family Court has no understanding of system integrity.
But why the talk of gaol? You may think that milder penalties consistently enforced would prove effective. You may think this, but the Family Court, as we will see later, has not been interested in that approach either.
Family Court judges expatiate on the dilemma they face over enforcement since theirs is a “caring court”, which puts the interests of the child first. A caring court! It has not cared for the thousands of non-custodial parents who have wasted their spirit and resources, not in attempting to overturn a decision of the Court, but in a futile attempt to get the Court to enforce its own orders so that they might see their children. Thousands more, perhaps wisely, have decided not to make the attempt. In Middlemarch George Eliot writes that if we could hear the pain of the ordinary tragedies of human life in our midst, the sound would deafen us. When Family Court judges talk piously of the “caring court”, I wish they could hear the roar of pain that their piety has caused.
The man who called the Family Court a “kangaroo court” in his submission to the 1992 parliamentary enquiry claimed he had spent $15,000 in a futile attempt to get access to his children. His former wife simply refused to open the door when he called to collect them.
To my utter disgust and dismay the Family Court judge decided that while I had done all I could as a father, he was powerless to enforce access if she refused to open the door. He just laughed and said “SEND THEM A CHRISTMAS CARD AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS”.
Is this credible? A report of the Law Reform Commission does record this view of one judge: “I am very slow to attach any sanctions at all to breaches of access orders.”
The other systematic failure in enforcement was the Court’s inability to compel non-custodial parents (chiefly fathers) to pay maintenance for the support of their children. Only about 30 to 40 per cent did so. It was in this way that custodial mothers suffered from the laxity of the Court. The low rate of maintenance payment greatly concerned the Treasury because separated mothers were drawing heavily on social security for their support. Indeed, in the heady days when welfare flowed freely, the Court organised the payment of maintenance so that it would not reduce the entitlement of custodial parents to social security. The government called a halt to this in 1988 when it established the Child Support Agency. The Agency collected funds from non-custodial parents and passed them to custodial parents.
The Child Support Agency is not a caring agency. It is ruthless and relentless; it deducts payments from wages and sweeps bank accounts. Its reputation is so fierce that people making payments outside the system are more likely to maintain them for fear of falling into its clutches. Unlike the Family Court, which has abandoned moral judgement for “no-fault”, the Child Support Agency proclaims the moral principle that parents should pay for the upbringing of their children. In this way it has raised the rate of compliance to over 60 per cent.
The comparative success of the Agency means that many fathers who are not able to see their children are nevertheless paying to support them. Fathers’ groups have proposed that fathers denied access should not have to pay maintenance. Policy-makers have looked at this option not unsympathetically, but the decision always is that access and maintenance should not be linked. The argument is that it is not in the best interests of the child to punish mothers by reducing their income. This is typical of thinking in family law matters. Everywhere else carrots and sticks work to keep us in order, but in the semi-chaotic world of the family law they are not to be contemplated. The picture is of thousands of children suffering economic deprivation. No one considers that a mother, motivated by care for her children, might well rethink her position on access in order to retain the maintenance. And if she didn’t, the social security safety net does not allow anyone to fall into life-threatening hardship.
If maintenance and access were linked, there is a concern that fathers could avoid paying maintenance by abandoning their right of access.
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‘Of pathogens and party lines: Social conservatism positively associates with COVID-19 precautions among U.S. Democrats but not Republicans’
Here’s a summary of a June 29, 2021 study: Social liberals tend to be less pathogen-avoidant than social conservatives, a pattern consistent with a model wherein ideological differences stem from differences in threat reactivity. Here we investigate if and how individual responses to a shared threat reflect those patterns of ideological difference. In seeming contradiction to the general association between social conservatism and pathogen avoidance, the more socially conservative political party in the United States has more consistently downplayed the dangers of COVID-19 during the ongoing pandemic. This puzzle offers an opportunity to examine the contributions of multiple factors to disease avoidance. We investigated the relationship between social conservatism and COVID-19 precautionary behavior in light of the partisan landscape of the United States. We explored whether consumption of, and attitudes toward, different sources of information, as well as differential evaluation of various threats caused by the pandemic—such as direct health costs versus indirect harms to the economy and individual liberties—shape partisan differences in responses to the pandemic in ways that overwhelm the contributions of social conservatism. In two pre-registered studies, socially conservative attitudes correlate with self-reported COVID-19 prophylactic behaviors, but only among Democrats. Reflecting larger societal divisions, among Republicans and Independents, the absence of a positive relationship between social conservatism and COVID-19 precautions appears driven by lower trust in scientists, lower trust in liberal and moderate sources, lesser consumption of liberal news media, and greater economic conservatism.
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