Talking to Our Selves: Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency

Posted on September 14, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2015 book by my favorite moral philosopher — John M. Doris:

In 1957, a marketing consultant named James Vicary reported huge sales increases at a New Jersey theater concession. All one need do, Vicary said, was intermittently flash Eat Popcorn and Drink Coca Cola on screen for 1/3000th of a second, and unsuspecting moviegoers ate more popcorn and drank more Coke. Before long, subliminal advertising was a staple of Cold War paranoia. Exposés like Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders and Wilson Brian Keys Subliminal Seduction glutted bookstores, while The New Yorker pronounced Packard’s opus an “authoritative and frightening report on how manufacturers, fundraisers and politicians are attempting to turn the American mind into a kind of catatonic dough that will buy, give or vote at their command.” Pretty creepy stuff, this catatonic dough: movie night as Night of the Living Noshers, with film buffs cast as junk food zombies.
The hysteria hadn’t to do with over-indulgence in sugar, salt, and grease, about which Americans have little compunction. What was sinister, according to alarmists, was that victims of subliminal sales techniques were made to do things; people’s desires were manipulated without their knowledge or consent. Clearly, something sneaky was going on: in 1974, federal regulators stepped in, ruling subliminal advertising deceptive, and “inconsistent with the obligations” of licensed broadcasters.
Turns out the alarmists were unduly alarmed: after decades of research, scientific evidence for the effectiveness of subliminal advertising remains in short supply (Pratkanis and Greenwald 1988; Dijksterhuis et al 2005). By 1962, Vicary had recanted, admitting that the Coke and popcorn “study” was a publicity ploy for his marketing business. Near enough, he was never heard from again.
Not everyone thinks it’s safe to go back in the theater. Surveys indicate that a majority of Americans have heard of subliminal advertising, and a majority of these believe it works (Rogers and Smith 1993). Books like The Secret Sales Pitch (Bullock 2004) and Subliminal Persuasion (Lakhani 2009) are still getting written; a celebratory 50th anniversary edition of The Hidden Persuaders appeared in 2007.

* The philosophy at issue subscribes to reflectivism, a doctrine according to which the exercise of human agency consists in judgment and behavior ordered by self-conscious reflection about what to think and do. Typically, this doctrine is associated with a corollary: the exercise of human agency requires accurate reflection. In an exercise of agency, as construed by reflectivism, a person correctly divines the beliefs, desires, and other psychological states relevant to her decision, makes her decision in light of these states (sometimes called her reasons), and acts accordingly.

* However attractive, this assumption is compromised by decades of research in the social, cognitive, and behavioral sciences. Empirical research suggests that reflection appears in a limited portion of human conduct; very often, behavior is altogether thoughtless, and quite unconstrained by the deliverances of reflection. And on those instances when people do reflect, there is little warrant for confidence that these reflections are informed by accurate self-awareness.

* At least in the cultures that are home to the Western philosophical tradition, there is an entrenched practice of people treating one another as morally responsible agents, and although this practice is sometimes egregiously infelicitous in its particulars, I’m convinced it is tolerably functional—in any event, considerably more functional than going without it. On my view, the trouble is not so much with the practice, but with extant attempts to provide theoretical support for the practice: reflectivist understandings of agency have prevented philosophers from understanding the ways in which human beings do, in fact, function as agents.
I envisage an alternative theory. The theory is anti-reflectivist: it does not require reflection and accurate self-awareness for the exercise of agency. The theory is valuational it locates the exercise of agency in the expression of a person’s values. The theory is collaborativist: it understands individual exercises of agency as products of social interaction. The theory is pluralist: it allows that a diversity of processes may effect the exercise of agency.

* The history of ideas in the twentieth century was a history of disintegration: physics rendered nature into infinitesimal particles, anthropology sundered humanity into incommensurable cultures, politics divided nations into irreconcilable factions, and literary theorists deconstructed what little remained.

* the history of mind in modernity (and post-modernity) is the history of a fragmented psyche

* cognitive performance is remarkably—not to say ridiculously—context-specific (Olin and Doris 2014): to mention a couple of representative findings, people may be good at estimating distances on lawns but not in hallways (Lappin et al. 2006), and better able to detect erroneous statements written in difficult fonts than in fonts that are easily read

* Just as success at one cognitive endeavor does not guarantee success in another, the attainment of ordinary (or even extraordinary) decency in one regard does not guarantee decency in others. People exhibit astonishing susceptibility to social and material influence, even when that influence is employed in the service of flagrant inhumanity, and the perpetrators of atrocity, more often than not, are disquietingly like the rest of us (Doris 2002: 53-8; Doris and Murphy 2007). As Solzhenitsyn learned in the Gulag, the line dividing good and evil crosses every human heart.

* Human beings are profoundly social organisms who do everything together, from making love to making war. It may seem like philosophers fully appreciate this obvious observation: that humans are, in Aristotle’s words, zoa politika, is a staple of introductory philosophy classes. Yet much Western philosophy bears the imprint of individualism, the supposition that people reason best asocially, doors closed and curtains drawn, as in the gripping fiction of Descartes’ Meditations.

* There’s also virtual sociality, where a solitary person can be said to function socially. The disapproving gaze of the “imagined other” characterizing shame is familiar in moral philosophy, but examples abound, such as the private, but socially engaged, activity of journal writing (time was, Dear Diary received a lot of letters).

* even solitary behavior is often governed by cultural norms.

* A gynecologist friend of mine reports that a surprising number of her patients avow the following constellation of inclination and disinclination: I want to have intercourse—I do not want to use contraception—I do not want to have a baby.

* America where the rugged individualist is celebrated, the conformist is castigated, and the child is admonished about succumbing to “peer pressure.”

* autistic children present atypically when asked to report their moral reasoning. In one study (cited in Doris and Nichols 2012: 432-3), neurotypical and autistic children (ages 5-9 years) were asked:
“Why was it wrong for Johnny to hit Billy?”
Neurotypical children gave the expected sorts of answers, exhibiting culturally appropriate instances of moral reasoning:
“Because it hurt Billy.”
Autistic children, however, often produced quite inappropriate responses:
“I was on an escalator once.”
This phenomenon is well known from clinical studies in the area: autistic children often produce conversational non-sequiturs, and present other evidence of social disconnection, such as presentation of strangely inappropriate gifts (cf. Dawson and Fernald 1987: 496-7). Evidently, impairments in sociality are associated with impairments in moral reasoning.

* Consider Narcissistic Personality Disorder, where afflicted individuals present with self-importance and feelings of entitlement (American Psychiatric Association 2000: 715).4 Unfortunately, the narcissist’s affliction is an affliction on those around him: individuals with Narcissistic Personality Disorder may believe they are exempt from social norms, such as waiting their turn in line. One patient, “Brian,” was compelled into therapy after a series of legal problems resulting “from his belief that rules and laws for other people didn’t apply to him” (Schwartzberg 2000: 106-88). Matters came to a head when Brian arrived at the airport for a trip minutes before his scheduled departure and discovered that his seat had been reassigned. Outraged, he claimed that his luggage was aboard the plane with a bomb in it, which did not endear him to authorities. Apparently, Brian was unable to grasp the fact that his flight was not literally his flight; the narcissist behaves, as Mom used to say, like the world revolves around him.

* If isolation is implicated in psychopathology, it may fairly be concluded that sociality is required to sustain normal adult reasoning, it is not merely a developmental prerequisite.

* Substantial cognitive achievement, such as scientific and technological discovery, is very often social achievement. In the first instance, knowledge is cumulative: the present generation learns from the previous generation, and the steam engine gives way to internal combustion, which in turn (one prays) gives way to some more sustainable technology. In the second instance, knowledge is specialized, especially in cases of large-scale industrial productions: it takes a lot of engineers, in a lot of fields, to make a skyscraper stand, or an airliner fly. Moreover, a diversity of researchers employing a range of methodologies facilitates scientific progress, because a larger percentage of the empirical and theoretical space is thereby investigated, increasing the likelihood of identifying undersubscribed, but high pay-off, research programs…

* people tend to believe propositions they entertain…

* people may reason better when a diverse set of views is represented across the population of intellectual contestants (Zamzow and Nichols 2009: 377-9). In addition to the aggregate benefits of such “checks and.balances,” the agonistic character of intellectual discourse in a diverse population of motivated reasoners may provoke individual contestants to reason more compellingly (if not more impartially) while they advocate for their views. As you strive for fame and fortune, you’re motivated to maintain your own theory and repudiate opposing theories, so you’re likely pretty good at producing support for your view and objections to your opponent’s.

* Specifically moral reasoning is also socially embedded. The idea is not that solitary individuals are somehow bereft of moral views; it’s that people are most likely to reason about those views when justifying themselves to others.

* In the early days of American desegregation, it was hoped that putting African American and white children in the same place would effect increased racial harmony. After all, one of the staple results in social psychology is that familiarity facilitates attraction (e.g. Grush 1976; Matlin 1970; Zajonc 1968). What happened instead was the formation of ethnic in-groups, which eventuated in in-group/out-group conflict…

* Group interactions are likely to be emotionally freighted, in ways both dramatic and mundane, and many familiar emotions like anger, guilt, and sympathy are characteristically triggered by social cues: it’s the tone of your colleague debasing a peer that makes you angry, it’s your friend’s stunned look that makes you feel guilty for slighting him, and it’s the tears running down a child’s face that triggers your sympathy. While such processes may follow conscious pathways, they needn’t. A celebrated example is “emotional contagion,” where people unconsciously mirror the affective states of those around them (Hatfield et al 1994): your good spirits may give me a lift without my realizing it, and my foul mood may have the opposite effect on you.

* moral emotions like sympathy and guilt tend to improve moral behavior, and the moral emotions are emotions that are especially likely to be triggered in a social context.

* people seek out psychotherapy in hopes of making their lives go better, so this active process has a more agential appearance than the capitulations just described. Of course, people often enter therapy in response to something like duress: a stalled career, a strife-torn marriage, or stacks of unpaid bills. But these incentives are not obviously inimical to agency. On the contrary, people trying to change their lives for the better is an excellent place to look for agency. Psychotherapy can help effect this change. Numerous outcome studies, using both clinician assessment and client self-report, indicate that talk therapy works; it can ameliorate various adverse psychological conditions, such as depression and anxiety…

* One clinical study evaluated a short course of cognitive therapy designed to help patients increase their awareness of emotions, modify dysfunctional beliefs, and enhance communication; twelve months after initiation of treatment, the severity of patients’ symptoms, compared to controls, was rated as significantly reduced by independent evaluators and by the patients themselves, and average health care expenditures were reduced by more than a third…

* It seems relatively uncontroversial to infer that the values at issue here—reducing pain, disability, and health care expenses— are values worth promoting, and are values held by the patients themselves; indeed, to assert the opposite would be controversial. Moreover, the patients work to realize their values. Is there good reason to deny them agency, even if they did not implement their values as completely independent individuals?
Uncertainties remain. Therapists’ theoretical predilections have relatively little to do with client outcomes, and the means by which therapy works are imperfectly understood. However, there seems to be strong evidence for the following: a “positive alliance” between therapist and client is associated with positive outcomes…

* To the collaborativist, this is an unsurprising finding: sociality— of the right sort—does people good. If it’s correct to say that the good in question is a good the people in question value, we’ve got a place to look for agency: sociality may facilitate agency in circumstances where people are unable to do so on their own.
Moreover, the theoretical indeterminacy of psychotherapy is congenial to the critic of reflectivism. If the explicit theoretical rubric under which therapy is conducted is not a critical determinant of therapeutic outcomes, it’s tempting to say that accurate reflection is not required for clinical success: whether you think your troubles are due your relationship with your mother or your father may not matter much, so long as you’ve a good relationship with your therapist. If we also conclude, as I’ve just concluded, that therapy can facilitate agency, we’ve here a case where agency is achieved without accurate self- awareness. In this instance, collaborativism and anti-reflectivism may travel together.

* If I form a vague intention to exercise more, I may never drag my lazy butt from the couch, but if I specify a concrete plan to run the Carolina North Trail, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5pm, then quitting time on Tuesdays and Thursdays may stimulate thoughts of my lumbering along the trail, which may in turn facilitate the planned-on lumbering. Evidence suggests that this approach may be effective for exercise (Milne et al 2002:173) and a variety of other health interventions: in one study, people missed fewer doses of a vitamin if they committed to when and where they would take it each day (Sheeran and Orbell 1999: 359, 364), in another, women who committed to location and time were more than four times as likely to perform a breast self- examination in the following month (Orbell et al 1997: 950). Here, reflection supports self-direction, not as deliberation proximate to action, but as prior strategizing about implementation: think about your plan, ahd you won’t have to think about your performance…

* Cognitive capacity is limited, so people can’t focus on everything equally: attention to one thing may require inattention to another.

Thinking may be the most impressive thing humans do, but it’s not the only thing humans do, and given finite biological resources, what’s spent on the brain can’t be spent on muscle, blood, and bone (Wrangham 2009: 105-27). Moreover, a cognitive system less prone to omissions might be, for many problems, an over-engineered system. Processing power is a mixed blessing, an observation underscored by Luria’s (1987: 159) celebrated mnemonist, whose prodigious memory so saturated his mind with detail that he experienced life “as though through a haze.” One might suspect something similar of self-awareness. Attending to what’s within your head may prevent you from attending to what’s without; lose yourself in your thoughts, get lost on the way to the store.

* Even if foods only seem to have tastes, there are systematic patterns of seemings that help animals get around in the world: bitter-seeming things are more likely to be poisonous, sweet-seeming things are more likely to be calorie rich, and so on (Glendinning 1994; Kreps 2009). The appearances are invaluable, though not infallible, signals.

* It’s probable that some illusions of self, namely, positive illusions of self, are implicated in well-being (Taylor and Brown 1988, 1994; cf. Lazarus 1983). For example, individuals with greater tendencies to self-enhancement may be more resilient in the face of traumatic events, as has been found with survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks (Bonanno et al. 2005). Nevertheless, the thesis that selfenhancement is generally advantageous has drawn heated criticism (Badhwar 2008; Block and Colvin 1994; Colvin and Block 1994; Kurt and Paulhus 2008). The connection between surplus positivity and happiness is hardly transparent: excessive optimism about one’s finances might cause one to under-save, and excessive optimism about one’s health might cause one to under-insure…

* Evidence indicates that supportive social relationships promote well-being, and in some cultures, marriage is a primary context for such relationships, so one may infer that marriage promotes well-being for members of these cultures. Numerous studies point to a “marriage protection” effect where marriage is causally implicated in lower mortality rates, perhaps especially for men (Johnson et al 2000; Kolip 2005; Lynch 1979; Wilson and Oswald 2005). In America, the happily married may enjoy lower rates of unemployment (Forthofer et al 1996) and better health (DeLongis et al 1988; Kiecolt-Glaser and Newton 2001), while dissolution of marriage is associated with depression and loneliness, even when the union in question was an unhappy one (Price and McKenry 1988; Weiss 1976). In Germany, widows were found to be more depressed than non-widowed comparison groups (Stroebe et al 1996), and German women’s life satisfaction was observed to decline immediately before and after the death of a spouse (Lucas et al 2003:534). Contra Plato’s Phaedrus, it’s not love that’s madness, but want of love: a review of mental hospital admissions found them highest in the separated and divorced, lowest in the married, with singletons in the middle (Bloom et al 1978: 869; cf. Horwitz et al 1996). Although the nature of the causal relationship is uncertain (and likely bidirectional), it seems safe to surmise that relationships like marriage support well-being.

In turn, marriages are associated with illusion. According to one group of marital researchers, the presence of positive illusions is “nearly universal” among “satisfied spouses” (Fowers et al 2001: 96). In an early study by Edmonds (1967: 684-6), it was found that married people tended to strongly agree with sentences such as “If my mate has any faults I am not aware of them.”

* Maybe people are aware of the daunting odds, but suppose they’ll occupy the lucky half. It’s also possible that people clearly appreciate that the difficulty applies to them, but decide to go forward anyway; as the saying goes, it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved (for some loves, anyway). If so, why doesn’t everyone get prenuptial agreements? It’s not easy to find records of how many do (perhaps because the practice is largely restricted to the wealthy), but given the state of the divorce courts, it’s safe to say that lots don’t. With the advantages prenups offer in the rather likely event that unhappy push comes to unhappy shove, forgoing one looks like irrational optimism, not so different from neglecting to save or insure. On the other hand, maybe people fear that prenups sour marriages with defeatism, and decide the advantages of planning for the worst are not worth the risk of relationship damage; as one divorce mediator put it, the “premises of prenuptial agreements are logically contradictory to the premises of modern marriage” (Margulies 2003: 426). But if this is what people believe, they take the point I want to make: relationships benefit from positivity exceeding a sober assessment of the probabilities.

* There’s evidence that people simultaneously maintain inflated and accurate views of their romantic partner’s attractiveness; they think their partners are more attractive than their partner’s friends and their partners themselves do, but are aware of this discrepancy, and are able to fairly accurately report their partner’s reputation for attractiveness (Solomon and Vazire 2014). Close relationships, like other human endeavors, are characterized by a mixture of awareness and ignorance.

* Authenticity has its place, but that’s not every place.

* Unrealistic positivity has been repeatedly implicated in good health outcomes (Taylor et al 2003), and it appears that this positivity extends to perceptions of control. In a study of cancer patients, perceptions of control were negatively associated with maladjustment; patients with higher perceptions of control were less likely to experience anxiety and depression…

* In relationships, as with illness, people are often motivationally challenged: Yve had enough. Ym out of gas. I can t go on. Here, I’m willing to speculate, sturdy perceptions of control have motivational utility: if you don’t think marital outcomes are responsive to effort, how do you get yourself to undertake the effort? By supporting value-relevant motives, illusions of control may facilitate behavior that helps to realize values. If so, we’ve identified a pathway whereby self-ignorance supports, rather than impairs, agency. This pathway is indirect: falsely believing I can directly influence something may effect efforts eventuating in behaviors or circumstances that influence the something in question. The fact is the child of the fiction.

* While it may be that people are genuinely clueless about the causes of their romantic commitments, I don’t think they often proclaim their ignorance. Coupled readers might try an informal experiment: go home and announce to your partner, “You know babe, I have no idea, I mean no idea, why I’m with you.”

* This sounds like saying you become your bullshit. Yes—but your bullshit had better become you. Fictive biography may facilitate agency, but living by fantasy isn’t the formula for agency; self-conceptions that are completely uncorrelated with ability may impede* the expression of values.

* Self-ignorance often functions to effect self-direction, and its absence can be an impediment to agency: a complete and accurate understanding of your relationship, or your health, might prevent you from making them all you want them to be.

* On one view, self- deception is adaptive because it allows people to deceive others with less “cognitive load” than conscious deception; to put it roughly, pretense burns more energy than sincerity, so the self-deceived deceiver is the more efficient deceiver…

* reasoning capacities evolved not so much to discover the facts—probably lots of considerably less fancy ways to do that—but to persuade conspecifics [members of the same species].

* Biographies are often structured by norms governing social roles, and this climate of expectation facilitates, through channels both conscious and unconscious, role-appropriate behavior.4 When someone presents herself as a gourmet she restricts her conduct; the professed gourmet risks censure by her acquaintances (or her self) if she exhibits behavior, like serving bargain wine at an important dinner, which confounds her self-appointed role. Some things fit the gourmet…

* many romantically involved couples indulge in telling and retelling the story of their beginnings. The point of these tellings and retellings, it seems to me, is not to discover an accurate history; it is to create a shared history. For American couples, there’s research indicating that something like the famous “we knew right away” chronicle associated with “love at first sight” may be the dominant form (McCollum 2002). My informal impression is that, in addition to “we knew right away,” there’s a second major form, “we hated each other.”

* In the two archetypal forms, love stories seem to share a theme: they celebrate strong feelings, and therefore help create and sustain emotional connections. With the mutual formation and endorsement of romantic biographies, lovers become couples. In contrast, a story like, “I wasn’t much drawn to your father, but I hadn’t been on a date in 17 months,” doesn’t seem to have the requisite bounce. (Note to reader: keep stories like that to yourself, even if—especially if—true.) Moreover, sharing idealizations can help make them reality: studies of dating couples suggest that positive illusions can be “self-fulfilling prophecies,” where idealized partners internalize their partners’ idealizations, and may thereby act in ways more closely approximating the ideal (Murray et al 1996: 1170; 2003; cf. Drigotas et al 1999). The endearment “you make me a better person,” sounds cheesy, but there you are.
Human beings order their lives together by jointly developing rationalizations, and the central requirement for these rationalizations is not accuracy, but accord: friends may jointly recall a big night on the town as bigger than their bar tabs report, neighbors may jointly recall a harsh winter as harsher than the meteorological record shows, and colleagues may jointly recall a dull performance by a professional rival as duller than unbiased assessment suggests. We’ve laughed and cried together, such stories say, and this commonality helps provide the foundation for together going forward.

* having a good conversation is typically more important—‘far more important—than conversing in facts.

* For agency, the key word is participant While it’s true that people are subject to social influences that constrain their self-understandings, they are not passive entities in these negotiations, the outcome of which is influenced by whatever values each party brings to the table. This is not to deny that inequalities of power may impede the exercise of agency; that’s one thing that makes inequalities of power bad. But in other instances, the opposite is true: relationships help people express their values in their lives, as they do in the right sort of friendships, romantic involvements, and institutions. Agency requires not freedom from influence, but mutual influence.

* In August 1911, an emaciated man was found at a stockyard near Oroville, California, apparently having walked out of the rugged canyon land fronting Mount Lassen and the Sierra Nevada. It was eventually determined that he was from a group anthropologists call Yahi, one of the native cultures decimated by European settlers in California. Ishi, as he came to be known, was the last of his people.

Ishi’s story became widely known through Theodora Kroeber’s bestselling memoir, Ishi in Two Worlds (2002/1961). Theodora was the widow of Alfred Kroeber, a distinguished Berkeley anthropologist who arranged for Ishi to reside at the University’s San Francisco anthropology museum, where he lived from shortly after his appearance in the stockyard until his death from tuberculosis some four and a half years later.

At first contact with Spanish explorers in 1542, there may have been around 300,000 Native Californians scattered in hundreds of groups across the region; while native peoples mounted some lethal resistance, the predations of Spanish colonization and the Gold Rush left perhaps 20,000 alive at the ninteenth century’s end (Starn 2004: 24-5, 65; cf. Thornton 1987: 25-32, 162). Lest enormity be lost in numbers, understand that Native Californians were literally hunted; some California towns offered 5 dollars per Native scalp..

Thus Ishi, who was probably born around 1860, was born to a culture in crisis (Kroeber 2002/1961: 68). The Yahi likely never numbered more than a few hundred, and by 1908 only four remained, concealed by remote backcountry. When their last encampment, Wowunupo Mu Tetna (Grizzly Bears Hiding Place), was plundered by surveyors and cowboys, death probably came quickly for everyone but Ishi (Starn 2004: 41). Of his desperately solitary existence between the destruction of Wowunupo Mu Tetna and his emergence at Oroville, little is known, but Ishi gracefully acclimated to life in the museum: he learned some English, worked as an assistant custodian, demonstrated traditional skills to museum patrons, and developed seemingly warm relationships with a number of people…

* When a person’s values change, they become less like the person they were before; at the extreme, if a person’s values are completely changed, they are no longer the same person.

* the desire for something like internal control has been identified in various locales; for example, across samples from 23 countries and Hong Kong, including both individualist and collectivist cultures, external locus of control was negatively associated with job satisfaction…

* Continuity, identity, and agency are all socially contingent: where human organisms achieve these, they do so as members of groups.

* the hubris of elevating humanity above the rest of nature.

* re-envisaging human beings, not as little gods with big brains, but as animals that, alongside other animals, have evolved with a curious assortment of endowments for muddling through the world. Human cognition—including the rarified sort called Reason—is but one of these endowments, not so different than feather, fur, and fang: by turns comical, wonderful, and tragical.

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Hasidic Joy (9-14-22)

Posted on September 14, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:30 U.S. Supreme Court requires Yeshiva University to allow LGBT student club
08:00 Who are Hasidic Jews?
12:30 What Rights Do Hasidic Schools Have?
13:50 Dooovid says secular governments have no moral right to regulate Hasidic schools
30:00 Strangers in a Strange Land
35:00 Where’s Hasidic joy?
41:00 Richard Spencer on the disparate LE response to January 6 and BLM
42:30 Brett Kavanaugh protesters vs January 6 rioters
46:45 Mostly peaceful BLM riots
52:00 Richard’s class-based dislike for the AR
1:08:00 Peep Show
1:12:00 Russian Propaganda
1:32:30 5 Tips to Create a Secure Attachment with Yourself to Improve Self Esteem

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America’s Political Prisoners Languish In DC Gitmo (9-13-22)

Posted on September 13, 2022 by Luke Ford

0:30 Does America have political prisoners?
02:00 Tucker on America’s crime wave
30:00 Capitol rioter accused of hitting cops with stick, https://www.courthousenews.com/capitol-rioter-accused-of-hitting-cops-with-stick-promises-to-be-on-best-behavior-if-granted-pretrial-release/
35:00 Videos Show How Rioter Rosanne Boyland Was Trampled in Stampede at Capitol, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/us/rosanne-boyland-capitol-riot-death.html
41:30 Richard Spencer against free speech
43:00 Kiwi Farms taken down
1:18:40 Tim Pool
1:29:30 Nick Fuentes and January 6 riots
1:31:30 Gilbert Gottfried and Norm MacDonald

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New York Times Devastating Expose Of Hasidic Schools (9-12-22)

Posted on September 12, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:40 In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/nyregion/hasidic-yeshivas-schools-new-york.html
02:00 Dooovid joins, https://twitter.com/RebDoooovid
04:00 The anti-semitic accusation
35:00 Agudath Yisrael, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agudat_Yisrael
1:01:00 Tucker Carlson on the 21st anniversary of 9-11
1:26:40 Moral Injury – Dr. John Doris, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxLNKpLcU1k
1:28:00 Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139670
1:40:00 When there are people blocking your right of way on a public thoroughfare, do you say a loud “Excuse me!”?

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Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s

Posted on September 12, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2022 book by Nicole Hemmer:

* Ronald Reagan, himself a radio and television host, set out to repeal the Fairness Doctrine from the start of his presidency, something his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally accomplished in 1987. 26
Unlike Reagan, Gingrich had not always been opposed to the Fairness Doctrine. When Congress first tried to reinstate it, Gingrich signed on as a cosponsor. And he was not alone: in 1987 the Fairness Doctrine had plenty of conservative supporters, from Gingrich and Trent Lott, to Phyllis Schlafly and Pat Buchanan, to the Heritage Foundation and Ralph Reed. These conservatives, though generally fans of Reagan-era deregulation, believed that the Fairness Doctrine could be a useful tool to get conservative voices on air. If it were true, as conservatives contended, that liberal bias permeated US media, then a regulation requiring political balance could be a powerful weapon for conservative activists. 27
What conservative supporters of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 did not foresee, however, was the rise of right-wing talk radio. The Limbaugh juggernaut suddenly left the right wary of government regulation that might be used to hem in the popular radio host, who by the early 1990s was on over six hundred stations with an estimated twenty million listeners. Overnight, a bipartisan piece of legislation that had previously passed through Congress handily became anathema to Republicans. Limbaugh and the Wall Street Journal dubbed the proposed legislation the “Hush Rush bill,” making clear that any vote for the legislation would be considered a vote against Limbaugh. The new bill went nowhere. 28
Once the Hush Rush crusade had passed, Gingrich and Limbaugh teamed up again to help kill antilobbying legislation. It was an odd crusade for Gingrich, who had built his reputation as a reformer but, in reality, was weaponizing ethics complaints to topple Democratic leaders. His biggest coup was successfully pressuring Democratic Speaker Jim Wright to resign in 1989 after stirring up an ethics scandal. While his intent was obvious—to take out prominent Democrats—he always insisted he was genuinely committed not only to reform but to cutting back on congressional luxuries and privileges. He had been hard at work on the Contract with America’s reform agenda, and a few months earlier he’d even given up his chauffeured car after his primary opponent attacked him for the extravagance. 29
Gingrich understood that opposing the lobbying reform bill cut against his arguments about ethics and reform. But he also knew that lobbyists had become a critical part of the apparatus connecting grassroots conservative organizations (and those that claimed to be grassroots) to Republican politicians in Washington. The reforms wouldn’t come soon enough to hamstring the GOP in the 1994 campaign, but they could annihilate the conservative political apparatus if enacted. So Gingrich, in addition to undertaking his own aggressive campaign against the bill, activated the other centers of power within the conservative movement.

* But the popularizers of this new racism, who wrote books like Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve , Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism , and Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation , presented their ideas with all the trappings of intellectual respectability. Their heavily footnoted books brimmed with charts and references to scholarly works. And they touched a nerve: each was treated seriously by established news outlets and at times even caught the eye of Democratic moderates who found the scientific-sounding books to be a modern alternative to rank bigotry in their efforts to appeal to white voters.

* “Time to rethink immigration?”
That was the question National Review asked on its cover in June 1992—a moment when, other than Pat Buchanan, not many Americans were thinking about immigration at all. Just a few years earlier, George H. W. Bush had signed bipartisan legislation to increase immigration to the United States with a focus on family reunification and skilled workers. The legislation had also created a commission to study immigration policy, which was quietly at work in Congress. But as a political issue, it did not appear to be top of mind for most Americans, garnering little notice in the 1992 election.
Still, the cover story caused a stir. The author, Peter Brimelow, was an immigrant himself—he grew up in Lancashire, England, before eventually settling in New York City—as was the editor who commissioned it. Brimelow had been through the process of becoming a US citizen, and what he saw as he waited in the offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) revolted him. Comparing the INS waiting room to the tenth circle of hell, he declared there was “something distinctly infernal about the spectacle of so many lost souls waiting around so hopelessly, mutually incomprehensible in virtually every language under the sun.”
So far, he could be describing the frustrations of any bureaucratic experience. But he had some other thoughts on the inhabitants of the room. They struck him as docile in the face of the INS’s opaque and seemingly arbitrary rules, and he mused that such docility may have been “imbued in them by eons of arbitrary government in their native lands.” One other thing struck him about that waiting room, something he’d noticed elsewhere in his adopted home of New York: “Just as when you leave Park Avenue and descend into the subway, on entering the INS waiting rooms you find yourself in an underworld that is almost entirely colored.” 1
He elaborated on that idea of a colored underworld in his book Alien Nation , released in 1995. The book revolved around what he called “a plain historical fact”: “the American nation has always had a specific ethnic core. And that core has always been white.” The immigration patterns of the past quarter century, however, had threatened to change that, triggering a “demographic mutation” that was steadily replacing the country’s “specific ethnic core” with one that looked more like the people waiting alongside him in the INS offices. To defend that white ethnic core, Brimelow concluded, the United States would have to enact restrictive immigration laws that heavily favored white Western countries. 2
Doing so would require repealing the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which did away with a racist quota system that limited immigration to almost exclusively white European migrants. Brimelow wanted that system back. Even though he argued that immigration—both authorized and unauthorized—had grown much too quickly and should be dramatically scaled back, he also railed against any limits on eastern European immigration, believing that the United States could easily assimilate those white migrants. He insisted that this was about not race but culture : immigrants from the “Third World,” if they arrived in large numbers, simply could not fully assimilate into US culture and, being poorer and less educated, would tax every system in the country, from welfare, to jobs, to health care, to the environment.
Brimelow’s insistence that his argument was not about race was undercut not only by his repeated emphasis on whiteness but by his distinction between earlier waves of immigration and the post-1965 pattern, which he described as dangerously dominated by “visible minorities.” He nonetheless swatted back the charge of racism in his introductory chapter. “Because the term ‘racist’ is now so debased,” he wrote, “I usually shrug such smears off by pointing to its new definition: anyone who is winning an argument with a liberal .” 3
That preemptive claim did not, of course, stop reviewers from pointing out the racism in the book. But it did show how Brimelow approached his critics: by framing his ideas as controversial truths that had been walled off from the realm of acceptable conversation. “The country is being transformed against its will, by accident, in a way that’s unprecedented in the history of the world, to no visible economic gain,” he told Brian Lamb in an interview about the book on C-SPAN. “And you’re not supposed to talk about it, so of course I couldn’t resist,” he added, his thin lips curling into a smile, as though he’d dipped into a tempting dessert rather than engaged in handwringing about the shrinking white majority. 4
Brimelow’s book grabbed attention for a number of reasons. His journalistic bona fides (he was a senior editor at Forbes and an editor at National Review ), his lilting northern English accent, his branding as a controversialist—all of these allowed him to present his arguments about race and immigration on national platforms throughout the mid-1990s. He had learned something that Pat Buchanan had figured out when he first contemplated a presidential run: “The principal press bias is not a liberal bias. It’s a bias for a good fight. The press loves to see a fight start, and hates to see it end.” Both men understood how media worked because they had been part of the journalism world for decades, connections that won them a hearing for their arguments about the superiority of white Western civilization and how best to defend it. 5
But Alien Nation , which Newsweek ’s Jerry Adler described as “one of the most widely discussed books of 1995,” also grabbed attention because it landed in the midst of a newly politicized debate over immigration. Across the United States in the 1990s, the politics of immigration were rapidly changing. Buchanan’s call for a border wall in 1992 looked prescient two years later, when California state politics exploded over Proposition 187. The proposition, if enacted, would strip undocumented immigrants of access to any social service, including public education. It passed with overwhelming majorities and the support of Democrats as well as Republicans. With the new bipartisan embrace of immigration restriction, Buchanan went even further, calling for new limitations on authorized immigration as well. He also veered away from economic arguments against immigration and toward something different: arguments about culture, whiteness, and the American identity that would become a defining feature of the neo-nativism of the 1990s.

* Both parties would shift right on immigration in 1993 and 1994. Both tended to frame the debate in fiscal and economic terms that, on their surface, were unemotional hard-numbers appeals. Yet, in both parties the actual debate over immigration took on a darker tone of invasion, criminality, and decline. When talking about immigration, Feinstein emphasized overcrowded schools and housing shortages. And while she never said, “They’re stealing your jobs,” “They’re cheating your children,” “They’re why you can’t afford to buy a house,” the implications were clear. They were even clearer in Wilson’s infamous border-crossing ad. It featured grainy video of migrants crossing the border while a narrator gravely warned of the ceaseless flow of Mexican migrants, evoking images of an invasion from the south.

* When he initially explored the argument for Losing Ground in a pamphlet he wrote for the Heritage Foundation, a donor read it and said it should be given a book-length treatment. Serious fund-raising—to the tune of $125,000—went to the project, setting Murray up at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, to write the book. 27
The Manhattan Institute was less thrilled with his next project. When Murray signed on to write The Bell Curve , the think tank’s leaders couldn’t stomach the genetic component of his argument. They severed their relationship with Murray after learning he was writing the book, at which point the American Enterprise Institute scooped him up. Murray and Herrnstein went ahead with the project, knowing that if it was already shaking things up in the planning stages, the book was destined to make a splash when it landed.
Of course, it was one thing to court controversy and another to be cast out as an extremist. Here, Murray benefited greatly from the way the mainstream press treated The Bell Curve . One reviewer, Charles Lane, writing in the New York Review of Books , refused to pull his punches. He noted that the book relied on studies from white nationalist and eugenicist sources and that their conclusions shared a great deal with those sources. “Both sought to restore the scientific status of race, and to reintroduce eugenic thinking into the public policy debate.” But in other coverage of the book, its sources and conclusions were rarely presented so baldly, and even when they were, they were bracketed by Murray’s insistence that the book was not racist. This matters, because, while it did land on the best-seller list, most Americans would encounter The Bell Curve through articles like the sprawling, twelve-page story that appeared in New York Times Magazine the week the book came out: a look at Murray living the high life while calling for the end of welfare for the poor. 28
Others would read about it in the New Republic , which devoted most of an issue to The Bell Curve , reinforcing the notion that controversy sold, even as it roiled the institutions that it touched. The decision to publish the excerpt triggered an explosive fight at the New Republic . Editor Andrew Sullivan had initially planned to simply run the excerpt as a cover story for the magazine. But that decision met with fierce resistance within the publication, leading to a lengthy series of rebuttals that ran alongside the excerpt. The editorial note that introduced the “Race & IQ” issue applauded the magazine’s courage in running Murray and Herrnstein’s work and denounced some of the internal objectors as illiberal. “If the TNR editors who authored some of the responses had had their way,” the opening essay read, “the debate before you—and the arguments of those very editors—would never have seen the light of day.” 29
In addition to framing publication of The Bell Curve excerpt as a matter of free and open debate, the opening essay went one step further: it declared that the book’s authors were not racist and that their findings were true. “A magazine should publish what is true. Sometimes the truth is intricate and ambiguous, which is why a debate may be needed to reveal the core of the matter.” It also bought in to the notion that Herrnstein and Murray were offering up a hidden truth: something unspeakable but accurate. For magazines like the New Republic , spotlighting The Bell Curve , even though it caused significant disruption at the publication, had important upsides: it reinforced their brand as defenders of free speech and purveyors of dangerous—but necessary—ideas.

* In response to the publication of The End of Racism , two Black conservatives at AEI, Glenn Loury and Robert Woodson, resigned in protest. In a joint interview, they denounced D’Souza’s book as “an anti-black pejorative” written in “an intemperate, irreverent, insulting way.” Both men had previously argued that at least some inequality was driven by what they saw as “dysfunctional behavior” in Black communities, but D’Souza’s screed landed differently. “We’ve been called Uncle Toms, which we are not,” Loury said. “But to be silent in the face of this book, written by a conservative colleague, would make us Uncle Toms.” 37
The resignations were not the first sign that this turn toward scientific and cultural racism was driving a wedge between Black conservatives and the rest of the movement. Loury had already gone through a split with the neoconservative magazine Commentary after it refused to run his review of The Bell Curve . Now he would sever ties with AEI over The End of Racism . D’Souza and Murray would remain at the think tank for years, part of what one critic called AEI’s “race desk”—which now had no Black conservatives. More than that, AEI had now rewarded the politics of outrage, outrage, making clear that it valued precisely the kind of controversy that led to Loury’s and Woodson’s resignations. 38
For D’Souza, it was all upsides. His and Brimelow’s and Murray’s experiences served, for a conservative movement that had grown uncertain about how best to talk about race, as proof of concept for how to use controversy to gain stature and win big advances in the post-Reagan conservative movement.

* Nineteen ninety-five was Laura Ingraham’s year. You could find her everywhere. Settled in the driver’s seat of her army-green Range Rover, zipping through Washington, DC, at sixty mph. Lounging in the back of a black limousine en route to the airport to make that evening’s taping of Politically Incorrect . On the cover of New York Times Magazine in a leopard-print miniskirt, arms crossed and chin jutting up in a defiant pose. “It’s getting a little crazy,” she told a Wall Street Journal reporter writing a profile of her that fall, “but it’s fun.”
Practically overnight, Ingraham had become one of the most sought-after conservative commentators in the country, the breakout star of a new group of right-wing women pundits. Young, telegenic professionals, they marketed themselves as next-generation conservatives: stylish, outrageous, media savvy, and steeped in pop culture.

* While the 1990s marked a turning point for right-wing media, which flourished online and on air, places like the new cable channel Fox News were not the main breeding grounds for the new brand of conservative pundit. Like most up-and-coming stars of the right, Ingraham made her way into the spotlight as a right-wing voice in mainstream outlets. She was a regular on Bill Maher’s comedy show Politically Incorrect , where she learned to blend politics with humor and outrage. She wrote occasional op-eds for the New York Times and worked as a pundit for CBS before being given her own show on the new cable network MSNBC in 1996. The style often credited to Fox News—the flashy graphics, punch-to-the-face punditry, and leggy blonde anchors—had been well-developed elsewhere first.

* Though she seemed like an overnight success, Ingraham had been laying the groundwork for a career in punditry for over a decade by the time she appeared on the cover of New York Times Magazine . Her career flowed from two main tributaries: the Dartmouth Review and the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF). Those conservative institutions played a significant role in shaping the identity and style that would fuel her success in nonconservative outlets in the mid-1990s.
She arrived at Dartmouth in 1981, a few years after Dinesh D’Souza, and quickly fell in with him and the rest of the crew at the Dartmouth Review . Under his tutelage, she honed her ability to provoke liberals and snag headlines. She became editor of the Review after D’Souza graduated, practicing the same style of provocation publishing that had come to define the paper.

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