Musings

 

The $100 Billion Dollar Ingredient Making Your Food Toxic

 

(Use extra virgin olive oil & stay healthy! Throwing out all of my vegetable oil right now!!)

How Conservatives Co-Opted Christianity

 

 

 

If you live in the United States, odds are you've encountered the distinctly American "conservative christian." It seems that these people, despite their fierce devotion to their faith, have no idea what the Bible actually calls them to do. This short but incisive clip takes look at how christianity was adopted and perverted by the American political Right, and how it differs from the christianity of the early church.

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Can you see the Absurdity of our World? Can you Imagine another Society?

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Andy Norman: "We Face a Scourge of Mind Parasites"

 

 Source: Salon

We are in the midst of an ignorance outbreak. QAnon's account of global politics, despite being both irrational and implausible, has enraptured thousands. Specious anti-vaccine rhetoric abounds even among the educated. Everywhere we turn, bad ideas are spreading like a, well, virus.

Author Andy Norman takes that problem literally. In his provocative book "Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think," the director of the Humanism Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University and founder of the Cognitive Immunology Research Collaborative reveals a growing scourge — and explores what we can do to fend it off. As he explains why thinking for yourself is a poor strategy and why everyone is not, in fact, entitled to their own opinion, Norman offers a compelling case for a regimen of mental resistance.In the interview below, the author talks about how to survive an era where misinformation is more common than the flu, and why "humility is a really important, under-appreciated cognitive virtue.

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When you say that bad ideas are mind parasites, you mean just that. Tell me about that, because that is hard, especially for those of us with a philosophical bent to get our heads around.

It's certainly stretching the concept of a parasite in a new direction, right? Words evolve as people find analogies or metaphors that are useful. One way to get used to the idea is to acknowledge that I'm stretching the concept of parasite into a new domain. It doesn't have to change our concept of bad idea; it's another way to look at it. Parasites require a host, bad ideas require a host. Parasites often compromise the health of their hosts. Bad ideas can also compromise the mental wellbeing of their hosts. Parasites can leap from body to body. Bad ideas can leap from mind to mind.

Parasites can induce behavior that spreads the parasite to other bodies by inducing a sneeze, and bad ideas can induce their hosts to spread them by, for example, proselytizing or sharing things on Facebook. If you go through and create a list of attributes that parasites have, bad ideas have all of the relevant properties. It makes sense to think of bad ideas as mind parasites, and it's useful in illuminating in ways that give us new strategies for combating them.


When we think about inoculating the mind — how do we do that when so many of us really seem to be very adamantly anti-vaccine?

Convincing the anti-vaxxers to get their minds inoculated is of course probably the hardest problem of them all. One of the things the science says is that it's easier to prevent the mind infection than to cure one. If you can teach somebody critical thinking when they're young, hopefully you don't have to do any cult deprogramming later in their lives. Or you don't have to try to rid your crazy uncle of QAnon beliefs if that crazy uncle learned critical thinking young and never has to be deprogrammed

Psychologists have been studying mind inoculation for about fifty years now. Exposure to certain kinds of arguments and objections can strengthen the mind's resistance to bad ideas. It can also strengthen our mind's resistance to good ideas and arguments. In other words, you can manipulate a mental immune system in such a way as to make it reject good arguments. Propagandists and demagogues use such strategies almost instinctively. The famous logical fallacy of straw man argumentation works because it sort of hijacks the mind's immune system and induces it to overreact to a good argument.


One of the things I found interesting in the book is this idea of a social immunity building. In the same way that a collective ideology can be dangerous, collaborative understanding can strengthen us.

Jonathan Rauch's new book, "The Constitution of Knowledge," is very good on this. He points out that the best exemplars we have in our culture of knowledge construction are all profoundly collaborative. Good investigative reporting often involves many people collaborating together. Research often requires peer review and an entire community of researchers checking results. The best thinking is deeply collaborative. That means that the advice we often give young people today, "Think for yourself," is terribly ambiguous and not necessarily good advice. We worry that when people think together, they'll slip into groupthink, and that's why we run around telling young people to think for themselves. what we now need to do is teach people how to think together and to help each other identify each other's mind parasites. No one of us can do enough to keep our minds healthy, unless we learn how to collaborate with others who see things differently and can spot things we miss.


And that is tricky, because you talk about the Lake Wobegon effect, where we all think we're above average. How do we get unstuck from that, and admit, "I don't know everything"?

Humility is a really important, under appreciated cognitive virtue.One way to do it is to engage in Socratic dialogue. Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, would pose questions that would raise people's awareness of the gaps in their understanding. The more aware you become the gaps in your understanding, the more humble you'll be, and the wiser you become. We need to learn a form of discourse, a form of conversation and a mode of idea testing, that gives much more time and attention to the questions and that fixates less on easy answers. When you spend time considering other people's doubts and questions and challenges, those are essentially the mind's antibodies.

Think of doubts as the antibodies of the mind, and your mind will generate some of them. Other people's minds can generate other questions, other doubts. By paying attention to them in a conversation that's full of clarifying questions, that turns out to be one of the most powerful mind inoculants of all. It requires getting the hang of a really fascinating mode of discourse, which is kind of philosophical. It places a great deal of emphasis on clarifying and trying to, together, figure out the shape of the gaps in our understanding and starting to get our heads around what it would take to fill those gaps.

It requires being okay with the discomfort of maybe being wrong, and not getting the high that we get from our confirmation biases.

The great British philosopher Bertrand Russell said one of the premier virtues of philosophy is that it helps us become comfortable with uncertainty. There's a great deal of uncertainty in the world and especially in this fast breakneck society we have right now. Then once you learn how to be comfortable with uncertainty and to navigate that uncertainty primarily with questions. The fast pace of modern life can make you really anxious. And when you're anxious, you don't think clearly.

I'm wondering where you see the place of faith and spirituality in this really strong interrogation. When you say a belief is reasonable if it can withstand challenges, where do people of faith fit into that?

I have both a cautionary word for people of faith and a word of encouragement. When people use the word "faith" to excuse irresponsible believing, believing that has no basis, that weakens their mind's immune system. You can accustom yourself to believing things without support or believing things without empirical validation or believing by simply brushing aside questions. When your mind becomes comfortable with that mode, your resistance to mind parasites declines. There's research out of Canada now that says that if you raise a child to accept things on faith, they're more likely to become a conspiracy theorist later in life. Many forms of religious faith are very problematic from a mental health standpoint. They provide a kind of superficial comfort at the expense of our long-term ability to spot and remove bad ideas.


But many people use the word "faith" in a somewhat different way that I want to express sympathy and approval of. That's to say, we need hope. There's something profoundly admirable about being resolutely hopeful, being determined, just being willfully hopeful. I think it's great to be willfully hopeful. I think it's bad to indulge in willful believing. Depending on what we mean by faith, that's either a good or a very bad thing. Faith understood as resolute hopefulness is a wonderful thing, faith understood as willful belief I think is a profoundly harmful thing for collective prospects.

One of the important things that I took from this book was this idea that our beliefs are not private. This both-sides-ism, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion" doesn't help and is actively toxic. You say there are certain worldviews that are just toxic.

When people start doing things that harm others, I think we start to develop grounds for objecting to those behaviors, and belief is just like that. If you believe things that don't harm others, fine. But if you believe things that indirectly do harm others, they become a matter of public concern. So if I believe that vaccines are the spawn of the devil and refuse to vaccinate my kids, my kids end up being harmed. My beliefs can harm others. If I believe irresponsible things and end up casting my votes or for a would-be authoritarian leader, I end up harming the entire public.


When you dwell on examples of beliefs that harm others, you realize that it's perfectly irresponsible to indulge the idea that everyone is entitled to their beliefs. It lets our beliefs both drift away from what's genuinely helpful and moral, but it also lets them drift away from reality and lets them drift away from each other. And when our worldviews drift too far apart, as we're seeing now, it gets really hard to have productive conversations and to keep a specific experiment together. So for social reasons, for truth and honesty reasons, and for moral reasons, we need to get rid of the idea that belief is where everyone is entitled to their opinion, and instead adopt a more public spirited concept of belief.

How do we then translate that to our combative relatives and neighbors in a way that doesn't escalate the polarization?

The same way your body's immune system can overreact and attack your body, the mind's immune system can overreact and attack good information, even in your own mind. The trick is learning how to calm your mind so you don't feel defensive so that we can actually dialogue together in fruitful ways. I think that the emerging science of mental immunity can help us learn how to maintain that calm demeanor, where we don't get defensive by other people's arguments and reasons. The problem is that when we get defensive, we stop listening to one another. We stop hearing each other's reasons, and learning from them.

Black Americans Resettling in Ghana

 

White America has declared over & over again via its mores, values & norms that in spite of becoming a hegemon on the backs of African slaves, it no longer wants the descendants of these African slaves on this stolen & cursed land. Garvey declared early "let's get the fuck out!" but most wanted to stay put in their anguish & misery as that was all they ever knew in their anti-Black environment. To this day, most will choose to remain chained to their dehumanization trying to "fake it til they make it" to achieve a pipe dream called the American Dream.

Few choose to embark on that journey of return to ancestral lands & reclaim their name...their dignity..their truth. As White America spirals downwards under the weight of its countless crimes against humanity, against Nature, against Life itself, I see this movement of return picking up steam in the years ahead - it may be the only option left as the long shadow of Death spreads across the land mercilessly......

Fascism is a Mind-Killer by Chauncey DeVega

 

 

 Source: Flipboard

Years ago in a high school anatomy class, I saw film footage of a man — perhaps a prison inmate or a patient at a mental hospital — who "volunteered" for a heinous medical experiment. His brain was bisected, meaning the left and right spheres were surgically split from one another. He survived the procedure, but his left and right hands now behaved as if they belonged to two different people. The man was told to use his right hand, the one over which he still had conscious control, to seize control of the left hand. The left hand continually escaped, and the two hands essentially began fighting with each other. He begged the doctors for help, but they were too busy obsessively noting every detail of the "subject's" behavior. Our teacher told us the film came from her "private collection."

That has stuck with me ever since, and it now seems a perfect metaphor for America in the Age of Trump, plagued by a fascist movement and so many other pathologies and signs of moral and political rot. We are like that unfortunate man, a psychically split nation whose hands are fighting with one another.

A new CNN public opinion poll reports that most Americans "feel democracy is under attack in this country," with 51% of respondents saying "it is likely that elected officials in the U.S. will successfully overturn the results of a future election because their party did not win." Nearly all those surveyed said that democracy in America was either "under attack" (56%) or "being tested" (37%), with only 6%, barely over one person in 20, saying that "American democracy is in no danger."

But there are important differences:

Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to say that democracy is under attack, and that view is most prevalent among those who support former President Donald Trump. All told, 75% of Republicans say democracy is under attack, compared with 46% of Democrats. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, those who say Trump ought to be the leader of the party are much likelier to see democracy as under threat: 79% in that group vs. 51% among those who say Trump should not be the party's leader. ...

Among Republicans, 78% say that Biden did not win and 54% believe there is solid evidence of that, despite the fact that no such evidence exists. That view is also deeply connected to support for Trump. Among Republicans who say Trump should be the leader of the party, 88% believe Biden lost — including 64% who say there is solid evidence that he did not win — while among those Republicans who do not want Trump to lead the Party, 57% say Biden won legitimately.

Furthermore, Democrats and Republicans polled hold very different views on whether voting rules "make it too hard to vote" or "aren't strict enough to prevent illegal votes." Among Republicans, 83% take the latter position, while 66% of Democrats believe voting rules are overly restrictive.

These polls and others show the depth of America's democracy crisis goes well beyond reasonable differences of opinion about mutually agreed-upon facts. Instead, America's democracy crisis reflects a battle over the nature of reality itself.

Agreement on basic facts and a shared reality itself are necessary for a functioning, healthy society. These shared beliefs are especially critical in a democracy because of the role citizens play in collective decision-making. To that end, attacking truth and reality is one of the primary weapons used by fascist leaders and movements.

Democracy can eventually be exhausted by these attacks before succumbing to disorientation and confusion where fascism is normalized as a type of "solution" — a way to restore order and address the very social and political problems it has both created and made worse.Advertisement:

This week, during an interview on the podcast SmartLess, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns described America in this moment of extreme crisis, saying, "It's really serious. There are three great crises before this: the Civil War, the Depression, and World War II. This is equal to it."

In a new essay, legendary CBS News anchor Dan Rather sounds a similar note of alarm and concern: and alarm about America's democracy crisis.

What is happening now in our nation's capital, and radiating throughout the country, is enough to put even the most cynical of politicians of past eras to shame.

I fear that we don't have an adequate framework to make complete sense of the depravity and disingenuousness of what is taking place. Basically, we have one political party at the national level, the Republicans, who have long since ceded any pretense of actually doing the work of government, namely making policies to solve problems. Instead, it is raw power for power's sake, and that has turned Congress into what is in essence largely a troll farm on their side of the aisle.

CNN's new findings offer further proof of the Orwellian power that the Republican Party and fascist movement have over their followers. In practice this power involves creating an alternate reality through the manipulation of language and the use of disinformation, outright lies, moral inversion and other tactics.

In the Republican alternate reality, democracy itself has been redefined to mean a condition under which Republicans and Trumpists win every election. If they somehow lose, then by definition the result was not "democratic" and is therefore deemed illegitimate. Such elections must be overturned or reworked or reverse-engineered until the "correct" result is achieved. 

Free and fair elections where the public will is respected, minority rights are guaranteed and leaders are held accountable to the voters and the rule of law — although inevitably imperfect — are the most basic criteria for a democracy.

The Republican Party and its nearly coterminous neofascist movement has mutated those norms as part of a plan to create a form of "managed democracy" or "competitive authoritarianism," under which chosen candidates are guaranteed to win but the superficial norms of democracy are observed and opposition is tolerated (up to a point).Advertisement:

Today's Trump-controlled Republican Party and the larger white right have become obsessed with "election fraud" and "securing" the votes. In their version of Orwell's Newspeak, "fraud" refers to the alarming possibility that votes cast by Black and brown people might be counted on an equal basis with those of white Republicans in affluent exurbs and "red states." 

Through that same logic, "securing" the vote ultimately means that nonwhite people and other core Democratic constituencies should have their voting rights severely restricted. Voting is to be understood as a privilege granted to the "right kinds of people."

Projection is also a powerful weapon in the neofascist assault on American democracy and society, which often employs Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels' famous dictum: "Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty."

Perhaps most troubling, Trump and his neofascist movement's "Big Lie" strategy about the 2020 election is gaining momentum: Now more than three-quarters of Republican voters (and increase since the events of Jan. 6) endorse it. The Big Lie is now a proxy for supporting Donald Trump, a signal that you are a loyal member of his personality cult.Advertisement:https://96d8dea5b6d07a4b83000aaa58b4cd1e.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

In the bestselling book "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump," therapist Elizabeth Mika warns of fascism's alluring and seductive power:

Tyranny feeds on the irrationality of narcissistic myths and magical thinking, even though its ideology may be disguised as hyper-rationalism, as it was the case with Communism. In this, it very much resembles the narcissistically psychopathic character of the tyrant himself: solipsistic, withdrawn from reality, full of grandiose and paranoid beliefs impervious to the corrective influences of objective facts.

In his essay "The Politics of Disimagination and the Pathologies of Power," philosopher and education professor Henry Giroux argues that American society is experiencing such extreme and rapid decline that engaged and responsible citizenship — which offers robust protection against the allure of fascism and other anti-human movements and beliefs — has become increasingly uncommon:

Civic illiteracy is the modus operandi for creating depoliticized subjects who believe that consumerism is the only obligation of citizenship, who privilege opinions over reasoned arguments, and who are led to believe that ignorance is a virtue rather than a political and civic liability….

The politics and machinery of disimagination and its production of ever-deepening ignorance dominates American society because it produces, to a large degree, uninformed customers, hapless clients, depoliticized subjects and illiterate citizens incapable of holding corporate and political power accountable. At stake here is more than the dangerous concentration of economic, political and cultural power in the hands of the ultrarich, megacorporations and elite financial services industries. Also at issue is the widespread perversion of the social, critical education, the public good, and democracy itself.

Those who choose to live inside TrumpWorld and the MAGAverse are lost souls, they are the Lost Americans.

There is little if anything that can be done to return them to normal society and empirical reality. What such people have found in those imaginary realms is too compelling, too exciting and answers too many of their needs and existential questions. The poison they have found there soothes their pain, even as it destroys them. It is foolish to hope or believe that the Trumpites and other neofascists will ever willingly abandon their safe space.

Fascism is governed by the passions, soul and spirit. It is the enemy of intellect and reason, which is why the uninitiated are so confounded by it. Fascism is the mind-killer. The alternate reality it has now created within American society is in danger of conquering and absorbing the other reality — the real one, where most of us still live.

How Caffeine Addiction Changed History

 

 

  Source: Wired

 

90% of the world's adults consume some form of caffeine everyday, making it the most widely used psychoactive drug on Earth. Michael Pollan, author of "This Is Your Mind On Plants," explains why. Michael goes into the history of coffee drinking, breaking down its origins and how it benefits humankind. 

Listen to a sample from This Is Your Mind on Plants

 

PRH Audio · This Is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan, read by Michael Pollan

John Pilger on Afghanistan: US Military a Killing Machine! & How The Taliban Went From Ally to Enemy

 

 

 

Legendary journalist and filmmaker John Pilger discusses the takeover of the Taliban in Afghanistan in this clip. He calls the US military a killing machine and discusses why the Afghanistan War must be viewed through the lens of Western imperialism, the scale of civilian casualties and destruction of Afghanistan by NATO countries, how the US created today’s situation by supporting Afghan jihadist forces against the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, the social progress and progressive reform lost to history with the fall of the Soviet-backed PDPA government in Afghanistan....

Musings

 

Chris Hedges: It's Time For Sublime Madness

 

 

One of my favorite non-fiction writers, Chris Hedges, sits down with the always entertaining & informative Michael Moore on his provocative podcast Rumble

Corruption in South Africa

 

 

A country falls into the hands of kleptocrats, a state is taken over. This happens again and again, all over the world. Including in South Africa, of all places, where the fight for democracy against a brutal apartheid regime was so hard-won. 

 For years, a small group of investigative journalists in South Africa had been on the trail of a gigantic corruption scandal. When they discovered signs of far-reaching corruption involving Jacob Zuma, then president of South Africa, a pernicious disinformation campaign was mounted against the integrity of the journalists. 

Then one day in early 2017, the journalists unexpectedly received a hard drive containing thousands of photos, emails and videos - evidence that laid bare the way the South African state had been taken over by private individuals, with the help of politicians.

 The so-called Gupta Leaks not only proved that the journalists had been right in their suspicions, but showed that the situation was much worse than they thought. Since taking office as president, Jacob Zuma had systematically awarded lucrative government contracts to three brothers from India, the Guptas. 

 Thanks to their good friend Zuma, members of the Gupta family were able to use the proceeds of an entire nation for their own gain, acquiring holdings in coal mines, media and IT companies, and even government positions. 

 The plundering of the state had been shamelessly supported by a group of elite international advisors. As criticism from the media grew louder, the British PR firm Bell Pottinger was hired. The journalists were defamed as agents of "white monopoly capital," and the Guptas stylized as victims of a racist press. But after the publication of the Gupta Leaks, the graft stopped. The Zuma clan and the Guptas lost their power. 

 When a Judicial Commission of Inquiry is finally ordered, Zuma himself testifies. His defense: it's all lies and fake news. In interviews, investigative journalists express their concerns about the global drift toward an ever-increasing entanglement between business and government, and the polarization it causes. Presidents and multinationals live unassailably in their own bubble. As a journalist, all you can do is make life in the bubble a little less comfortable. Is there still room for justice in South Africa's hard-won fledgling democracy? What lessons can be learned for the rest of the world?

The Corporatization of American Science

 

 

 Science historian Clifford Conner is author of the new book The Tragedy of American Science: From Truman to Trump.

Musings

 

Ukuri guca mu ziko ntigushya: The truth goes through fire but never burns (Rwandan proverb)

 

Marcus Garvey Lecture: John Henrik Clarke

 

John Henrik Clarke was a pure Master Teacher. My first introduction to Clarke was in the 90s with the book Africans at the Crossroads: Notes for an African World Revolution which blew my mind.This book still has relevance today & is a must-read for anyone interested in the human struggle for freedom.

 

Ousman Tourey: A Message To All Africans

 

Ousman Touray is a prominent youth leader whose focus is on development and who firmly believes of Pan Africanism. He completed his Bachelor’s degree in Development Studies at the University of The Gambia.

I was quite impressed with this young visionary in both his intellectual acumen & strength of character which are clearly evident in these videos. Current leaders in Africa have much to learn from this future leader. May he continue to blaze across the world with his much needed message of decolonization, unity & transformation from an Afrocentric perspective.