If Only There Were a Well-Funded Peace Lobby as a Counterweight to the Military Industrial Complex

If only there were an industry of businesses that manufactured goods and services specifically geared to maintaining the peace (something more profitable and focused than libraries). Then there would be a weighty lobby to counterbalance the military-industrial complex. This Peace Lobby could sponsor NFL half-time shows. Instead of showing pretty photos of missiles taking off, they could show what happens to human beings when those missiles land. And they could sponsor research to explore the extent to which U.S. articulates meaningful objectives regarding its wars and also set forth detailed metrics to show whether U.S. wars actually achieve those objectives, using (as one example) the 20-year war in Afghanistan.

They could investigate the extent to which the U.S. government has been honest with the citizens regarding the need for each war. They could have teams of analysts assess the risks and benefits of going to war or not going to war. They could warn us that many media outlets uncritically and gullibly join in whenever politicians beat the drums to go to war. They could also explore the effect on diverting massive U.S. tax resources to war, and they could run campaigns showing the lost benefits of failing to spend those tax resources on peaceful uses, such as decaying U.S. infrastructure. They could also educate Americans of the dangers of the sunk cost fallacy.

Related Thought: If only were were better incentives for Hollywood to produce storylines where war was averted. Unfortunately, scripts permeated with visual violent conflict sells, especially visual conflict involving physical fighting.  I wonder about the filtering that likely occurs when Hollywood script-writers and producers want the cooperation of of the military to use military resources in their movies (e,g., military hardware and access to military ships, planes and bases). If only we had the following data: How often does the U.S. military turn down cooperation of a movie-maker because the script puts the military in a bad light or makes war look like a bad idea?

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Drivers of expensive cars tend to drive their privilege

My gut feeling borne out . . . Drivers of expensive cars are more likely to drive like jerks. These studies explore driver behavior in four-way intersections.

A research team including Berkeley psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner have been examining the way social status and wealth affects morality. Their findings — which are getting a lot of media attention — broadly show that wealthier, higher-status individuals are, essentially, more likely to cheat.
I've explored this topic previously here. John Nichols and William McChesney gathered enough evidence on this topic of wealth privilege to fill an entire book: Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America. Also, check out the new podcast of Michael Lewis, Against the Rules. I've only heard the intro podcast so far ("Ref, You Suck"), but this is podcasting at its best.

The study at the top, involving an simple traffic intersection with simple well-known rules, seemed like an especially good illustration that a disproportionate number of wealthy people feel and act out their privilege, even out in the open.

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Coddled Children Grow up Self-Disruptive

In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Attorney Greg Lukianoff (founder of FIRE) and moral psyhchologist Jonathan Haidt address America’s mushrooming inability to engage in productive civil discourse. Increasing numbers of people are claiming that they cannot cope with ideas that challenge their own world view. They sometimes claim that ideas that challenge their own ideas are "not safe." In dozens of well-publicized cases, rather than work to counteract "bad" ideas with better ideas, they work to muzzle speaker by disrupting presentations or even running the purportedly offensive speakers off campus. There is a related and growing problem. We cannot talk with each other at all regarding many many important issues. We shout each other down and use the heckler's veto. These maladies are especially prominent on some American college campuses, but these problems are also rapidly spreading to the country at large, including corporate America. Consider this 2016 example featuring the students of Yale having a "discussion" with Professor Nicholas Christakis: You would never guess it from this video alone, but this mass-meltdown was triggered after child development specialist Erika Christakis (wife of Nicholas), sent this email to students. This incident at Yale is one of many illustrations offered by Haidt and Lukianoff as evidence of a disturbing trend.  Here's another egregious example involving Dean Mary Spellman at Claremont McKenna College who was run out of her college after committing the sin of writing this email to a student.  More detail here.  The authors offer this as the genesis of the overall problem:

In years past, administrators were motivated to create campus speech codes in order to curtail what they deemed to be racist or sexist speech. Increasingly, however, the rationale for speech codes and speaker disinvitations was becoming medicalized: Students claimed that certain kinds of speech—and even the content of some books and courses—interfered with their ability to function. They wanted protection from material that they believed could jeopardize their mental health by “triggering” them, or making them “feel unsafe.”
The solution offered by Lukianoff and Haidt is to take a moment to stop to recognize what they call the “Three Bad Ideas.”

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Steady Diet of Bad TV and Movies

We are in the middle of a big experiment. What happens when you subject hundreds of millions of people to vivid portrayals inducing consumerist tendencies and paranoia? A haunting thought keeps recurring to me: We were once a nation with such potential, but we have been poisoning ourselves with our mass media. Yes, there are many thoughtful TV shows and movies that challenge us to be self-critical, as well as shows that inspire us to be our best selves, Over the decades, though, we have willingly lapped up far more TV shows and movies that do the opposite. I haven't watched much TV for the past decade, but I do see many previews for shows, and I do check in here and there to see what shows are about. Thousands of plot lines teach us to distrust those who look like they are not from Europe or who talk with an accent. We learn that weapons are the first choice for solving complex social conflicts. We learn that failing to carefully plan works out most of the time. We learn to be cocky in our ignorance embracing Dunning-Krueger as a substitute for being well informed. We learn from show after show that putting other people down or dehumanizing them is a worthy substitute for empathy. We learn that people come in two mutually exclusive flavors, good and bad. We learn that impatiently acting out is often a worthy substitute for hard-earned intelligence and wisdom. We learn that we can recognize the good guys by the fact that they have lots of money, fancy houses, a lot of shiny consumer gadgets, and formidable weapons. [More . . . ]

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Hillary Clinton’s Role in Honduras Coup

Here is another troubling story about Hillary Clinton's willingness to interfere with other governments to serve the interests of U.S. corporations, at the expense of ordinary people. Clinton has eagerly embraced Henry Kissinger as her role model for Secretary of State. The story was told by Dana Frank at Democracy Now, interviewed by Amy Goodman.

As Hillary Clinton seeks to defend her role in the 2009 Honduras coup, we speak with Dana Frank, an expert on human rights and U.S. policy in Honduras. "This is breathtaking that she’d say these things. I think we’re all kind of reeling that she would both defend the coup and defend her own role in supporting its stabilization in the aftermath," Frank says. "I want to make sure that the listeners understand how chilling it is that a leading presidential candidate in the United States would say this was not a coup. … She’s baldly lying when she says we never called it a coup."

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