Why we SHOULD talk to strangers

Kim Stark has made a career of talking to strangers. She made it her task to try to understand why she does that, in this TED talk. She has decided that it is better to use one's perceptions than to use categories, such as the category of "stranger." Using this category means that we are not treating others as fully human. There are other benefits. Some studies show that people are more comfortable opening up to strangers than to people they believe they know. We expect that people we know understand us--we expect them to read our minds. Not so with strangers, with whom we start from scratch. Sometimes they do understand us better. Maybe we need strangers, but how should we interact with them, how do we balance both civility and privacy, which are the guiding rules in the U.S. In other countries there are other rules. In Denmark, many folks are extremely adverse to talking to strangers. Stark offers and exercise that involves smiling, and then "triangulation," commenting on a third person or a thing. Or engage in "noticing," such as complimenting the other person on something (and you can most easily talk to a stranger's dog or baby). Or engage in "disclosure," sharing a personal experience, and this tends to cause the "stranger" to reciprocate. Stark's main message is that we need to stop being so wary of strangers and to make a place for them in our lives. At The Atlantic, James Hamblin follows up with his own explorations on talking to strangers.

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Glenn Loury discusses racism with Sam Harris

I found this discussion of race issues by Glenn C. Loury and Sam Harris to be a lively, challenging and candid discussion. Consider, for example, this excerpt on "structural racism":

This is one of the reasons why I think the term “structural racism” is so compelling to many people. But I, a social scientist, find the evocation of that kind of one-size-fits-all narrative—structural racism—inadequate to getting an account of what’s actually going on. It’s not as if there’s a bunch of white people meeting somewhere deciding to make the laws in order to repress blacks. And it’s not as if the outcomes that people are concerned about—in the example at hand, disparities in the incidence of incarceration—are independent of the free choices and decisions that are being made by people, in this case black people, who might end up finding themselves in prison. They made a decision to participate in criminal activities that were clearly known to be illicit and perhaps carried the consequences that they are now suffering, didn’t they? Sometimes the decisions they make have enormous negative consequences for other black people. Do we want to inquire about what’s going on in the homes and communities and backgrounds from which people are coming who are the subjects of this racial inequality? Or are we to assume that any such deficits or disadvantages that are causally associated with their involvement in lawbreaking, and that are related to their own community organization, structures of family, attentiveness of parenting, and so forth, are nevertheless themselves the consequence of white racism? Black people wouldn’t be acting that way if it weren’t for white racism. If there were greater opportunity, if the schools were better funded, if it hadn’t been for slavery, the black family wouldn’t have… So forth, and so on. [more . . . ]

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Clinton Supporters Hoist the Impossible-to-Prove-Standard of Quid Pro Quo Corruption in Defending Despots’ Contributions to the Clinton Foundation’s

At The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald lays out some of the most important principles for which the Clinton charitable foundation ostensibly stands (e.g., women's rights, LGBT rights and economic oppression). He then makes an overwhelming case that the Clinton principles are anathema to the despotic dictatorships "donating" to the Clinton Foundation.  Therefore, it follows (unless one believes that electing Hilary Clinton is so important that clear evidence that she is corrupt is irrelevant) that despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia are donating to the Clinton Foundation for reasons other than furthering the stated goals of the Foundation. So why are the despots shoveling tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation?  Clinton apologists try to redirect the discussion at this point, arguing that the Clinton Foundation has done some excellent charitable work.  Glenn Greenwald responds:

That the Clinton Foundation has done some good work is beyond dispute. But that fact has exactly nothing to do with the profound ethical problems and corruption threats raised by the way its funds have been raised. Hillary Clinton was America’s chief diplomat, and tyrannical regimes such as the Saudis and Qataris jointly donated tens of millions of dollars to an organization run by her family and operated in its name, one whose works has been a prominent feature of her public persona. That extremely valuable opportunity to curry favor with the Clintons, and to secure access to them, continues as she runs for president. . . . .

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ALAIN de BOTTON: We marry the wrong person because we fail to focus on excellence in resolving conflict

Alain de Botton has written an extremely insightful article at the NYT on why we marry the wrong person. What do we traditionally look for: During a perfectly romantic date, we propose marriage as an attempt to bottle up romance forever. Or we act Machiavellian, seeking to find someone for strategic advantages. There's nothing bad about any of this, but it leaves out a critically important area of concern. Alain de Botton urges that we not overlook that we are all dysfunctional, and that dysfunction often is left unexplored until after the vows are uttered.

We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?” Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.
For instance, we tend to seek those things that traditionally make us happy, but many of those things are things from our dysfunctional childhoods:

What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.

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