Why young Americans passively accept the status quo

I just finished reading Bruce Levine's article at Alternet: "8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance." It is a rare day when I read a detailed article with which I so completely agree. Here are eight reasons why the great majority of young Americans passively accept massive social injustice, incessant warmongering, and a stunning amount of lying and betrayal by most of their so-called leaders: 1. Student-Loan Debt. 2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance. 3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy. 4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” 5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously 6. The Normalization of Surveillance. 7. Television. 8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism. I highly recommend Levine's article for more details on each of these reasons. I especially agree with his arguments that by fighting back, young Americans perceive that they are putting at risk their chances of engaging in the material good life that they crave.  Fighting back, and even speaking out in person, can destroy one's chances of getting a "good" job. [More . . . ]

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Michelle Bachmann’s crusade against sustainability

In "First They Came for the Lightbulbs," Tim Murphy of Mother Jones explores Michelle Bachmann's war against sustainability. Bachmann has described the enemy as follows:

"This is their agenda—I know it's hard to believe, it's hard to fathom, but this is 'Mission Accomplished' for them," she said of congressional Democrats. "They want Americans to take transit and move to the inner cities. They want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, [and] take light rail to their government jobs. That's their vision for America."
Murphy explains that the Republican fears about "sustainability" have mushroomed into something even much larger. Under the environmentalists' plans, people would be:
instructed to live in "hobbit homes" in designated "human habitation zones" (two terms embraced by tea party activists). Public transportation would be the only kind of transportation, and governments would force contraception on their citizens to control the population level. A human life would be considered no more significant than, say, that of a manatee. "Sustainability," the idea at the heart of the agreement, became a gateway to dystopia.

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Scary News from the Christian Coalition

I did not opt out of the Christian Coalition newsletter mailing list that someone unknown signed me up for some months ago. It helps to keep an eye on what the other side is up to. The Aug 5, 2011 issue includes the following scary observation:

"Critics and supporters of the Budget Control Act ... agree that the Tea Party now controls the agenda in Washington D.C. As one who attended Glenn Beck's Tea Party event last August -- along with over a half million other Tea Party supporters -- when looking at the hundreds of thousands of families near the Lincoln Memorial on Washington D.C.'s Mall, I realized that those families represent the large majority of the American people, as anyone with any kind of commonsense would.

Why in particular do I find this scary?
  • Open admission that The Tea Party (not even an official political party) controls the actions of our legislature. This group is a powerful vocal minority, arguably smaller but richer than the 1980's "Moral Majority."
  • Lack of fact checking: The attendance of the Glen Beck event is well established by several independent sources. They range from Beck's hopeful "300,000 to 600,000" and Michelle Bachman's "at least a million" to several actual counts from aerial photos between 60,000 and 87,000.
  • The massive innumeracy that equates "thousands of families" with "large majority of the American people." Please divide several thousand by hundreds of millions and show that this is somehow more than half. 87,000 / 330,000,000 = 0.00026 or somewhat less than a majority, however you massage it.
  • The implication that the openly theocratic ideals of the Tea Party are somehow related to common sense. Even Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" argued against a government supported by the church (as is England's).
  • And in totality, the tone that says that the oddball ideals of this group are somehow mainstream. They seem hopeful about Lenin's maxim that a lie told often enough becomes the truth. And the Christian Coalition is all about The Truth.

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Black Swan moments approaching

Even since my workplace put a television screen in the lunch room, I've gotten a regular dose of the kinds of things that TV offers. I find it incredibly distressing to see that this is the sort of information America relies on. Based on my re-acquaintance with live TV, I know that next week, while the financial markets roil (or not), we will have lots of Black Swan moments by all of the financial "experts." Namely,

The Black Swan Theory or Theory of Black Swan Events is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept that The event is a surprise (to the observer) and has a major impact. After the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight. The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:
-The disproportionate role of high-impact, hard to predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology -The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities) -The psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs.
Truly, I don't know if there's any sort of "expert" that annoys me more than financial markets "experts," especially highly credentialed well-coiffed economists who "explain" things only after they already know that those things have happened. When has any such expert ever had the courage to predict a major development in the market ahead of time?  How many "experts" predicted that they market would lose 7% last week (or even predict that it woudl lose 2%?).  I suspect that I (and I'm not a financial investment expert) could make up lots of "reasons" for anything the market does, as long as you tell me what happened before I need to give my reasons.   If the market went up 1%, I'd say, "You see, the DOW is up 1% because Ben Bernancke stuttered in a press conference and China's 3rd biggest computer factory is 17 days ahead of schedule. And, oh yeah, because a butterfly flapped its wings in Dayton." I could get away with this kind of crap for many years, especially if I were a fast-talking TV "expert" whose pathetic record (i.e., whose lack of meaningful predictions) was (almost) never held up to ridicule. We should make these jokers always videotape their analyses the day prior to the market-day they are analyzing. We should make them record their analyses in that same cock-sure tone of voice they use when they "explain" what has already happened. If we did that, 99% of them would look like idiots. They can't predict short-term markets any more than a historian can predict what will be in tomorrow's newspaper. They lack the honesty to say that they don't know. Or maybe they are so arrogant and dense that Dunning-Kruger runs rampant. Let the silliness begin on Monday.

Continue ReadingBlack Swan moments approaching