The power of listening

A good friend of mine named Tom was an excellent parent - his son was a really cool kid. When I was about to adopt my first child I asked him what advice he had for raising children. He said, "Listen to them. Listen actively. Everything else will follow from that." After having raised two children, I find that to be excellent advice. Eric Barker has published a post on the power of listening. He calls it, "How To Be Loved By Everyone: 6 Powerful Secrets," which is not a good title, because I consider it self destructive to try to be loved by everyone. But I agree with the content of the post, which centers on improving relationships by active listening. Here are Barker's take-aways:

Be a detective. You need to be interested. The best way to do that is to play detective and be curious. How little can you say? Ask questions. Paraphrase to make sure you understand. Past that, just shut up. Can you summarize to their approval? If you paraphrase what they said and they reply, “Exactly” — you win. Don’t try to fix them. Be Socrates. Help them find their own solution. People remember their own ideas best. Monitor body language. Eye contact and open postures are good. Touch their elbow to help create a bond. Review the common mistakes we all make. And then don’t do them. Listen and people will listen back. In fact, they’ll do more than that. They will come to trust and love you.
He ends with this quote by David Augsburger: “Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable."

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Hierarchy of religious beliefs

Friendly Atheist comments on a pyramid of the hierarchy of religious beliefs here.    And here is the original article at The Reason Stick.   The author comments: "While much thought and effort is directed at tackling those at the top of the pyramid, society seems equally keen to continue fuel the system from the bottom, ensuring that we have a constant fresh supply of enough receptive minds to climb to the top of the pyramid." religious hierarchy    

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About “race”

On FB, someone recently complained that race is not a legitimate concept. The writer claims to be Libertarian and wants to dismantle all government laws protecting citizens on the base of racism. Here is my response:

It is my position that you are overstating the role of Obama in peddling of "race" as a legitimate concept. The peddlers of racialism are ubiquitous, all stripes of people want to believe that they can use the skin color and body features as a proxy for a personality type. It's been going on for many decades and centuries and, in my opinion, it's time to put this stupidity to a stop. That said, I have no idea of how to do this, but the first step would be to say "Halt!" to everyone, all the pundits, social workers, media reporters, judges and every one else who claims that there is some scientific or social basis for claiming there to be sub-races to the human race. It's much like climate change. There is no basis for the belief in race (or the denial of human-caused climate change), yet the stupidity has taken on a life of its own. Careful scientists with expertise in biology have weighed in, almost entirely in unison. There is no "black" or "white" or "Chinese" race. Belief in race has no more basis than the belief in phrenology, and if there were big money, careers and xenophobia making use of phrenology, that silliness would still be with us too. Skin is an organ. It comes in different shades of brown. If skin were transparent, we'd be manipulating/exploiting/threatening each other on the colors of our livers, kidneys and lungs too. But I write this with a caveat - There are still many bigots running amok, much of this caused by the widespread misconception that there is such a thing as race. I would not outright eliminate all laws that protect people from racial discrimination. I would not make it an element of these laws that one is of a particular "race," however, because I don't believe in race. Rather, the protection would be given to anyone who is fired/excluded on the basis that they are perceived to be of a certain "race," even though there is no such thing as race. In short, there can be racism even though there is no such thing as race, and people should be protected from racism, because it is a pernicious belief that causes widespread harm to society, in addition to causing specific harm to specific people.

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The extent to which partisan thinking dominates politics

How much does it affect how you think about legislation that it was sponsored by YOUR political party? To a shocking extent, according to this article by The Hill.

We presented respondents with two different education plans . . . [H]alf the sample was told A was the Democratic plan and B was the Republican plan, while the other half of our national sample was told A was the Republican plan and B was the Democrats’ approach. The questions dealt with substantive policy on a subject quite important to most Americans — education — and issues that people are familiar with — class size, teacher pay and the like. Nonetheless, when the specifics in Plan A were presented as the Democratic plan and B as the Republican plan, Democrats preferred A by 75 percent to 17 percent, and Republicans favored B by 13 percent to 78 percent. When the exact same elements of A were presented in the exact same words, but as the Republicans’ plan, and with B as the Democrats’ plan, Democrats preferred B by 80 percent to 12 percent, while Republicans preferred “their party’s plan” by 70 percent to 10 percent. Independents split fairly evenly both times. In short, support for an identical education plan shifted by more than 60 points among partisans, depending on which party was said to back it. Thus, policy positions were not driving partisanship, but rather partisanship was driving policy positions. Voters took whichever position was ascribed to their party, irrespective of the specific polices that position entailed.

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