Trump supporter charged after breathing forcefully on protesters

 

A 61-year-old man who breathed on protesters while wearing a Trump innertube has been charged with assault, after a heated encounter outside the president’s Virginia golf course on Saturday.

Raymond Deskins, 61, of Sterling, Va., faces one count of misdemeanour assault after a citizen obtained a warrant through a county magistrate, according to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office.

The charge stems from an encounter captured partially on video outside the Trump National Golf Club, where Deskins and two anti-Trump protesters engaged in a shouting match over the weekend. The brief video has circulated widely on social media, although it does not show how the argument began.

The video opens with Deskins shouting at a protester while standing right in front of her. Deskins is not wearing a mask or standing at a distance of six feet — two measures that doctors recommend to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

“Get away from me, get away from me, get away from me!” the woman with the camera can be heard saying, while the man stands immediately in front of her.

Deskins then steps away and walks toward the other woman.

“Do what you want, sweetheart. I’m not in anybody’s face,” he says in the video.

“You are in my face, and you don’t have a mask, so you need to back up,” the other woman says.

The man inhales deeply and breathes forcefully at her, then turns away with a smirk on his face.

“That’s assault!” the women yell at him.

“I breathed on you!” the man says. He then lets out another huff at the woman with the camera. “Now call the cops and ask them to come get me, you simpleton.”

Photos and video show the man was wearing an inner-tube around his belly that had been styled to look like U.S. President Donald Trump. He also sported a Trump campaign shirt.

Protester Kathy Beynette says she started recording the video after the man came “charging across the street” to confront her and her friend.

“He just proceeded to assault us by taking a deep breath and doing a very powerful exhalation on both of us,” Beynette told NBC Washington.

Beynette added that she’s cancelled her Thanksgiving plans because she worries the man might have given her and her friend the coronavirus.

“We’re both senior citizens both close to 70 years old, which puts us in a high-risk category,” she said.

The outgoing president spent Saturday and Sunday golfing. Pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators gathered outside the golf course on both days.

Deskins did not respond to requests for comment from The Guardian, NBC and CNN.

The sheriff’s office announced the charge on Sunday.

“As the incident was not witnessed by law enforcement and the video did not capture the entire interaction, an investigation was conducted on scene and both parties were advised they could go to a Loudoun County Magistrate and seek a citizen obtained warrant,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement.

One of the protesters obtained that warrant, and the sheriff’s deputies served it to Deskins on Sunday afternoon.

He was released on a summons.

The assault allegation has not been tested in court.

Heavy breathing, coughing and spitting have become extremely contentious in 2020, as the global coronavirus pandemic has made people more afraid of one another’s germs. Some have shown they are willing to weaponize that fear in a dispute.

Partisan tensions have been running high in the United States this month, particularly in the wake of the president’s election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump has refused to concede the election and has falsely alleged widespread voter fraud, without presenting evidence in public or in court. Many of his supporters have loudly backed his claims, while his opponents have denounced him with equal force.

Biden won the popular vote by six million, and appears to have secured a larger electoral college win than Trump did in 2016. Trump described that win at the time as a “landslide.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1330636227150815232

https://globalnews.ca/news/7478860/trump-supporter-breathing-assault-protest/

Why there’s mainstream silence about freethinkers

The modern freethought movement is gigantic. Numerous skeptic organizations, magazines, websites, books, online blogs, student secular chapters, videos, podcasts and other voices spread the message that supernatural religion is absurd. But America has a strange contradiction: Mainstream magazines, newspapers, television shows, radio programs and other general media rarely allow a direct challenge to supernatural faith.

I think it’s because they’re mostly for-profit commercial businesses dependent on advertising and/or subscribers. They have multitudes of religious customers who would stop paying or listening if insulted, causing severe audience and ad revenue loss. Print media is an especially endangered species these days, barely clinging to life. Hazards must be avoided like the plague.

As a longtime newspaper editor in Appalachia’s Bible Belt, I have known the dilemma firsthand. Years ago, a column syndication agent visited our newsroom. I told him I’d like to write a national atheist column. He choked on his coffee. I knew my proposal was impossible. No newspaper would print such a column. We couldn’t even print it in my own paper. We would lose thousands of subscribers, maybe sink into bankruptcy.

Since for-profit mainstream outlets are forced into silence, our nonprofit freethought movement lives mostly within its own realm, greatly aided by the wide-open Internet. We have freedom to speak in our own domain, but aren’t fully welcome outside it.

However, religion is dying in the United States. American churches have lost 20 percent of their members in the past two decades. About one-fourth of adults now say their religion is “none” — and for young adults, it’s one-third. Eventually, I hope, “Nones” will become the largest category.

In other words, we skeptics are winning the cultural struggle. Scientific-minded honesty is prevailing. Maybe this snowballing trend will eventually force mainstream media to open their doors.

As for now, commercial media outlets don’t dare assert that religion is hokum. But our freethought community can. We don’t depend on religious subscribers or advertisers. We can proceed full steam ahead to proclaim rational truths without risking losses. We are free to act — driven by convictions, not by the profit motive — and thus the “free” in freethought has multiple meanings.

A great social transformation is occurring in America. Supernaturalism is withering away. The Secular Age is blossoming. Our freethought movement is delivering the message because for-profit media cannot.

FFRF Member James A. Haught, syndicated by PeaceVoice, was the longtime editor at the Charleston Gazette and has been the editor emeritus since 2015. He has won two dozen national newswriting awards and is author of 12 books and 150 magazine essays. He also is a senior editor of Free Inquiry magazine and was writer-in-residence for the United Coalition of Reason.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/freethoughtnow/why-theres-mainstream-silence-about-freethinkers/

 

Should We Do Mind Hacking In Defence of Freedom & Democracy?

This 56 minute PBS broadcast, The Wings of Angels, describes in general audience terms what I now believe has always been the fundamental basis of politics for as long as humans have been doing politics. In essence, politics is a struggle or competition for power, wealth and advantage. The struggle plays out between at least two fundamentally different but not always completely separate human mindsets, cooperative-democratic and competitive-authoritarian. The struggle plays out in the human mind mostly (~97% ?) unconsciously, emotional, intuitive, moral and social, not consciously and rational. Because of that, the human mind is easily hackable and governments, businesses and religions have all developed effective ways to hack our minds.

The program poses the question of whether democracies should consciously engage in mind hacking for good, at least in part as defense against the all-out hacking war that some authoritarian governments, most prominently China, now use to subdue their people and quash dissent, all with the unconscious cooperation of the subjugated people. China present a possible model for the ultimate fate of the human species, eternal enslavement and oppression.

Wings of Angels is the third in a series of three called Hacking Your Mind that PBS produced about the workings of the human mind and what modern cognitive and social science now understand the human condition to be. This program is mind blowing. It is akin to the Netflix documentary Social Dilemma. It is another sign that the incredible importance of modern cognitive and social science in understanding the human condition, politics and everything else about humans.

My description of mind hacking 

Mind hacking happens all the time. People engage in behavior that influences the behavior of others. That happens by shaping the reality others see, e.g., by experiencing a person’s (hacker’s) behaviors, including speech, and unconsciously reacting to it. Whether hacking is intended or not, various behaviors affect the observer’s mental state, cognitive processes and/or level of cognitive function. In politics, there usually is (~99% of the time?) intent to manipulate the target audience’s behavior without their knowledge or consent. That said, people mind hack by simply being alive and interacting with other people. That cannot be helped or changed because it is an inherent, fundamental trait of the human mind. For politics, the main question is whether the hacking is for authoritarianism and the dictator’s vision of law and order, or for messy, chaotic democracy.

Key points 

For those who don't want to take the time to watch this, these three points stand out.

Point #1: Whether we like it or want it or not, we are all mind hackers. Simply being alive and interacting with others hacks minds. This blog post hacks minds, but at least the intent is for good, not bad. Wings of Angels poses the question should we hack in a democracy. But the question is moot. We do hack, whether we like or want it or not. Some people argue a slippery slope will lead democracy into tyranny if we do mind hack. That argument is not accompanied by a recognition of two key points. 

First, there may be a worse slippery slope if we do not hack for good because authoritarians hack their people. Mind hacked authoritarianism could come to dominate the entire human species for thousands of years. In my opinion, it is the most plausible means to enslave the human race forever.[1] Wings of Angels makes that point clear in its discussion of how Chinese authoritarians now effectively employ mind hacking to get the Chinese people to willingly but unknowingly support their own tyranny by suppressing dissent and ‘bad citizenship’. The Chinese voluntary opt-in mind hack tactic is brilliant, brutal and effective. 

Second, mind hacking is multidirectional. It can be for good, bad, stupid, entertainment, educating, disinforming, ethnic cleansing, waging war, saving a marriage, picking better musicians for an orchestra, reducing criminal recidivism, selling anything (smart or dumb, useful or useless, e.g., pet rocks) to consumers or just about anything else. 

Chinese people voluntarily opt-in to a social monitoring and 

grading system that monitors and punishes bad citizens and  

rewards good ones -- essentially everything is monitored 24/7/365

(my guess is that most opt in due mostly to a combination of social  

pressure and a predisposing collective culture mindset)   

Point #2: Mind hacking can have amazing subtlety, power and social reach. It is a true social contagion phenomenon. It can reach past degrees of separation and right through to people's minds and behaviors in ways that profoundly affect other minds and behaviors. This happens without one shred of awareness of any of the people involved. The Wings of Angels discusses research on obese people, their friends, friends of their friends and so on. 

In that research, being obese was shown to reach through to a person separated by at least 3 degrees of separation. The data indicated that an obese friend (1st degree) of an obese friend (2nd degree) of an obese person (3rd degree) can influence whether a person tends to be obese merely by association with the 1st degree friend. That happens without the person even knowing the 2nd or 3rd degree persons exist at all. Something is transmitted from the 3rd degree person all the way to the affected person and no one has any idea that it is happening. The same observation is found with alcohol drinking.

1st degree of separation = friend of a mind hacked person

2nd degree = friend of the friend of the mind hacked person

3rd degree = friend of the friend of the friend of the mind hacked person

4th degree = etc.

If there is any at least partly effective vaccine to this social contagion phenomenon, it lies in teaching self-awareness and critical thinking skills.

Point #3: Lastly, pro-environmental mind hacking research shows that appealing to conscious reason fails, but appealing to the unconscious mind can work quite well. This research harks back to observations on the human condition by the eccentric economist-satirist Thorstein Veblen, some of which are described in his strange, brilliant 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. In short, when one keeps up with the Jonses, one has usually been mind hacked. If Jones buys a Buick, you buy a Buick or preferably a Cadillac or BMW. That's a mind hack. In this situation, at least some people are probably aware to some extent that they are keeping up with the Jonses, but they aren't aware they have been mind hacked. 

The research looked for ways to get people to be more energy efficient, e.g., by using less energy and having lower utility bills. Three groups received one of three different appeals to conscious reason, e.g. it will lower your energy bills or your children will be better off if the environment is not so polluted. Once group was mind hacked by appeal to what the Jonses do. The mind hack group was simply shown how much energy their household used compared to their neighbors (the Jonses) and told nothing else.

The result? Only the mind hack group showed a significant energy use drop. The other groups did not change in their energy consumption. Based on that research, appeals to slow, weak conscious reason to help the environment failed, but appeals to the fast powerful unconscious mind succeeded. If that research is replicated and holds up, this observation reflects the core messages that Nobel laureate Daniel Khaneman described in his well-known 2012 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and what psychologist Johnathan Haidt described in his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Questions:

Should our government use mind hacks to better serve the public interest, or is it too dangerous?

Did Obama make a mistake when he opened a federal office dedicated to applying behavioral science to federal policy when possible? 

Footnote: 

1. Most plausible because it is the political “ideology” most based on what the human mind is and how it works according to modern science. Science-based political ideology transcends liberalism, conservatism, Christianity, capitalism, socialism, fascism, racism and all the other significant ideologies in politics that I am aware of in terms of effectiveness. To the best of my knowledge, only pragmatic rationalism (PR) can potentially come close to what the Chinese government has done and is doing (Only potential because it is not a significant political ideology and the hypothesis remains untested). That is because PR is also based on the science of the human mind. PR, like the Chinese counterpart, rational authoritarianism(?), tries to understand and accept humans for what they are, not for what they ought to be according to any ideology that is unduly detached from relevant science. 

The Wings of Angels points out that the short 2009 book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, a book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein was highly influential in shaping Chinese government thinking about how to control its people. Thaler's work earned him a Nobel prize in 2015 in behavioral economics for his understanding that humans are not the rational creatures that obey the complex equations that economists falsely believed they obey. The Chinese are dead serious about using cognitive and social science to inform their brilliant mind hacking tactics.

I've posted several times about the growing Chinese authoritarian cognitive mind hack technology and its underlying foundation in advanced, all-encompassing deep surveillance technology. For example, the Chinese government uses it for ethnic cleansing and reinforcing good citizenship as the dictators explicitly define good citizenship and grade people on. The lives of bad citizens are forced into misery, low income and low social status. Who knows, maybe they go extinct.

Storm Clouds Are On The Horizon

No to Biden's appointees

Several signs of long-lasting political dysfunction and even more polarization are coming clear. The New York Times writes on bitter partisanship in the US Senate that indicates the GOP has no interest in how voters voted or in engaging in rampant hypocrisy. The NYT writes:

“WASHINGTON — Senator Bernie Sanders, the progressive Vermont independent, has emerged as a contender for labor secretary in President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration, a prospect that would suit his ambitions of being a warrior for working Americans — and one that makes some Senate Republicans very uneasy.

“I think that is somebody who we know is an ideologue and, well, it would be very unlikely he would be confirmed in a Republican-held Senate,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, one of multiple Republicans who said Mr. Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, would be unlikely to win the chamber’s approval.

It is a testament to the deterioration of the Senate confirmation process that a longtime colleague — even one they vehemently oppose on policy — would face such a Republican roadblock. In the not-too-distant past, fellow senators got considerable leeway from the opposing party if they were selected to join the executive branch.

“The truth is, to the best of my knowledge, there has been a courtesy within the Senate that when a president nominates senators, they have been approved,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. 

The growing senatorial resistance to Mr. Sanders even before any formal action by the new administration reflects the formidable task Mr. Biden faces. Should Republicans hold on to their Senate majority next year, Mr. Biden would be the first president since George Bush in 1989 to enter office without his party controlling the chamber and managing the confirmation process. And that process has grown much more toxic, to the point where senators routinely engage in near-blanket opposition to the picks of a president from the opposite party — if they allow consideration at all.”

For a hard core, uncompromising radical right ideologue like Cornyn to complain about ideologues is about as hypocritical as hypocrisy can get. Cornyn did not oppose the raging authoritarian ideologues that Trump nominated for his administration. That fact does not faze him or probably most or all other radical right GOP senators in the slightest. Hypocrisy isn’t illegal, so why not be a radical right hypocrite? It is fun and easy to be hypocritical and obstructionist. Just say no.

How bad can this get? Very bad. McConnell can block every single executive branch and judicial nominee if he wants to. Given his proud self-description as the Grim Reaper of whatever displeases him, he just might choose to do total obstructionism or something fairly close to it. This could be a new norm for the GOP. Time will tell.

No to bipartisan economic cooperation

Equally toxic is the intentional sabotaging of the transition to Biden. Here, the Trump and his GOP enablers are intentionally sabotaging economic and public health policy to make life harder for Biden once he is in office. Presumably, the vengeful Trump and his purely partisan GOP enablers will sabotage whatever they think will hurt Biden. In the sabotaging process, some or many Americans can expect to experience serious economic pain and even death. The NYT writes about unwarranted economic sabotage:

“Imagine a divorced couple that simply can’t get along. They share custody of the children, but have completely different visions of how to raise them.

It is not an ideal situation, but this couple realizes that, despite mutual resentments, raising healthy, happy children is a shared goal. Each parent may get annoyed at the other now and again, but they know they need to maintain some continuity in how the children are raised and not let disputes ruin their lives. 

That, in recent decades, has been how economic policy has worked in the United States. Republicans and Democrats might have had different agendas and philosophies, but both fundamentally wanted a vibrant United States economy and, when the time came for one party to hand over control to the other, both ensured a smooth transition of economic policy.

This week, there are clear signs that tradition is breaking down — that the outgoing Trump administration is seeking to deprive President-elect Joe Biden of crucial tools to sustain and revitalize the economy. It suggests a future in which there is less continuity in economic policy and more abrupt risk of crisis or downturn every time party control changes.

The most startling example was a decision on Thursday by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin not to extend beyond the end of the year several joint Treasury-Federal Reserve lending programs that started in the early weeks of the Covid pandemic. The decision to end them went against Fed officials’ wishes, and he asked the Fed to return to the Treasury funds already provided for those programs.  

One problem with the more partisan economic policy transition underway now is that it tends to fuel tit-for-tat reciprocity. If President Biden is handing over power to a Republican in the winter of 2025 or 2029, will his team seek the same partisan advantage by salting the earth on the way out? If this is the new normal, is it possible to go back to the old normal?”

So, in the process of serving party over country and people politics, the radical right GOP engages in practices that will lead to needless deaths of innocent Americans and needless economic pain. The full blossom and effect of GOP poison on the American government and people is becoming clear. Trump’s behaviors, e.g., inciting violence against perceived opponents, reasonably earns him the label of domestic terrorist, along with some other labels, e.g., chronic liar, crook, traitor, incompetent, etc.

Increasingly, the GOP is earning, or has earned, some or all of the same labels. In view of its economic and political sabotage, it is fair and reasonable to apply the label “domestic terrorist organization” to the GOP. Or, is that still over the top and not reasonably defensible?