Happy Holidays versus Merry Christmas

This article discusses using a greeting that respects everyone instead of using one that excludes many religions

By Michael Rubino, Ph.D, MFT, Patch Mayor 

https://patch.com/california/pleasanthill/happy-holidays-versus-merry-christmas

Last year there was a big debate between people saying Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays. The United States has people from various ethnic backgrounds and religions living in our Country. There are also many people who have no religious beliefs. Our Country is suppose to be the "great melting pot." Therefore, we are suppose to all live together peacefully and respectfully together.

Unfortunately, it does not appear we are living up to the goal of being the "great melting pot." We have people who are singling out certain nationalities and trying to prevent them from immigrating to the United States. We have also seen a 57% increase in crimes against people of Jewish decent. For example, last year the largest amount of Jewish people in the United States where killed at one time as they were worshiping in their Temple. This type of violence has not occurred for decades, but it is baaack. Freedom of religion is one of the core beliefs of the United States. However, it does appear that core belief is eroding and possibly disappearing.

In addition to increase discrimination towards ethnicities and religions, there is an increase in the discrimination towards people who are homosexual or identify as anything other than heterosexual. The United States Declaration of Independence states, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These are the beliefs that our Country is based on and what our Country represents. It states "all men" not just Caucasian people, not just Christian people and not just people who are heterosexual.

The Declaration of Independence and Constitution assume that we may have differences in our cultures or religious beliefs, but that we can all live together peacefully and respect one another. Unfortunately, when we see a 57% rise in hate crimes towards people who are Jewish, we are not living together peacefully or respectfully.

This brings me to the debate between Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. I am a proud Italian, Catholic, American, however, my family taught me to respect people regardless of ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. Therefore, I always wish people Happy Holidays. In the United States during this time of year we celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa (I am sure there are some religious celebrations I missed) and New Years. If I am going to be respectful, Happy Holidays is the most appropriate saying not Merry Christmas. Some one may not be Christian and they may have no religious beliefs at all. However, most likely they celebrate Thanksgiving and New Years. Happy Holidays covers this without imposing my beliefs on someone else. Everyone who is Christian think about this point, what if you were not allowed to say Merry Christmas or if the entire Country acted like Christmas did not exist? How would that make you feel? You probably would not like it.

Therefore, I think we need to return to our roots: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." This is a very powerful statement and in order to honor it we must respect all cultures, religions and sexual orientations. This statement is what makes the United States so different from every other country in the world. If we are going to honor our Country then Happy Holidays is the appropriate greeting during this time of year not Merry Christmas. If you are Christian it is appropriate to say in your home and at your Church not at work or out in public.

We also need to look at the amount of violence that is occurring in our Country. Besides fire drills at schools, now children are having to do mass shooting drills. Schools are actually practicing and teaching first and second graders what they need to do if there is a mass shooting at their school. Many children are frightened by these drills. They do not know if they are practice or real and they are afraid that they will be killed at school. There are a number of reasons why we have these mass killings, but the lack of respect we show to each other cannot be helping the situation. Therefore, out of respect for everyone when you are in public try using Happy Holidays. When you are at home or among family and friends use the greeting that works for your family.

Dr. Michael Rubino is a psychotherapist with over 20 years experience treating children and teenagers.

Fact Checking the President

Among modern US presidents, maybe all presidents, the president has an unprecedented record of making false and misleading statements to the public, over 13,000 as of last October 9. With that record, there is no basis for trust in anything the man says unless one knows there is truth in at least some of his assertions or fact checks and finds some truth.

The AP reports recent fact checking and that shows the president continues to make false and misleading statements to the public. He honestly has no concern for truth, facts or the fact that his statements can often easily be shown to be false. Some examples:

1. TRUMP: “The word ‘impeachment’ is a dirty word, and it’s a word that was only supposed to be used in special occasions: high crimes and misdemeanors. In this case, there was no crime whatsoever. Not even a little tiny crime. There was no crime whatsoever, and they know it. ” — remarks Wednesday with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.
THE FACTS: That’s a misrepresentation of the conditions for impeaching a president. The constitutional grounds for impeachment do not require any crime to have been committed. In setting the conditions, treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors, the Founding Fathers said that a consequential abuse of office — crime or not — was subject to the impeachment process they laid out. Months after the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton explained in the Federalist Papers that a commonly understood crime need not be the basis of impeachment. Offenses qualifying for that step “are of a nature ... POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself,” he wrote. 

2. TRUMP: “We won, in the World Trade Organization, we won seven and a half billion dollars. We never used to win before me, because, before me, the United States was a sucker for all of these different organizations.” — remarks Tuesday with Stoltenberg.
THE FACTS: He is wildly wrong to state that the U.S. never won victories in disputes taken to the trade organization before him. The U.S. has always had a high success rate when it pursues cases against other countries at the WTO. In 2017, trade analyst Daniel Ikenson of the libertarian Cato Institute found that the U.S. won 91% of the cases it took to the Geneva-based trade monitor.

3. TRUMP: “We have a tremendous amount of captured fighters, ISIS fighters over in Syria. And, they’re all under lock and key, but many are from France, many are from Germany. Many are from U.K. They are mostly from Europe.” — remarks Tuesday with Macron.
MACRON: There are “very large number of fighters ... ISIS fighters coming from Syria, from Iraq and the region.” Those from Europe are “a tiny minority of the overall problem.”
THE FACTS: Trump is incorrect to say the Islamic State fighters who were captured and held by the Kurds in Syria are mostly from Europe. Of the more than 12,000 IS fighters in custody in Kurdish areas, only 2,500 are from outside the region of the conflict, some from Europe, some from other parts of the world. Most of the captured fighters — about 10,000 — are natives of Syria or Iraq.

Given how easy it is to fact check and find the president’s statements are often or usually false, it leads to a conclusion that the president has little or no concern for the social damage his lies cause or that his contempt for truth is poisoning other people. The president is normalizing lies, deceit and disrespect for truth and objectively true facts.

A reasonable moral judgment is that our president is deeply immoral at best. Or, is that an unreasonable moral judgment?

What if Election Interference Becomes Impossible to Trace?

The New York Times is reporting that China is interfering with upcoming elections in Taiwan. The point is to undermine Taiwanese democracy and nudge it toward dictatorship. The NYT characterizes the Chinese operation as “still largely unverified.” The NYT calls the Chinese effort “a multipronged effort to finance pro-Beijing candidates, buy off voters and sow disinformation on television channels and on the internet.”

A NYT story from a couple of weeks ago described the situation:

“A man claiming to be a disillusioned Chinese intelligence operative has told the Australian authorities that China’s military intelligence agencies were directly intervening in politics in Hong Kong and Taiwan, buying media coverage, infiltrating universities, funneling donations to favored candidates and creating thousands of social media accounts to attack Taiwan’s governing party.  

So far, some Western diplomatic officials believe the claims by an asylum seeker named Wang Liqiang to be reliable at least in part, according to two people briefed on the matter. While some of his details appeared speculative and impossible to verify, the officials were taking his claims seriously, the people said.”

This sounds very familiar because it is what has been happening in the US at least since 2014. About that time, the Russian government ramped up its endless disinformation campaign to divide Americans and prod them into irrational distrust, fear, anger, bigotry, disgust and other fact- and logic-killing emotions. Russia’s goal for the US is the same as China’s goal for Taiwan -- destroy democracy and the rule of law and replace it with corrupt tyranny and mass oppression.

A growing problem is proving the scope of Chinese and Russian involvement. As time passes, these kinds of attacks will become harder to trace and prove. Both China and Russia deny any interference in the US despite contrary evidence. There is good reason to believe that over time external enemies will become both more effective in their propaganda and harder to trace, maybe impossible.

In July of 2018, Robert Mueller indicted 12 named Russian intelligence agents as responsible for interfering with the 2016 US election. According to the NYT, the Russian effort included “phishing attacks to gain access to Democratic operatives, to money laundering, to attempts to break into state elections boards, the indictment details a vigorous and complex effort by Russia’s top military intelligence service to sabotage the campaign of Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.”

New York Times - July 13, 2018

No doubt that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin was very unhappy, maybe furious, to see how much detail US intelligence could gather on his intelligence agencies and their activities. That situation will probably not be allowed to happen again without some people being shot for failing to hide well enough. Mueller’s indictment not only named names, it also specified days on which some attacks occurred and the role that the indicted officers played. For example, the Mueller indictment included this: “Defendant VIKTOR BORISOVICH NETYKSHO (HeTanmo BHKTOp Bopnconnq) was the Russian military officer in command of Unit 26165, located at 20 Komsomolskiy Prospekt, Moscow, Russia. Unit 26165 had primary responsibility for hacking the DCCC and DNC, as well as the email accounts of individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign.”

The day will probably come when it will no longer be possible to trace the origin of Russian and Chinese attacks on democracies. That day may already be here. Invisibility of attacks adds to the plausibility of the plausible deniability that China and Russia routinely deploy to try to deceive the world and their own people about how they operate and what their goals are. To the extent that China, Russia and other hostile nations are able to hide and deny their online activities, that adds to the pressure on open democracies to somehow defend themselves against the onslaught of tyrants.

It is not clear to what extent our president’s refusal to accept the reality of the situation damages American security and democracy. Given that Russia has been relentless with disinformation campaigns against the US for decades, one could credit them with some of the blame, e.g., maybe about 20%, for the rise of the anti-fact, anti-reason, pro-distrust mindset that has poisoned American conservatism and populism. And, it may be beginning to poison the rest of American society, if it hasn't already accomplished that to some extent.

What Should One Do About Trolls?

DP etiquette: Please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that.

Troll: a person who starts quarrels or upsets or insults people; trolls act, consciously or not, with an intent to have fun, and/or to advocate an ideology or agenda, e.g., by distracting or sowing discord or distrust; trolls tend to provoke reason-killing emotional responses using, e.g., inflammatory comments, insults, bad faith arguments or deflecting or distracting comments such as straw man arguments and logical non-sequiturs 


Since moving to this blog at the end of last August, I've banned 15 people. The most recent casualty was yesterday. The trigger was refusal of a poster to provide any evidence that (1) debunked pro-Trump conspiracy theories are true and not debunked, or (2) any other false assertion the poster make was true. After at least six requests for information from me, the final retorts were:

“You mistakenly assume there is some burden to disprove a positive claim you've yet to falsify. ..... You are shifting the burden of proof and making ad hom attacks against me. If you think that's worthy of a ban. So be it. But make sure you understand why you are doing this... not because of what I believe.. but because of how you feel about it.”

I know exactly how I felt about it. I was frustrated that a person continually adducing false information and lies as truth refused to provide one shred of evidence in support of the false claims. It had nothing to do with disagreement per se. It had everything to do with the lack of a rational basis for discussion.

When a person is banned, Disqus allows reasons for the banning to be listed. I always list reasons. The reasons for banning 13 out of the 15 are first, “troll, liar, insult”, second is “troll, liar” and third is “troll.” Yesterday's ban fell into the 2nd category, although I never once called the poster a liar in my online comments to him/her and also never made an ad hominem attack. That was another of the liar’s lies.

What should one do?

America is now awash in dark free speech, (deceit, lies, unwarranted emotional manipulation, etc.). Most of it (~85% ?) is coming from the the president, the GOP, conservatives and pro-Trump populists, collectively “the right.” In my opinion, decades of dark free speech coming from the right is mostly responsible (~90% ?)  for the breakdown in trust, civility and fact-based reasoning that now dominates both rhetoric and behavior by the right. It is possible that the anti-evidence and anti-logic mindset may be or is slowly poisoning most everyone else who is not on the right.

When confronted with a commenter who adduces information that is shown to be false by links to reliable information sources and a refusal to provide evidence that the false information is true, what is a reasonable response? Should that kind of anti-evidence and anti-reason content be allowed a platform to further foment distrust and incivility? Why should lies and bad faith arguments be given equal footing with honest attempts to be reasonably grounded in facts, truths and sound reasoning?

Bad faith arguments from the right include assertions that the evidence I cite isn't proof and it thus does not carry any probative weight. Bad faith arguments also include (1) outright rejection of evidence from fact checkers, (2) assertions that reliable news sources do not have law enforcement power to investigate anything and thus everything they report is unreliable and not evidence at best, or a pack of lies at worst, and (3) since I do not agree with their assertions, I am a liberal extremist or radical socialist hell bent on enslaving the American people and establishing an American tyranny.

Why should bad faith arguments even be rebutted?  Responding to trolls and their bad faith arguments takes time and effort. Is it unfair to ask for an information source(s) that supports something a person disagrees with? If a discussion is based only on unsupported personal opinion, what value is it to society? At the very least, some relevant facts need to be identified and agreed on. After that, reasoning or logic can be discussed. Maybe reasoning is flawed because it is too partisan biased or doesn't logically flow from the facts. Those disagreements are mostly (~99% ?) not resolvable, but at least they can shed light on why people disagree. In my opinion, that has some social value.

Questions this raise include, is there social value in engaging with trolls and their false and bad faith arguments? If so, what is the value? Can a troll be identified by means other than taking the time and effort to try to engage with them?

Taylorism Returns: Life under the algorithm, how a relentless speedup is reshaping the working class

I'm only putting up three paragraphs from this article off The New Republic, as I don't want to cause any copyright headaches.  This is a long, detailed article and is well worth your time.  It is a review of two recent books on this gig economy Victorian redux narrative.

In her new book, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, Guendelsberger re-creates a version of Barbara Ehrenreich’s famous experiment in Nickel and Dimed. Guendelsberger, a reporter for the alt-weekly Philadelphia City Paper until it was sold off and shut down in 2015, went undercover at three low-wage workplaces: an Amazon warehouse in Indiana, a call center in North Carolina, and a McDonald’s in San Francisco. Whereas Ehrenreich’s main discovery was that there still existed an exploited working class—a controversial point in the late 1990s and early 2000s—Guendelsberger takes inequality and exploitation as given, asking instead what these jobs are doing to the millions who work them.


In her first job, at an Amazon “fulfillment center,” Guendelsberger finds a regime that is Taylor’s “vision incarnate.” (One co-worker, sensing Taylor’s ghost, theorizes that Amazon is “a sociological experiment on how far a corporation can push people.”) Guendelsberger, a “picker,” is made to carry on her waist a scanner gun, which monitors her location, tells her the precise item among the hundreds of thousands in the warehouse that she is to go pluck from the shelves, its location, and how much time she has to do it. A sliding bar counts down as seconds go by, haranguing her. When she’s identified the shelf in the vast facility, dug through the bin, and scanned the item, the next one appears right away. 


Seen from Guendelsberger’s point of view, America’s working class is quivering in stress and fear, hurting from torn-up feet, and all covered in honey mustard. The economic miseries inflicted on working-class people are bad enough, but here Guendelsberger has identified something deeper and arguably worse: “Chronic stress drains people’s empathy, patience, and tolerance for new things.” We’ve been brutalized, bullied, and baited into being trained work-animals and not even afforded a corresponding pay bump. No wonder our society fell apart.


https://newrepublic.com/article/155666/life-algorithm

Here's a videoclip of relevance from PBS Newshour:

An inside look at injury rates in Amazon warehouses

https://www.pbs.org/video/prime-risk-1574896564/

I really do not know why the formatting is all over the place, nor how to correct it.  My apologies.

Summary of the Ukraine Issue

A 3 minute video accurately summarizes the House fact findings in the first phase of the impeachment inquiry. The summary is less than 100 words long and is a description of the section headings in the ~300 page House document.

The 3-minute video is here: https://youtu.be/Tk2ABtEzcXQ

The House report can be read here.

Congressional republicans continue to reject this as untrue, unfair, a hoax, nothing impeachable and/or mostly lies, with the facts mostly not being facts or evidence of anything impeachable. Elsewhere in the same broadcast, Maddow showed videos of Lindsey Graham speaking about impeachment in 1999 and in 2019 regarding impeachment. Graham has evolved from saying impeachment is about cleansing the office of the presidency and no laws need to be broken to impeach a president, while also complaining that senators need to listen to facts before deciding. Now, Graham considers the current matter nothing of concern and he will not even read witness testimony because he believes the impeachment process is s sham.

Another term for that kind of evolution in thinking is called partisan hypocrisy.