Long-term planning and human welfare

Comments here brought up the human trait of weak capacity to do long-term planning. We now possess technologies that can significantly wreck the environment by pollution and climate change. There are nuclear bombs that can blow modern civilization to smithereens in a matter of a day or two. There are pandemics coming that we are just not prepared for. Heck, we're still not prepared for the one we are living through right now. Global supply chains are weak and sometimes break. 

Science is aware of human weakness about long-term planning and preparation. We often just don't do it well enough and react to crises when they pop up instead of planning for them before they hit and kill or harm people. A long article The Conversation published, Is humanity doomed because we can’t plan for the long term? Three experts discuss, considers the issue. It's an interesting article and topic. TC writes:

We are built this way

Robin Dunbar

COVID-19 has highlighted three key aspects of human behavior that seem unrelated but which, in fact, arise from the same underlying psychology. One was the bizarre surge in panic buying and stockpiling of everything from food to toilet rolls. A second was the abject failure of most states to be prepared when experts had been warning governments for years that a pandemic would happen sooner or later. The third has been the exposure of the fragility of globalized supply chains. All three of these are underpinned by the same phenomenon: a strong tendency to prioritize the short term at the expense of the future.

Most animals, including humans, are notoriously bad at taking the long term consequences of their actions into account. Economists know this as the “public good dilemma”. In conservation biology, it is known as the “poacher’s dilemma” and also also, more colloquially, as “the tragedy of the commons”.

If you are a logger, should you cut down the last tree in the forest, or leave it standing? Everyone knows that if it is left standing, the forest will eventually regrow and the whole village will survive. But the dilemma for the logger is not next year, but whether he and his family will survive until tomorrow. For the logger, the economically rational thing to do is, in fact, to cut the tree down.

This is because the future is unpredictable, but whether or not you make it to tomorrow is absolutely certain. If you die of starvation today, you have no options when it comes to the future; but if you can make through to tomorrow, there is a chance that things might have improved. Economically, it’s a no-brainer. This is, in part, why we have overfishing, deforestation and climate change.

The process underpinning this is known to psychologists as discounting the future. Both animals and humans typically prefer a small reward now to a larger reward later, unless the future reward is very large. The ability to resist this temptation is dependent on the frontal pole (the bit of the brain right just above your eyes), one of whose functions is to allow us to inhibit the temptation to act without thinking of the consequences. It is this small brain region that allows (most of) us to politely leave the last slice of cake on the plate rather than wolf it down. In primates, the bigger this brain region is, the better they are at these kinds of decisions.

In humans, failure to inhibit greedy behavior quickly leads to excessive inequality of resources or power. This is probably the single most common cause of civil unrest and revolution, from the French Revolution to Hong Kong today.

There is a simple issue of scale that feeds into this. Our natural social world is very small scale, barely village size. Once community size gets large, our interests switch from the wider community to a focus on self-interest. Society staggers on, but it becomes an unstable, increasingly fractious body liable at continual risk of fragmenting, as all historical empires have found.

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The power of politics

Chris Zebrowski

“Discounting the future” may well be a common habit. But I don’t think that this is an inevitable consequence of how our brains are wired or an enduring legacy of our primate ancestry. Our proclivity to short-termism has been socialized. It is a result of the ways we are socially and politically organized today.

Businesses prioritize short-term profits over longer term outcomes because it appeals to shareholders and lenders. Politicians dismiss long-term projects in favor of quick-fix solutions promising instant results which can feature in campaign literature that is distributed every four years.  

Our capacity to deal not only with future pandemics, but larger-scale (and perhaps not unrelated) threats including climate change will require us to exercise the human capacity for foresight and prudence in the face of future threats. It is not beyond us to do so.

This is another example of importance of human cognitive biology and social behavior. Everything or almost everything we do comes back to that. So, if one wants to understand humans, politics and religion at least a little better, one needs to learn at least some things about those aspects of human beings.

WE BELIEVE THAT CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM THREATENS OUR FAITH AND COUNTRY

 

As Christians, our faith teaches us everyone is created in God’s image and commands us to love one another. As Americans, we value our system of government and the good that can be accomplished in our constitutional democracy. Today, we are concerned about a persistent threat to both our religious communities and our democracy — Christian nationalism.

Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. We reject this damaging political ideology and invite our Christian brothers and sisters to join us in opposing this threat to our faith and to our nation.

 As Christians, we are bound to Christ, not by citizenship, but by faith. We believe that:

• People of all faiths and none have the right and responsibility to engage constructively in the public square.

• Patriotism does not require us to minimize our religious convictions.

• One’s religious affiliation, or lack thereof, should be irrelevant to one’s standing in the civic community.

• Government should not prefer one religion over another or religion over nonreligion.

• Religious instruction is best left to our houses of worship, other religious institutions and families.

• America’s historic commitment to religious pluralism enables faith communities to live in civic harmony with one another without sacrificing our theological convictions.

• Conflating religious authority with political authority is idolatrous and often leads to oppression of minority and other marginalized groups as well as the spiritual impoverishment of religion.

• We must stand up to and speak out against Christian nationalism, especially when it inspires acts of violence and intimidation—including vandalism, bomb threats, arson, hate crimes, and attacks on houses of worship—against religious communities at home and abroad.

Whether we worship at a church, mosque, synagogue, or temple, America has no second-class faiths. All are equal under the U.S. Constitution. As Christians, we must speak in one voice condemning Christian nationalism as a distortion of the gospel of Jesus and a threat to American democracy.

https://www.christiansagainstchristiannationalism.org/statement

Meet some of the endorsers

Christian leaders are standing up to the threat of Christian nationalism. Click on the link:

https://www.christiansagainstchristiannationalism.org/endorsers

“Christian nationalism perverts the gospel and the Constitution."

“Christian nationalism is a threat to the United States' wellbeing, the world, and the Christian faith. To be clear, there is nothing Christian about ‘Christian nationalism.’ "

“The merging of faith and politics into a single ideology is idolatrous and dangerous."

“‘Christian nationalism’ is an oxymoron and a dangerous movement rooted in supremacy and hate."

“As followers of Jesus, his command to love our neighbors means neighbors of every type, of every faith, not just our own."

Clueless Democrats & press, lying Republican Senators

Collins' deceit: It is 'completely inconsistent' that Gorsuch, 

Kavanaugh would support overturning Roe v. Wade

Most Democratic Party elites certainly look to be clueless about how politics works and what the Republican Party is. Just clueless. Politico writes:

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said Sunday that multiple Supreme Court justices lied in their confirmation hearings about abortion, echoing the statements of Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins in the wake of the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion.

“If a corporation put these kind of statements in their quarterly filings, they would be seen to be purposefully misleading and deemed fraud,” Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I think they misled the Senate with the intention of getting their confirmation vote with the intention of overruling Roe.”  

Collins ignored repeated questions from reporters on Capitol Hill on Tuesday morning about whether she felt Kavanaugh had lied to her. "I put out a statement," she said.

As usual for Republican politicians, the KYMS (keep your mouth shut) tactic is employed to avoid saying something stupid to the press. She is an experienced politician. She is practiced at lying and deceit.

Gillibrand, a Democrat, apparently does not know that there are either no laws to prevent judicial nominees from lying in confirmation hearings or if there are laws, they are not enforced. It was to be expected that the Republican nominees lied to and/or mislead the Senate. 

What the Republicans stand for these days, shameless mendacity and deceit, neo-fascist laissez-faire capitalism and radical Christian fundamentalism, is not supported by most Americans. The GOP and its judges had to lie or mislead. So they did. That is a no-brainer. 

One can also wonder at the press is thinking or knows, if anything. Politico's comment that Gillibrand echoes the statements of Murkowski and Collins is inexcusable misinformation. It leaves the impression that they really did not think they were being lied to during the Senate vetting process. Everybody knows that (i) the Federalist Society picks only radical right Christian fundamentalist judges who hate abortion, and (ii) the ex-president publicly promised to appoint judges who would overturn Roe. That is exactly what he did. Everyone reasonably connected to reality and facts knew all of this. 

And what about the mainstream press and media? One expects lies, deceit and irrational manipulation from the Republican propaganda Leviathan, e.g., Faux News. But even the professional MSM keeps referring to Murkowski and Collins as moderate Republicans. That is simply wrong. They are radical right authoritarians, not moderates.

To be honest and professional, Politico should have at least pointed out that Murkowski and Collins are either lying or they themselves were clueless idiots about what their own party intended to do. One can reasonably believe that they are liars. Neither of them is stupid. Both are intelligent, politically savvy and experienced. They knew exactly what was going on. Pretending otherwise is an arrogant insult, but that too is just the standard poisonous, neo-fascist Republican attitude toward the American people.

Murkowski's faux bewilderment:  her “confidence in the  

court has been rocked” by the draft opinion

Question: How stupid do these politicians really think we are, or since this is tribal cult politics, it does not matter how stupid we are, because what we think does not matter?

What we want does not matter

What wealth wants does matter

An unremarkable story about the power of polarizing propaganda

 

How radical right puppetmasters  

demagogue the political left

The New York Times writes:

FORT SMITH, Ark. — In the fall of 2020, Kevin Thompson delivered a sermon about the gentleness of God. At one point, he drew a quick contrast between a loving, accessible God and remote, inaccessible celebrities. Speaking without notes, his Bible in his hand, he reached for a few easy examples: Oprah, Jay-Z, Tom Hanks.

Mr. Thompson could not tell how his sermon was received. The church he led had only recently returned to meeting in person. Attendance was sparse, and it was hard to appreciate if his jokes were landing, or if his congregation — with family groups spaced three seats apart, and others watching online — remained engaged.

So he was caught off guard when two church members expressed alarm about the passing reference to Mr. Hanks. A young woman texted him, concerned; another member suggested the reference to Mr. Hanks proved Mr. Thompson did not care about the issue of sex trafficking. Mr. Thompson soon realized that their worries sprung from the sprawling QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that the movie star is part of a ring of Hollywood pedophiles.

For decades, Mr. Thompson, 44, had been confident that he knew the people of Fort Smith, a small city tucked under a bend in the Arkansas River along the Oklahoma border. He was born at the oldest hospital in town, attended public schools there and grew up in a Baptist church that encouraged him to start preaching as a teenager. He assumed he would live in Fort Smith for the rest of his life.

But now, he was not so sure. “Jesus talks about how he is the truth, how central truth is,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview. “The moment you lose the concept of truth you’ve lost everything.”

A political moment in which the Supreme Court appears on the brink of overturning Roe v. Wade looks like a triumphant era for conservative evangelicals. But there are deepening cracks beneath that ascendance.

Across the country, theologically conservative white evangelical churches that were once comfortably united have found themselves at odds over many of the same issues dividing the Republican Party and other institutions. The disruption, fear and physical separation of the pandemic have exacerbated every rift.

If he spoke against abortion from the pulpit, Mr. Thompson noticed, the congregation had no problem with it. The members were overwhelmingly anti-abortion and saw the issue as a matter of biblical truth. But if he spoke about race in ways that made people uncomfortable, that was “politics.” And, Mr. Thompson suspected, it was proof to some church members that Mr. Thompson was not as conservative as they thought.

The NYT article goes on to point out that many churches are fragile because attendance remains well below prepandemic levels. Christian denominations are declining, along with the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian. at least some observers see a “seismic shift” underway, with white evangelical churches dividing into two camps. One embraces Trump-style messaging and politics, including belief in crackpot conspiracy theories. The other follows a different path, maybe less emotional and more grounded in reality and reason.

In my opinion, the pastor’s comment about losing sight of truth is a key insight about a key trait of modern authoritarian conservative propaganda. Loss of truth is central to how followers of intolerant, irrational falsehood-driven political-religious messaging exerts power. Those people have to detach from truth. They are mostly unaware of what has happened to them. Effective propaganda works mostly unconsciously to deceive and manipulate. 

When people have lost truth to effective propaganda, their power to decide and act on the basis of truth has been taken from them. The flow of power from the deceived and manipulated to the deceiving manipulators is real. Such personal power loss has serious, life-changing consequences for millions of average people’s lives.

Anti-abortionists shift gears and aim for nationwide ban and criminal penalties

There appears to be a growing recognition that religious conservatives, now more accurately called radical Christian fundamentalist conservatives or just Christian nationalists, have a broader agenda than merely overturning Roe v. Wade. The New York Times writes:

The court’s opinion is not final, but the draft immediately shifted the horizon by raising a new question: If Roe is struck down, where does the anti-abortion movement go next?

Many leaders are redoubling state efforts, where they’ve already had success, with an eye toward more restrictive measures. Several prominent groups now say they would support a national abortion ban after as many as 15 weeks or as few as six, all lower than Roe’s standard of around 23 or 24. A vocal faction is talking about “abortion abolition,” proposing legislation to outlaw abortion after conception, with few if any exceptions in cases of rape or incest.

The sprawling anti-abortion grass-roots campaign is rapidly approaching an entirely new era, one in which abortion would no longer be a nationally protected right to overcome, but a decision to be legislated by individual states. For many activists, overturning Roe would mark what they see as not the end, but a new beginning to limit abortion access even further. It also would present a test, as those who have long backed incremental change could clash with those who increasingly push to end legal abortion altogether.

This week, many anti-abortion leaders were wary of celebrating before the court’s final ruling, expected this summer. They remembered Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, when they hoped the court would overturn Roe and it ultimately did not. But they said they have been preparing for this moment and its possibilities for decades.  

“If a dog catches a car, it doesn’t know what to do,” said Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee. “We do.”

The Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion political group, is planning a strategy involving state legislatures where it sees room to advance their cause or protect it. The National Right to Life is trying to support its affiliates in every state as it looks to lobby lawmakers. Both groups have been hoping to build support in Congress for a national abortion ban, even if it could take years, just as it did to gain momentum to undo Roe.  

Across the anti-abortion spectrum, everything is on the table, from instituting bans when fetal cardiac activity is detected, to pressing their case in Democratic strongholds. Some activists are prioritizing limiting medication abortion, which accounts for more than half of all abortions.  

While many fighting for restrictions believe abortion to be murder, only a small fringe openly call for punishing a woman for procuring one.

Lawmakers in Louisiana, however, advanced a bill on Wednesday that would classify abortion as homicide and make it possible for prosecutors to bring criminal cases against women who end a pregnancy.

Just wait. Over time that “small fringe” will grown to become the dominant dogma for Republicans. Those who dissent, will be RINO hunted out. That what years of demagogic propaganda can do to a society. In that kind of protected free speech lies the poison that will kill democracy and allow an intolerant theocratic White Christian dictatorship to flourish in the wreckage.

In moral terms, most rank and file Christian nationalists see this as (i) the morally right path to take, and (ii) not political at all, just normal. Fantasies like that are what decades of demagogic authoritarian dark free speech has brought down on what's left of our fading American democracy.

Notice the signs: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you 

Before you were born I set you free”

and

“Love them Both”

That is really what millions of Christian  

nationalists sincerely believe

Love them Both is BS, it’s like the Christian falsehood 

“Hate the sin, Love the sinner”

(most of them hate the sin and the sinner

-- people just cannot separate the sin from the sinner 

because the human mind does not work that way)

The Republican Party’s slide into anti-democratic authoritarianism

An article The Hill posted, Republican Party’s fear of debate highlights our slide toward authoritarianism, reflects the apparently growing recognition of what the Republican Party has clearly become, American fascist or neo-fascist (as I define the concept). 

The Hill writes:

Last week, the Republic National Committee voted to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) and will require candidates to pledge they will not participate. My immediate thought was, what are they afraid of? Then a more discouraging realization seeped in — this is another sign the U.S. is moving backwards. The U.S. has supported candidate debates through our foreign aid as an important benchmark in democracy. Debates signal maturity, transparency, and competition. Sparring over policy differences and making a case to voters are signs of democratic advancement. And now the U.S. itself may not be able to meet that challenge.

Everywhere I’ve worked, a key sticking point in debate organization is moderation. In weak and new democracies, the hangover of distrust is strong. There is no history of referees — neutral arbiters calling balls and strikes. One of the more difficult tasks for countries transitioning to democracy is building out independent bodies, whether an election management body, auditor general, anti-corruption commission, or ombudsperson. Media proves the most difficult, with journalists and outlets labeled partisan. Thus, the question of who will moderate a debate is fraught. I have had parties refuse to participate, rejecting every proposed moderator and insisting they would only join if they alone could choose. In Cambodia, finding a neutral moderator was difficult, but we managed to identify someone all parties could live with.

One of the RNC’s complaints about debates is unfair and biased moderation selected by the CPD. The committee argues that moderation in 2020 gave Joe Biden an advantage. The CPD is actually nonpartisan, with a board of former Republican and Democratic leaders. Furthermore, selected moderators have included a diverse array of journalists, including from conservative-leaning outlet Fox News, such as Chris Wallace. No matter, as Donald Trump declared them all “against him” or “terrible and unfair.” As in the newer democracies where the U.S. provides aid, it appears we also are too polarized to agree upon neutral referees, and immaturely insistent that only our choices are the fair ones.

Agreeing on debate rules is also a challenge. My experience has shown that candidates only like the rules applied to their opponent.  

Like elsewhere, the RNC is also complaining about debate rules, and the behavior they try to enforce. In 2020, the Trump campaign was furious that the commission determined that mics would be controlled in future debates to keep order because in the previous debate Trump refused to follow the time limits, constantly interrupted, and ignored the moderator. The Trump campaign also wanted control over the topics for debate, particularly when learning questioning would focus on his COVID response, though the campaigns had already agreed the issues for debate would be up to the moderators. The campaign also complained about live fact-checking by the moderator, accusing the commission of being “stacked with Trump Haters and Never Trumpers.” Trump said the quiet part out loud: “As President, the debates are up to me… avoiding the nasty politics of this very biased Commission.” As I’ve experienced elsewhere, the Trump campaign had an inconsistent relationship with rules (he certainly wanted Biden’s speaking time limited), depending on to whom it applied, and a sense of entitlement.

The RNC should consider carefully the company they are in — following the path of Putin, Orban, Mugabe, and other authoritarians. Refusing to debate is a trait of strongmen and dictators, not confident democrats. In a free society, as I have told parties everywhere, opting out of debates is not a good look.

 Yes indeed, the Republican Party and its morally rotted ex-president leader are following the path of democracy- and liberty hating authoritarians, including Putin.