What are the psychological characteristics of people holding far-right beliefs?

• People with far right beliefs are characterized by a simplified mindset and tendency to search for order and structure.
• They have a strong desire for group-based dominance and hierarchy, and often see social groups arranged along a superiority-inferiority dimension.
• They perceive the wider authorities as illegitimate.

(no kidding)

https://www.sv.uio.no/c-rex/english/groups/compendium/what-are-the-psychological-characteristics-of-people-holding-far-right-beliefs.html

Snippets:

Individuals who endorse far right ideology often have an increased desire for obedience to authority, order, purity, familiarity, structure, and a rigid worldview mentality. Particularly, they tend to adhere to a worldview that is based on authoritarianism and hierarchy between social groups. This is further reflected in their psychological profile, which is more reflective of the desire for group-based dominance and subjugation (including women’s subordination), traditionalism, and social inequality. The tendency to dominate and subjugate disadvantaged and minority groups is particularly expressed in anti-immigrant and xenophobic stances, strong preference for an ethnically, culturally and/or racially homogeneous population, and prejudice against minorities.

(SOUNDS ABOUT RIGHT)

Another key feature of far right individuals is the rigidity of their mindset—a cognitive style reflected in increased closed-mindedness, simplistic style of thinking, and black-and-white perceptions of society.

Moreover, a study using a sample of white Americans with Republican affiliation[ showed that perceived psychological distress predicted stronger willingness to violently persecute political out-groups. Effects on these extremist tendencies were largely mediated by people’s increased closeness with their political leader. In other words, the more psychological distress people experience, the more they identified with their political leader, which in turn made them more willing to use violence against those identified as threats by this leader.

(EXPLAINS TRUMPISM)

In sum, holding far right beliefs increases people’s social identity and personal importance because such beliefs satisfy a need to belong to groups of like-minded people.

(This one I tend to believe is not necessarily an exclusive far right phenomenon, we ALL tend to gravitate towards groups of "like-minded people.") Don't we?

Eradicating malaria: At the intersection of science progress, cognitive biology and society

CONTEXT

In the context of new technology to eliminate malaria, a Science News Explores article discusses the emphasis that scientists put on understanding human cognitive and social factors before even discussing new technology with the people having the highest stake. In my opinion, this is more evidence that, compared to a mere 20 years ago, scientists are much more aware of the human factor in both science progress, and sources of opposition to it.

The human factor includes both the scientists themselves and the people who will be affected by new technology. Key tactics of this enlightened science mindset include (1) doing a risk assessment of new technology that is as thorough as possible, and (2) understanding what people think they know about the areas that new technology will impact. The former tends to be a humbling exercise for the scientists. They are forced to admit that risk assessments are not certain. The latter identifies and then targets misinformation, myths and misconceptions among stakeholders in the public that miscreants now routinely use to attack new technology to serve their own corrupt interests and agendas.[1]

The new anti-malaria technology

Science News Explores writes:

Should we use a genetic weapon against mosquitoes carrying malaria?

The African public may get the final say on running one test of gene-editing tools

The weapon? A self-replicating bit of DNA known as a gene drive. It’s one of the most anticipated tools being developed to stop mosquitoes from spreading diseases like malaria to humans. It’s also one of the most controversial. 

The gene drive interferes with the insects’ ability to reproduce. [females cannot reproduce or bite people, and the species could go completely extinct] In one small lab study, it wiped out captive populations of mosquitoes in just eight to 12 generations. A larger study in outdoor cages in Terni, Italy, worked too. Within as little as five to 10 years, this gene drive could be ready to test in the wild.

Researchers are eyeing Africa for the first test release. There, malaria takes a huge toll. In 2020, it sickened close to 241 million people on the continent. And most of the globe’s 670,000 malaria deaths that year were in Africa. About eight in every 10 were children, the World Health Organization says.

Dealing with scientist bias, and public knowledge and misinformation

Scientist bias: Because gene drive technology in the wild could lead to the extinction of the target mosquito species, scientists did a detailed risk assessment. SNE writes:

As a first step, researchers tried to dream up potential drawbacks. That helped identify what they might need to plan for and test before releasing gene-drive mosquitoes into the wild. They could also weigh risks and benefits. They focused on four areas that African leaders said were most important to protect: biodiversity, human health, animal health and water quality.

Altogether, they came up with at least 46 possible harms that might come from releasing gene drives in mosquitoes. Might animals that eat mosquitoes struggle, for example, if the targeted mosquitoes disappeared? Might people develop allergic reactions to the bite of mosquitoes that had a single copy of the gene drive? Might large numbers of dying mosquito larvae worsen water quality? Might a gene drive even lead to more cases of malaria? For instance, could thinning out less-troublesome mosquitoes allow better disease-spreaders to take over? Malaria Journal published the full list of concerns in March 2021.

Keith Hayes leads a risk-assessment group at the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization’s Data61. It’s in Hobart, Australia. Experiments and simulations are useful to a point, he says. But, he adds, “We can’t know everything. There may be surprises.” So some questions won’t be answered unless and until gene drives get released.

In the end, any decision about a release will need to weigh risks against benefits. The potential benefits for human health and their costs may far outweigh the risks, Ruth Müller* argues. “If you have a high burden of malaria, that costs a lot,” she notes. “Children cannot go to school. People cannot go to work.” 

* Chief ecologist and entomologist at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium

Public knowledge and misinformation:
SNE writes:

Beyond the science concerns, researchers must also get public support for releasing the technology. Without that, even a gene drive that works perfectly could be a no-go.

Not everyone agrees on when and how to get input. Fredros Okumu* thinks it’s important to have more answers about the science first. “I would rather we know the true benefits, the true risks and gain a consensus around it,” he says. Then, he thinks, scientists could “start engaging the communities.”

* A mosquito biologist and director of science programs at Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania

Not everyone agrees on when and how to get input. Okumu thinks it’s important to have more answers about the science first. “I would rather we know the true benefits, the true risks and gain a consensus around it,” he says. Then, he thinks, scientists could “start engaging the communities.”

Lea Pare Toe disagrees with that approach. She’s a social scientist at the Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Santé in Bobo-Dioulasso. That’s in the West African nation of Burkina Faso. “We should listen to [the community],” she says, and then “develop the science together.”

Toe works with Target Malaria to engage local people in the research. At Bana, in her country, researchers didn’t start out talking about genes at all, she says. First, the team had to clarify the link between mosquitoes and malaria. They also had to dispel myths, such as that eating fatty foods or sweet fruit can cause the disease. The researchers led an intensive campaign from 2014 through 2019. Afterward, they found that such false statements were far less accepted. The researchers reported this in Malaria Journal in October 2021.

It is an open question as to whether such an approach to developing new technology, assessing it and dealing with public opinion like this is even possible in the US or in large areas of Africa. America is awash in misinformation, propaganda and distrust, e.g., distrust of science and scientists. It took five years of intense effort to reduce public misunderstanding in a single targeted area of Africa. In America, decades of warnings about climate change have not resulted in many meaningful government efforts to deal with the problem. Despite majority public concern about climate, America is paralyzed by corrupt politics, corporate propaganda, climate science denial and social gridlock. 

What SNE describes about malaria in Africa may be an ideal that is exceptional. Or, maybe this research has not yet triggered hoards of African miscreants into a frenzy of dark free speech akin to what has poisoned and paralyzed American politics and policy.

Footnote: 

1. My definition of corrupt here includes intentional use of dark free speech to deceive, divide, distract, misinform, polarize, and/or irrationally emotionally manipulate individuals and groups. Here, I define miscreants to be liars, demagogues, tyrants, cranks, crackpots, blind ideologues, grifters and the like. They almost always spew their poison to gain wealth and/or power-influence, which tend to run together.

News: Climate science, capitalism and government, etc.

Utilities oppose clean air regulations until government 

incentivizes them to support regulations

Capitalism really does work when one understands that profits are everything. The NYT writes:

With Federal Aid on the Table, Utilities Shift to Embrace Climate Goals

As billions in government subsidies were at stake, the electric utility industry shed its opposition to clean-air regulation and put its lobbying muscle behind passing President Biden’s climate bill.

Just two years ago, DTE Energy, a Michigan-based electric utility, was still enmeshed in a court fight with federal regulators over emissions from a coal-burning power plant on the western shore of Lake Erie that ranks as one of the nation’s largest sources of climate-changing air pollution.

But in September, Gerard M. Anderson, who led DTE for the last decade, was on the South Lawn of the White House alongside hundreds of other supporters of President Biden, giving a standing ovation to the president for his success in pushing a climate change package through Congress — a law that will help accelerate the closure of the very same coal-burning behemoth, known as DTE Monroe, that his company had been fighting to protect.

Mr. Anderson’s position reflects a fundamental shift among major electric utilities nationwide as they deploy their considerable clout in Washington: After years of taking steps like backing dark-money groups to sue the government to block tighter air pollution rules, DTE and a growing number of other utilities have joined forces to speed the transition away from fossil fuels.  

Their new stance is driven less by evolving ideology than the changing economics of renewable energy, fueled in part by the sheer amount of money the federal government is putting on the table to encourage utilities to move more quickly to cleaner and more sustainable sources of energy like solar and wind.

The priorities of most (~90% ?) big businesses cannot be much clearer than this. Profit talks and everything else walks. 

Despite Republican Party ideology vilification of, and vehement opposition to, Biden’s attempt to deal with climate change, businesses go for the cash. Ideology, hate of government and everything else be damned. Profit is king. Everything else is worthless peasantry. The government hater wing of the fascist GOP, i.e., the entire GOP leadership, must hate news like this. One can bet that Faux News won’t be mentioning this inconvenient little development.

A bit of bipartisanship about same-sex marriage happened!

The NYT writes:

The Senate passed landmark legislation on Tuesday to mandate federal recognition for same-sex marriages, as a lame-duck Congress mustered a notable moment of bipartisanship before Democrats were to lose their unified control of Capitol Hill.

The 61-to-36 vote put the bill on track to become law in the final weeks before Republicans assume the majority in the House of Representatives at the start of the new Congress in January.

The bill would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal benefits to same-sex couples. It prohibits states from denying the validity of an out-of-state marriage based on sex, race or ethnicity. But in a condition that Republican backers insisted upon, it would guarantee that religious organizations would not be required to provide any goods or services for the celebration of any marriage, and could not lose tax-exempt status or other benefits for refusing to recognize same-sex unions.

Notice the Republicans protected Christianity and its precious tax-exempt status. That is kleptocratic theocracy in action. Christian nationalist churches remain free to discriminate as much as their bigoted black little hearts desire. But on balance, this is still good news. 

One step at a time. One fight at a time.

Time for cognitive biology!: Fostering prosocial behavior

Some research suggests that getting people to think about the future can foster prosocial behavior. A recent social science paper comments:

Previous studies suggest a link between future thinking and prosocial behaviors. However, this association is not fully understood at state and trait level. The present study tested whether a brief future thinking induction promoted helping behavior in an unrelated task. In addition, the relation between mental time travel and prosocial behaviors in daily life was tested with questionnaire data. Forty-eight participants filled in questionnaires and were asked to think about the future for one minute or to name animals for one minute (control condition) before playing the Zurich Prosocial Game (a measure of helping behavior). Results revealed that participants in the future thinking condition helped significantly more than participants in the control condition. Moreover, questionnaire data showed that dispositional and positive orientation toward the future and the past was significantly associated with self-reported prosocial behaviors. The present findings suggest that thinking about the future in general has positive transfer effects on subsequent prosocial behavior and that people who think more about the past or future in a positive way engage more in prosocial behavior.

Anecdotal reports have linked future thinking to increase in prosocial behavior or conflict resolution, even in international conflicts. One example is the Camp David Accords stating the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1978. After several days of negotiations without an agreement at Camp David, the American president Jimmy Carter introduced grandchildren to the discussion. This was a turning point in the negotiation. Later that day, Begin, Sadat and Carter signed the Camp David Accord. It is possible that evoking grandchildren shifted the focus from the present to the future, thereby increasing the willingness for compromise and conflict resolution.

Evolutionary considerations also argue that mental time travel may guide decision-making and lead to cooperative behaviors by bypassing opportunistic motivation, impulsive choices, and the effects of time discounting. In particular, it has been suggested that episodic future thinking [the ability to imagine oneself vividly in a specific future event] might foster prosocial intentions as well as behaviors. Several studies have provided evidence establishing the link between episodic future thinking and prosocial intentions.

If this is true, it suggests that climate news reporting should usually mention plausible future scenarios such as adverse effects of climate change on species extinction and on the next and future generations. 

Time for physics! α - the Fine Structure Constant: ~1/137

Don't try to understand all of this ~16 minute video. For a thought experiment, instead try to follow the gist of the reasoning. Just go with the flow and don't sweat the details. The line of thought reveals some of the limits of human understanding and some of what physics and mathematics are grappling with. 

News bits 'n whatnot

A lot of people are slow to see reality

The NYT writes:

Jewish Allies Call Trump’s Dinner With 

Antisemites a Breaking Point

Supporters who looked past the former president’s admirers in bigoted corners of the far right, and his own use of antisemitic tropes, now are drawing a line. “He legitimizes Jew hatred and Jew haters,” says one. “And this scares me.”  

But last week, Mr. Trump dined at his Palm Beach palace, Mar-a-Lago, with the performer Kanye West, who had already been denounced for making antisemitic statements, and with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken antisemite and Holocaust denier, granting the antisemitic fringe a place of honor at his table. Now, even some of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters say they can no longer ignore the abetting of bigotry by the nominal leader of the Republican Party.

“I am a child of survivors. I have become very frightened for my people,” Morton Klein, head of the right-wing Zionist Organization of America, said on Monday, referring to his parents’ survival of the Holocaust. “Donald Trump is not an antisemite. He loves Israel. He loves Jews. But he mainstreams, he legitimizes Jew hatred and Jew haters. And this scares me.”

Seriously? Really? It took this long and something this blatant to scare another self-deluded radical right right winger? This is what scares me about people who can delude themselves into believing they are pro-democracy and pro-civil liberties while supporting a bigoted fascist who is blatantly anti-democracy and anti-civil liberties.

This reminds me of the Indian scouts that Col. Custer used to track down tribes the scouts hated so that Custer could slaughter them. Later after the main event slaughter was complete, the scout tribes got what was coming to them. 

So, a question pops right up. How stupid and/or deluded are some people? Apparently, pretty stupid and/or deluded. Look at how Mr Recently Scared rationalized Trump’s antisemitism into a false reality, i.e., He loves Israel. He loves Jews. That is nonsense. Trump loves Trump. Stupid, deluded, both and/or something(s) else, Mr Scared is Custer’s Indian scout who still doesn’t get it.

Stolen election hardball in Arizona

The AP writes:

GOP-controlled Arizona county refuses to certify election

State Elections Director Kori Lorick wrote in a letter last week that Hobbs is required by law to approve the statewide canvass by next week and will have to exclude Cochise County’s votes if they aren’t received in time.

That would threaten to flip the victor in at least two close races — a U.S. House seat and state schools chief — from a Republican to a Democrat.

As usual, there is no evidence of widespread vote or voter fraud in Cochise County. That inconvenient fact does not matter. What matters is subverting those elections based on lies about vote and/or voter fraud or irregularities.

So, a question pops right up. How ignorant, stupid and/or deluded are some people who still cannot see blatant Republican Party fascism and its hostility to elections and other targeted civil liberties? Elections and voting are civil liberties. Stupid, deluded, ignorant and/or something(s) else, most rank and file Republican voters are Indian scouts who still don’t get it. If the fascist beast they support gains enough power, it will turn on them sooner or later.

From the crumbling rule of law files:

Rut roh!! Be afraid: The Supreme Court is at it again 

The NYT writes:

Supreme Court Seems Poised to Limit Public Corruption Cases

The fraud convictions of Joseph Percoco, a former aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, and Louis Ciminelli, a contractor in Buffalo, appeared likely to be overturned.

The Supreme Court, which has become increasingly skeptical of federal prosecutions of public corruption in state government, seemed poised on Monday to hand prosecutors two more defeats.

The question in the first case, Percoco v. United States, No. 21-1158, was whether Mr. Percoco could be prosecuted under a federal law that makes it a crime to deprive the government of “honest services” for conduct that took place after he resigned his government position to run the governor’s 2014 re-election campaign.

Yaakov M. Roth, a lawyer for Mr. Percoco, said the law applies only to people who exercise the authority of the government, a power he said his client had lacked when he received the payments.

“What he did have, like many lobbyists and donors and interest groups and others, was influence — in his case, influence drawn from years of public service, from a close relationship to the Cuomo family and from his senior campaign role,” Mr. Roth said. “But none of that creates a fiduciary duty to the public.”

Justice Clarence Thomas asked whether an official could resign for an afternoon, just long enough to take a bribe. Mr. Roth responded that such a bribe would very likely be in exchange for government action after the official’s return, which he said would be covered by the law.

“The State of New York doesn’t seem to be upset about this arrangement,” Thomas said of the payments to Mr. Percoco, adding, “It seems as though we are using a federal law to impose ethical standards on state activity.”

Once again, the hard core pro-corruption capitalism that the Christofascist Republican Party leadership supports is on public display for all to see. What the Christofascists on the Supreme Court are aiming for in this case is severance of federal law enforcement reach into state corruption. The underlying truth is that it is easier to corrupt a state government and state law enforcement than it is to corrupt their federal counterparts. 

This is why Republican brass knuckles capitalist elites are so hell-bent on shifting as much power  as possible from the federal government and law enforcement to the states. That opens the door to more corruption with less danger for the criminals and bent politicians and bureaucrats. In turn, more corruption amounts to more wealth and power for the capitalists.

The Republicans have been chipping away at anti-corruption laws for years. This is just another step on the fascist Republican road to legalizing blatant corruption in government.

Big businesses hate labor unions

Vice writes:

Federal Judge Orders Amazon to Stop Firing People for Organizing

A cease-and-desist order filed against the company demands it stop retaliating against unionizing workers.

A federal judge filed a cease-and-desist order against Amazon on Friday, demanding that the company stop firing its employees for participating in union organizing.

Once again, brass knuckles capitalism shows its true colors. The rule of law does not matter much. Profits matter.