So what is it?

(Societal extremes)

This morning, someone on Twitter asked:

 “For all of you celebrating your stock portfolios today, a reminder that there are millions of Americans out of work and unable to afford the basics.”

In response, another person then asked:

“Is there a term for an economy where the markets hit an all time high but half of the country is desperately worried about paying rent and keeping groceries on the table?”

So, what do you call that? 

I call it “Capitalism Gone Awry.”  I read many others saying a version of that too.  Granted, much is in play, but are we fundamentally wrong?

Thanks for posting and recommending.

Senate Investigation into 2016 Russian Interference: It Happened!

Multiple sources are reporting that an investigation by the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee concluded that Russia did interfere. The AP writes:

"The Trump campaign’s interactions with Russian intelligence services during the 2016 presidential election posed a “grave” counterintelligence threat, a Senate panel concluded Tuesday as it detailed in a report how associates of the Republican candidate had regular contact with Russians and expected to benefit from the Kremlin’s help. 

The report, the fifth and final one from the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee on the Russia investigation, describes how Russia launched an aggressive, wide-ranging effort to interfere in the election on Donald Trump’s behalf. It says Trump associates were eager to exploit the Kremlin’s aid, particularly by maximizing the impact of the disclosure of Democratic emails that were hacked by Russian military intelligence officers. 

The conclusions mark the culmination of a bipartisan probe that spanned more than three years and produced what the committee called “the most comprehensive description to date of Russia’s activities and the threat they posed.” 

The findings echo to a large degree those of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, with the report’s unflinching characterization of furtive interactions between Trump associates and Russian operatives contradicting the Republican president’s claims that the FBI had no basis to investigate whether his campaign was conspiring with Russia.  

A group of Republicans on the panel submitted “additional views” to the report saying that it should state more explicitly that Trump’s campaign did not coordinate with Russia. But Democrats on the panel submitted their own views, arguing that the report clearly shows such cooperation."

What was mildly surprising to me about this is that the GOP senators apparently decided to go with the overwhelming evidence of interference. They seemingly did not fabricate evidence to make the president's false claims of no Russian interference look real. I can only assume that was because there are some democrats on the intelligence committee.

Another authoritarian shoe I have been waiting to drop is the GOP resorting to fabricating evidence to make the president's dismal record look better. They might try to do that with the bogus investigation of Biden in the Ukraine. They could also try it in Barr's bogus DoJ investigation into the origins of the FBI investigation into Russian interference. Or, maybe GOP evidence fabrication will happen in the crackpot conspiracies the president likes to blither about, e.g., Obamagate, the president's false claim that Obama illegally spied on him in the 2016 election.

Is the Will of the People Sufficient to Govern?

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” -- H.L. Mencken

In a 2003 article, Is “Popular Rule” Possible? Polls, political psychology, and democracy, political scientist Larry M. Bartels considers whether the will of the people can ever suffice to run a government. Bartels is co-author of the 2016 book, Democracy For Realists: Why Elections Do not Produce Responsive Governments (book review here). Bartels thinks the answer is no. He writes:

“Leaders may ignore the dictates of public opinion, but they are assumed to do so only with good reason—and at their electoral peril.

My aim here is to suggest that this conventional view of democracy is fundamentally unrealistic. Whether it would be desirable to have a democracy based on public opinion is beside the point, because public opinion of the sort necessary to make it possible simply does not exist. The very idea of “popular rule” is starkly inconsistent with the understanding of political psychology provided by the past half-century of research by psychologists and political scientists. That research offers no reason to doubt that citizens have meaningful values and beliefs, but ample reason to doubt that those values and beliefs are sufficiently complete and coherent to serve as a satisfactory starting point for democratic theory. In other words, citizens have attitudes but not preferences—a distinction directly inspired by the work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Kahneman and Tversky have called attention to “framing effects”—situations in which different ways of posing, or “framing,” a policy issue produce distinctly different public responses. Framing effects are hard to accommodate within a theory built on the assumption that citizens have definite preferences to be elicited; but they are easy to reconcile with the view that any given question may tap a variety of more or less relevant attitudes. The problem for democratic theory is that the fluidity and contingency of attitudes make it impossible to discern meaningful public preferences on issues of public policy, because seemingly arbitrary variations in choice format or context may produce contradictory expressions of popular will.”

An example of a framing effect making a major difference in public opinion relates to the first Gulf War in 1991-1992. When people were polled, a big majority said there were unwilling to “go to war”, but a solid majority said it was acceptable to “engage in combat.” That war was then posited to the American people as an acceptable combat engagement, not an unacceptable war.


A democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. -- John Adams and Alexander Hamilton


Bartels cite another example of how framing changes opinions. When a first group in a study was asked, “Do you think the United States should let Communist newspaper reporters from other countries come in here and send back to their papers the news as they see it?”, 36% said yes. A second group was asked the same question but only after they were first asked whether “a Communist country like Russia should let American newspaper reporters come in and send back to America the news as they see it.” In this group, 73% agreed that Russian reporters should be allowed in the US to report as they saw fit. Posing the first question to the second group led those people to apply reciprocity despite strong anti-communist attitudes.

In one large survey at times when welfare was viewed negatively by many Americans, about 20-25% percent said that too little was being spent on “welfare”, but 63-65% said that too little was being spent on “assistance to the poor.” Even for issues that seem simple and easy to be consistent about, e.g., abortion, framing effects are easy to elicit. The human mind evolved to be quite sensitive  to how information if framed. Intelligent propagandists know this very well and exploit it ruthlessly to their advantage.

That is just one of several major mental traits that make it hard to know what people want. How are political leaders to decide what the will of the people is?

Bartels is not optimistic that this fundamental aspect of democracy can be adequately addressed. He writes:

“Perhaps these apparent contradictions in public opinion would disappear if political discourse were somehow elevated—but I doubt it. Political elites have had about as much chance of providing a clarifying debate on abortion as they have on any issue before the American public .... 

More generally, the hopeful assertions of democratic theorists regarding the positive effects of deliberation are largely unsupported by systematic empirical evidence. Indeed, most observers of political deliberation have painted a much less rosy portrait than philosophers of deliberative democracy. New England town meetings apparently involve a good deal of false unanimity, with most important decisions settled in advance through informal networks reflecting preexisting inequalities in social status and political power. The atmosphere of public-spiritedness and mutual respect central to theorists’ accounts of democratic deliberation may be difficult or impossible to achieve in societies burdened by sexism, racism, and fundamental cultural schisms.  

The most obvious alternative to theoretical progress along these lines is a much-diluted version of democratic theory in which the ideal of “popular rule” is replaced by what William Riker once characterized as “an intermittent, sometimes random, even perverse, popular veto” on the machinations of political elites. If that sort of democracy is the best we can hope for, we had better reconcile ourselves to the fact. On the other hand, if we insist on believing that democracy can provide some attractive and consistent normative basis for evaluating policy outcomes, we had better figure out more clearly what we are talking about.”

Is it time for the rise of the popular veto?

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” -- Ernst Benn

How voters' opinions in battleground Wisconsin could determine presidential race

 

In a state President Donald Trump won by less than a point in 2016, socially distanced French toast and eggs at Frank's Diner in downtown Kenosha, Wisconsin, come with a slate of opinions revealing how a battleground state could well determine the presidential race.

There's the college student who says she's definitely going to vote for former Vice President Joe Biden, a mask-clad man who plans to vote for President Donald Trump a second time and a young first-time voter who says, plainly, "neither" on Trump or Biden because she plans to vote for a third party instead.

And for many, the politics are inseparable from the coronavirus pandemic.

The pandemic has pushed Americans to the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, drawn structural racism into plain sight with Black and brown people dying at higher rates, and heightened concerns over national debt as the government tries to plug holes in the economy with multi-trillion-dollar stimulus efforts.

In 2016, Trump took Kenosha County by a mere 238 votes -- flipping a county that voted for former President Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012.

Swing counties like Kenosha propelled Trump to take Wisconsin by a razor-thin margin of just over 22,000 votes.

For many, 2020 has become a referendum on the president's handling of the pandemic. According to recent polling by Marquette Law School, only 40% of Wisconsin registered voters approve of Trump's handling of the coronavirus, while 58% disapprove.

For Lori McCammon, a resident of Alma, Wisconsin, the pandemic response is another reason she regrets casting her ballot for Trump in 2016.

McCammon, 65, was initially drawn to him because of his hardline stance on immigration. McCammon was living in Southern California in 2016 and said her proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border made the issue feel more relevant.

"The ballot wasn't even cold in the box and I'd already regretted it," she said. On the pandemic, "he has completely failed us," McCammon said.

Asked if she had a message for the president now, McCammon said, "Just please do something about this pandemic. I'm begging you. Please do something and quit making it political."

Come November, McCammon said she's decided to vote for Biden.

"I have voted Republican for most of my adult life," she said. "I don't know if I will ever vote Republican again."

Outside of Kenosha County, in more rural areas of Wisconsin, Democrats hope to see Trump's popularity slip in places where they previously expected him to continue to gain steam. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Trump gained the most ground in small towns over former-Obama territory.

Wisconsin lost 10% of its dairy farms over the last year -- over 800 farms -- because of a milk surplus driving down profits. Though the issue predates the coronavirus, farmers like Lynn Hicks want to get the message to the White House that they're still struggling every day.

"I'm a small guy -- I'm just a drip in the pail," she said.

Hicks has a small family farm in Gilman, Wisconsin. She supported Trump in 2016 and still values his "tough talk" over what she's seen from Biden. But she doesn't feel like Washington is listening, she said, despite Trump's promises four years ago to "drain the swamp" and focus on Americans who'd been left behind.

MUCH MORE ON THIS STORY:

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/newspolitics/how-voters-opinions-in-battleground-wisconsin-could-determine-presidential-race/ar-BB181Erx?li=AAggFp5&ocid=mailsignout

A Guided Tour of Madness

 Disclaimer: This essay is probably kind of a drag, just because my condition is kind of a drag, so skip it if you don't want to read Debbie Downer. This isn't a vent post. It's intended to give the sane a little insight into the mad.

 

I have schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. The condition includes schizophrenia symptoms and symptoms of bipolar mood disorder. In my case, my psychosis and mood swings are handled pretty well with medication, but the other symptoms - particularly of the schizo side of the disease still seriously affect me day to day.

Being medicated is not a lot of fun. At least unmedicated I could find some amount of pleasure in my manic states, but on the meds everything is blunted. I become impossible to live with and care for when I am unmedicated, so I take my meds for the sake of my spouse, but not so much for me. I could write far better when I was unmedicated, so you'll have to bear with me.

I aim to take you through some of the symptoms as I experience or have experienced them. Hopefully it will give you an inside glimpse at madness. Maybe those of you already familiar with madness can find some common thread herein.

Adventures in Diagnosing

Diagnostic paths for mental illnesses are often bumpy roads that may require several different opinions from different doctors. In fact, due to the nature of psychiatry, I recommend getting second and sometimes third opinions in any case.

I was initially "diagnosed" with bipolar one (which is "manic-depressive" with psychosis) in the emergency room of a hospital by a nurse. I was in that emergency room because I was manic and psychotic for well over a week and my partner finally convinced me to go with to the ER. They offered to commit me to the mental hospital (which here is inside the regular hospital) and my spouse declined and told the doctor he'd care for me after I told him they wouldn't let me smoke and I'd lose my shit.

So for about three months or more I thought I was simply bipolar. The mental health professionals I was seeing were running with that bipolar label even though it wasn't an official diagnosis - since it had been given by a nurse. Getting in front of an experienced and competent mental health professional is not so easy, especially in my country, and especially if you don't have ridiculously good insurance. If you're on Medicare/Medicaid you can forget it. Pay out of pocket. The first one I went to refused to even evaluate me to update the diagnosis even though I was showing symptoms other than bipolar.

It was my spouse pouring over the DSM that informed us of schizoaffective disorder. My symptoms are pretty textbook for that illness so it was an easy connection to make. Armed with this information/possibility we set out looking for a good psychiatrist, and finally found one in private practice about a 30 minute drive from us. That's what it took in the end. Letting the therapist know my symptoms, and asking about schizoaffective disorder I think helped - then they knew what to look for at least. I secured that diagnosis and then also got a second opinion as well. I still go to that psychiatrist today despite the drive.

Living With This Mess

I was sick for a long time before I knew it. It should have been obvious the way my adult life had been going, but it wasn't to me. I knew I wasn't normal, but I didn't know how sick I was. I thought I was just different. My parents didn't know, so the early symptoms I exhibited such as the extreme mood swings, were attributable to me being an asshole teenager. My mother called the cops on me repeatedly because of my behavior. She should have had me sectioned instead.

I didn't have psychosis until a few years ago, so I went through my childhood and most of adulthood without any idea I was sick. I had a career in software, which people with my condition simply don't have. We can't hold down jobs. We can't manage things like deadlines. Nobody informed me of that however, so there I was. It helps that I wasn't as sick as I am today. Looking back, my career was rocky. I was good at coding, but not any of the soft skills necessary for a job. I was really difficult to work with but people worked with me because I was a damned good developer. I'm sure I was expensive to manage - I was even told that by an employer once.

My career was there, but my home was a wreck whenever I lived by myself, and generally my personal life was a rolling disaster. My partner who has known me since I was 17 and he 15 always told me I needed to be in a group home. He wasn't wrong, but I thought he was just messing with me. I refused to believe I needed help.

Even when I'd get arrested from time to time (most recently in 2006 because i drank way too much, blacked out and apparently broke a door to a clinic), police would mention at my arraignment that mental health might be an issue. I balked, and got myself a lawyer. Every time. That's the problem with being sick and having cash. I had options, and I didn't choose the right ones.

Going Psychotic and Other Hobbies

Psychosis can be fun. It can be enlightening because it is like looking at the world with the brain's filters turned off. Imagine our brains cut out a lot of what we see and hear, because it isn't real (i think this is actually how it works anyway but don't quote me) - what we're left with is roughly reflective of reality, but it had to be pruned by the subconscious mind for us to make sense of those sensory inputs. If any of you have ever taken hallucinogens you'll have at least a vague idea of what I mean above I think. You see it all.

I really enjoy mania induced psychosis because it feels like I have access to the world that exists underneath what we perceive as the world. I've seen the whole of creation unfold before me and it was breathtaking. If I lived 6 lifetimes I'd never see anything so beautiful again. I felt intensely spiritual. Magic was everywhere, and I could understand it and it work with it. I found amazing patterns everywhere I looked, including in scripture. Some of what that "taught" me I still hang on to today, because despite coming to me whilst psychotic, it wasn't all garbage. Some of what I discovered about scripture for example, was legitimate.

Some of what happened to me changed me for good. Even the way I write software is different now, more fluid because I don't have to think about it anymore. I learned to background it reliably so I don't have to devote conscious thought to it a lot of times. That's a trick I learned while psychotic, and it has proved useful to me since. I can now hold a conversation whilst coding. Unfortunately, since my last major psychosis of this nature, some of my other symptoms got much worse, and I think they're related.

I also experienced another form of psychosis, this coming from the schizo end of my illness, and it was terrifying. "Bad magic", bits of the universe I could see that would harm me if I got too close, and the "night people" who wanted to turn me into one of them ruled this experience. The "night people" are particularly terrifying because they're constructed from my deeply seated core fears - pure nightmare fuel. These experiences are not fun at all. Sometimes they can be interspersed with the good ones, leading to a confusing rollercoaster of fear and elation.

Negative Symptoms

A positive symptom is a symptom that's present in a patient that's not found in healthy people - like psychosis
A negative symptom is a symptom of something that's not present in the patient, but is present in healthy people, like the ability to feel pleasure.

The negative symptoms of my condition are debilitating and not very treatable. They include but are not limited to social isolation, a diminished capacity to feel pleasure, disorganized thinking, diminished motivation, and depression that's not responsive to medication.

They're the worst simply because they resist treatment, and the meds don't help, so they're what I have to live with.

The social isolation may be the worst for me. I can't really form and maintain social relationships like I could before I got really sick. I avoid people, in part because of my fear of the night people - even though I no longer believe in them the fear is still there - but mostly I think because that part of me just doesn't work anymore. I don't call people, nor will I keep a phone. I barely leave the house (I also have a panic disorder, which gives me panic attacks while I'm out) and when I do it's with my spouse, not alone. My friends either bailed when I got sick, or we fell out of touch when I became a hermit over the past few years. It doesn't stop you from missing having people in your life. It doesn't stop you from getting cabin fever. It just means there's often no way to be content or comfortable. The only way to be my friend anymore is through concerted effort, because I don't reach out to people anymore. I just don't have it in me.

What I think scares me the most however, is losing interest in my hobbies. Without those I'd just be waiting around to die. Anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure) and avolition (being unable to be motivated) are terrible symptoms of schizoaffective and schizophrenia disorders. Talk about being zombified. What is someone that is interested in nothing and has no motivation? I fear that.

The disorganized thinking and behavior affects others more than it does me. I talk to myself, I can't foster and keep routines which affects everything from eating regularly to personal hygiene. I have a partner who is home frequently and is good about taking care of me, without which I'd be a mess. These issues don't cause me direct personal grief but they do affect other people, because I'm not so hot at taking care of myself without help these days. I don't like the loss of independence but it's something I can at least see myself being able to live with in the long term.

Prognosis

The prognosis for my illness isn't great, because it's not entirely treatable, and it's pretty debilitating, but schizophrenia, which is like a sister condition to this is worse, prognosis-wise, so at least I didn't end up with that. Schizophrenia runs in my family, however. When I was young - about 18 or 19 I feared I was going to end up with schizophrenia. Turns out, I wasn't far off.

In any case, there are very few jobs I can work at, so I hang on to the one I have, despite it being something that would otherwise be well beneath me due to my skill set. I went from coding for Microsoft at 18 to cleaning toilets at 40 because of this condition. Fortunately, I work alone - am not out of the house for more than an hour and a half at a time, I set my hours, and I don't speak to my supervisors for months on end. That's the sort of job I can do these days. Anything more than that and at best I get panic attacks, at worst I have another breakdown and sink further into my illness, which has already happened a couple of times.

I've accepted that I'll probably never have anything resembling a normal social life anymore. My outlet is online because it's what I can do. At least I'm married so I'm not totally alone.

Conclusion

I don't have some sort of happy ending for you. The condition sucks. Medication ostensibly helps keep it from getting worse, but it doesn't make people any better. It just fixes some of the symptoms. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with emphasis on patients with psychosis can help with some of the negative symptoms, but how much is questionable. I've got my spouse, and I've still got my physical health. Fuck the rest of it.

Chapter Review: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Moral Judgment and Decision-Making

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Moral Judgment and Decision-Making is chapter 88 of the 2020 book The Cognitive Neurosciences (sixth edition). This chapter was written by Joshua Greene and Liane Young. The book is academic, 1113 pages long and expensive ($233). It is not written for a general audience. It is a fairly detailed review of the state of cognitive neurosciences for academics and researchers.

Moral thinking is whole-brain thinking

Greene is the pioneer of one of the major models of the neuroscience of morality, the dual process model (mentioned in this book review):

Unconscious emotion-intuition and conscious reasoning lead to moral judgment (dual inputs): Reasoning + emotion → moral judgment

According to this hypothesis, both unconscious emotions and intuitions and conscious reason play a role in moral thinking and decision-making. The evidence to support that general thesis strikes me as overwhelming. What isn't known is the details of how the brain does what it does.

One concern about the neuroscience of morality that Greene and Young (G&Y) discuss is the possibility that morality as a separate scientific research field could be in danger of becoming meaningless. Accumulating evidence shows that morality appears to have few or no neural mechanisms that are unique to  moral thinking. In other words, moral thinking appears to rely mostly or completely on the same pathways and brain structures that mediate various kinds of non-moral thinking. G&Y comment: “It’s now clear, however, that the ‘moral brain’ is, more or less, the whole brain .... Understanding this is, itself, a kind of progress .... if this unified [whole brain] theory of morality is correct, it doesn't bode well for a unified theory for moral neuroscience.”

Apparently, there is no specific brain structure(s) that uniquely do the mental data processing involved in making moral judgments.

Morality and moral neuroscience defined; The specter of warring tribalism

If one wants to do research on something, it helps to have a definition or description of it. The description has troubling implications for long-term human survival and well-being. G&Y write:

“... we regard morality as a suite of cognitive mechanisms to enable otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation. Humans have psychological features that are straightforwardly moral (such as empathy) and others that are not (such as in-group favoritism) because they enable us to achieve goals that we can’t achieve through pure selfishness. .... Morality evolved, not as a device for universal cooperation but as a competitive weapon -- as a system for turning Me into Us, which in turn enables Us to outcompete Them. It does not follow from this, however, that are are doomed to be warring tribalists. Drawing on our ingenuity and flexibility, it’s possible to put human values ahead of evolutionary imperatives, as we do when we use birth control.”

Morality and pragmatic rationalism

Based on my limited understanding of history, humans have always been warring tribalists and arguably still are today to some extent. Although it usually doesn’t seem that way, here is less warring between armies and nations going on in modern times than in past centuries.

Other than birth control, G&Y do not give evidence for their belief that ingenuity and flexibility can allow the species to put moral values ahead of evolutionary imperatives. The sentiment seems to be mostly aspirational, not empirical. In view of the major expansion of power that modern communications technologies give to demagogues, tyrants, liars and other bad people, one can argue that democratic, rule of law-driven societies are falling to evolutionary imperatives, including authoritarianism. The rapid rise of modern communications technology has blown right past slow human evolution. Societies have to evolve because biological evolution cannot keep up.

One core goal of pragmatic rationalism’s moral structure is to somehow form a gigantic Us in-group for the human species. As I learn more, e.g., by reading chapter 88 of this book, that seems increasingly unlikely. The next best thing seems to try to unite all people in a single country based on the four core moral values that pragmatic rationalism is based on. Inherent in the third moral value, service to the public interest, is an anti-war bias that is intended to reduce violence generally, including between nations.

The problem with the nation-size In group formation hypothesis is that, as we are witnessing in real time, demagogues, liars and other bad people who rely on dark free speech, can tear the people of a nation to pieces. It is odd because the conservative and GOP side is explicitly appealing to American nationalism, but it nonetheless is tearing us apart. A major reason the modern conservative appeal is tearing us apart appears to be that it is significantly grounded in irrational bigotry, racism, distrust, hate, misogyny and intolerance of Out groups. Dark free speech has created all of that poison in the minds of millions of people.

At present, circumstances and evolutionary imperatives do not bode well for the rise of pragmatic rationalism. In my opinion, that is unfortunate to say the least.