themarshallproject | If you thought violent biker gangs were a relic of the Altamont era, Sunday’s shootout at a Waco, Texas restaurant might have come as a shock. A long simmering beef
between the Bandidos and Cossacks boiled over into gunfire. When police
arrived at the scene, gang members shot at them, too, leaving nine
bikers dead, 18 people injured, and 170 suspects in police custody. Over
100 weapons have been confiscated.
The scale of this incident dwarfs a typical urban gang confrontation, says Harold Pollack, co-director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab
and an expert on gangs and guns. We talked to Pollack about why biker
gang violence typically gets so little attention. He believes the Waco
incident confounds our expectations regarding the race and geographic
location of people who perpetrate crime, causing us to see biker gangs
as more of a “curiosity” than a threat.
How does the shootout in Waco differ from the gang violence you study in Chicago?
I have never encountered a gang incident in
Chicago remotely like this. The number of perpetrators involved — not to
mention the nine deaths — far exceed the typical urban gang-related
shooting. Maybe there was some gang incident in Chicago like this
decades ago. But this sort of pitched battle? I’ve never heard of
anything like it. If these biker gang members were non-white, I think
this would cause a national freak out.
One of the shocking parts of this incident
is that after the police arrived, there was a gunfight between the gang
members and the authorities.
Urban gangs and criminal organizations very rarely
get into gun battles with police. They certainly have access to
powerful weaponry. Police around the country periodically capture large
caches of AR-15s and other weapons in cities. Yet when they break down
the door to a gang safe house or a drug location in a city, whatever
weapons might be piled on a mattress in the adjoining room are left
where they are. They aren’t picked up and used to attack the police. The
people who do attack police are typically cornered individuals or
people with serious mental health problems.
These biker gangs have a long history in organized crime. They began
with restless, traumatized veterans returning home after World War II.
Today, biker gangs still act as a sort of private militia that police
can’t always control, patrolling festivals and other events. Why don’t we pay more attention to them?
Geography may be part of the answer. There are not
a lot of outlaw biker gangs in gentrifying Brooklyn and other key media
centers. Of course, the number of deaths is lower overall with these
groups. You don’t have the daily deluge of homicides the way we would in
Chicago. But I do think that our views about urban crime are so framed
by race and inequality in a variety of ways. When criminal activity
seems unrelated to these factors, it doesn’t hit our national dopamine
receptors in quite the same way. People tend to view these motorcycle
gangs as a kind of curiosity.
dailymail |The
waitresses who were working at a Texas restaurant when a massive
gunfight broke out over the weekend are revealing the terror they felt
as bullets began to fly.
The
women, all employees at Twin Peaks sports bar in Waco, have taken to
social media to share stories of hiding in freezers, running in fear and
their belief that this tragedy could have possibly been prevented in
the first place.
And now, after enduring this horrific scene, they all find themselves unemployed.
'What we went through Sunday was scary as s**t,' wrote Alicia Ortiz on her Facebook page.
'I
wouldn’t want to have gone through it with anyone else. Being in that
freezer with y’all made me see how much of a family we really are.'
She also
bemoaned the fact that the restaurant has been closed down in the wake
of the incident, and what that means for the staff.
'So
the whole restaurant needs to be shut down because of bad management?
Peoples jobs need to be lost because of bad management?' she wrote
'We are getting the short end of the stick. And people are blaming all of Twin Peaks like we knew what was going to happen.'
Another employee, Sara Violet Parker,
seemed to echo Ortiz's comment, writing on her Facebook; 'Twin Peaks is
not to blame, my heart is so heavy for all of my friends who were
scared for their lives. Now we are worried none of us have jobs, with
bills to pay and some have children to provide for.'
WaPo | Two days after nine people were shot and killed at the Twin Peaks
restaurant here, Oddissie Garza can’t seem to shake a single, unnerving
thought:
“I was supposed to be there,” she told The Washington
Post on Tuesday as she lingered on her porch in a solemn mood. “That
keeps running through my mind. I was supposed to be right there at the
front where all the fighting was.”
Garza, an easygoing
18-year-old with a shock of pink hair, was often the first person
customers saw when they walked into Twin Peaks. She began working at the
new restaurant in September as a waitress and was promoted to hostess
five months later, placing her just past the front door at the
restaurant.
“It
was my first job and I was nervous in the beginning, but I found out I
had a bunch of sisters in plaid,” she said, referring to the servers’
infamous uniform. “After I got pregnant, I kept this job because of the
other girls.”
When she thinks about Sunday’s violence she is less
concerned with her own safety than the person she would have been
carrying with her. Garza is eight months pregnant with a baby boy, a
fact that may have saved her life, she said.
After a long shift
on her feet Saturday night, Garza’s legs were swelling and she asked a
co-worker if they could trade shifts the next morning.
Her
co-worker agreed. The next time she heard from anyone at the restaurant
was when they were locked in a freezer as gunfire erupted. Garza got a
call from her mother saying something — possibly a shooting — had
occurred at work. She immediately texted her friends at Twin Peaks,
hoping the rumor was some sort of joke.
HuffPo | Rival biker gangs clashed violently in Waco, Texas, on Sunday
afternoon, in a brawl that ultimately left nine gang members dead and at
least 18 others injured. As the fight spilled out of a local restaurant
and into the parking lot, participants reportedly used fists, chains,
knives and later firearms to attack one another. Eventually they
exchanged gunfire with police. Waco law enforcement announced Monday
that 170 people had been arrested and will be charged with engaging in organized crime.
The
brutality terrorized the surrounding community, leading to large-scale
evacuations, closed businesses and ongoing fears, though remarkably no
physical harm to bystanders.
The incident has temporarily shoved biker gangs and their overwhelmingly white membership
into the national spotlight. But these groups -- which the FBI labels
outlaw motorcycle gangs, or OMGs -- typically receive far less media
attention than urban street gangs, though the biker gangs' criminal
networks reach across the country and have erupted violently before.
Sunday's bloodshed reportedly began inside the bathroom of a local Twin Peaks "breastaurant"
that has catered to bikers in the past. Between 150 and 200 gang
members were apparently inside at the time, and one witness said that as many as 30 gang members were shooting at each other at the height of the battle.
Police
have accused the Waco restaurant of being uncooperative in earlier
attempts to scale back large and often contentious biker gatherings, and
now its clientele has led to serious consequences for management. On
Monday, the Twin Peaks corporate office revoked the establishment's franchise,
stating that "the management team of the franchised restaurant in Waco
chose to ignore the warnings and advice from both the police and our
company, and did not uphold the high security standards we have in place
to ensure everyone is safe at our restaurants." The Texas Alcoholic
Beverage Commission had already closed the restaurant for a week in
order to avoid further possible violence.
Nearby businesses that
fell within the police perimeter were also put on lockdown or evacuated
following the initial melee. Walmart reportedly closed early
Sunday after being cleared. Best Buy, Cabela's and other stores in the
Central Texas Marketplace -- the shopping center that contains the Twin
Peaks restaurant -- remained closed Monday as the investigation continued.
The manager of a local Denny's told the Austin American-Statesman
that a "huge" group of bikers came into her restaurant a few hours
after the shooting. Many were served but left abruptly a short time
later, some without paying their checks. The manager said a SWAT team
showed up minutes after the bikers departed, leaving her and other
patrons rattled.
The Waco Tribune reported
that "other local dining and drinking establishments" closed early
Sunday amid fears that gang members might be looking to resume the
violence.
Law enforcement officials in Texas said they've received numerous retaliatory threats from biker gangs following Sunday's incident and have gone on high alert in case of any backlash.
Biker
gang violence is not unusual in Central Texas. OMGs play a key role in
methamphetamine and marijuana trafficking throughout the region. The FBI says
they're involved in cross-border drug smuggling as well as domestic
drug trafficking, prostitution, human trafficking and other criminal
enterprises. Police said that five OMGs took part in the violence on
Sunday, though authorities haven't identified the organizations by name. Fist tap Rohan.
questioneverything | One could reasonably argue that I am, after all, biased and will tend
to ignore evidence against my basic hypothesis, that civilization must
necessarily collapse due to the decline of net free energy (i.e. peak
oil combined with declining energy return on investment — EROI — and
still growing populations). I am probably not immune to such selective
bias. Thus I put it to you, the readers, to let me know of any evidence
of some reasonably impactful institutions or organizations that seem to
be working and contributing positively to human happiness (please also
include estimates of the magnitude of such impact). As I was writing
this one possible example did come to mind, if I allow that some kinds
of religious experiences are positive (and I do even if I do not believe
in most of what religions teach about an ethereal world). The current
Pope of the Catholic faith (Francis), it seems to me, has done some
worthwhile things that could have a positive impact on the followers of
that religion, if not on other states owing to their leaders paying
deference to what the Holy See says (e.g. calls for peace). But I
reserve judgment of the effectiveness of his reign on the Church. For
example, will he ferret out gross behaviors like child sex abuses or
financial corruption in the Vatican's dealings?
If you have any contributions please make them in comments here. Let's
see what sort of list we come up with. But please do not post examples
of dysfunction. We already know so many it would be an act of waste of
bandwidth.
Economists' View the “New Normal”
Meanwhile if we just examine the state and trends of the global economy
we get a basic picture of the developing collapse. An article in today's
New York Times Business section by Tyler Cowen, a professor of
economics at George Mason University “Signs of a Shakier New Normal”,
May 17, 2015, brought into focus a variety of comments made by a number
of neoclassical economists of late (including, from time to time, the
titular representative of ‘liberal’ economists, Paul Krugman) that we
have entered a new kind of economic situation that they don't quite
understand but have labeled “the new normal.” I suppose they are trying
to subtly say that they expect the current set of conditions to continue
indefinitely into the future. But, their reasons for saying so have
nothing to do with their understanding the dynamics of the real economy
and making predictions based on their bogus models. They are just
tacitly admitting that something unusual is happening and it has
persisted long enough now to be acknowledged as possibly permanent.
While the US government and a variety of media talking heads are hailing
the “recovery” the reality of life for the vast majority of Americans
does not demonstrate recovery. They continue to grow poorer, budgets are
stretched even for those who have jobs, the real cost of living is
still going up even in spite of the recent relief in energy costs, in
short for most people there is no recovery. And that is what these
economists are referring to (academically) as the new normal.
NYTimes | The
difficulties facing the police and prosecutors were foreshadowed by the
last mass arrest of bikers in the United States. In that case, in 2002,
three motorcycle gang members were killed and about a dozen others were
injured in a shooting and knifing brawl in Laughlin, Nev. The brawl
broke out at Harrah’s Casino and Hotel between the Hells Angels and the
Mongols, all of whom were attending an annual motorcycle rally. About
120 people were detained by law enforcement. A total of 44 Hells Angels
were indicted in federal court, but only seven were convicted. Six
Mongols members pleaded guilty to state charges.
“Oftentimes,
these mass prosecutions fail because of the overreach,” said Robert
Draskovich, a Las Vegas criminal defense lawyer who represented a member
of the Hells Angels in the Laughlin case. The charges against his
client were dropped. In the Waco case, Mr. Draskovich predicted, “the
majority of these people will walk.”
Officials,
however, have defended their handling of the arrests and the $1 million
bonds. “I set that bond because there was nine people killed, and I
felt that was appropriate for the incident that occurred,” said Walter
H. Peterson, the justice of the peace in McLennan County who made the
decision.
Sgt.
W. Patrick Swanton, a spokesman for the Waco Police Department, said
the three bikers who had been released — Juan Garcia, Drew King and Jim
Harris, all of Austin — were back in custody. The three men were
arrested Sunday after they rode up to the scene carrying weapons and
wearing motorcyle-gang colors, Sergeant Swanton said. After their
release, new arrest warrants were issued for them, and bond was set at
$1 million for each, he said.
“They were not mistakenly released,” he added.
Law
enforcement officials and gang experts said conflicts between two
motorcycle groups, the Bandidos and the Cossacks, had led to the
shooting outside a Twin Peaks restaurant in south Waco on Sunday. The
shooting, which left nine bikers dead and 18 others wounded, stemmed
from both petty disputes and broader tensions over the smaller group,
the Cossacks, failing to pay respect, and money, to its larger rival,
the Bandidos, officials said.
texas.gov | The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) has released the updated Texas Gang Threat Assessment, which was developed to provide a broad overview of gang activity in the state of Texas.
“Gang violence and crime are a chief threat to public safety in
Texas, and protecting our communities from these criminals remains a
top priority,” said DPS Director Steven McCraw. “This assessment
provides detailed information about the gangs operating in our state,
which will enhance the ability of law enforcement to combat these
dangerous organizations and their associates.”
The Texas Gang Threat Assessment was developed according to
statute, which requires an annual report to be submitted to the
governor and Texas Legislature assessing the threat posed by statewide
criminal gangs. The report is based on the collaboration between
multiple law enforcement and criminal justice agencies across the state
and nation, whose contributions were essential in creating this
comprehensive overview of gang activity in Texas.
“Gangs represent one of the top organized-crime threats to public
safety,” said Sen. Craig Estes, chair of the Senate Committee on
Agriculture, Rural Affairs and Homeland Security. “The Texas Gang Threat Assessment
will serve as a critical tool to assist law enforcement agencies in
developing and executing strategies to protect Texans, and I applaud
the Texas Department of Public Safety for its efforts in combating this
critical threat.”
“The most effective tool in fighting any threat is understanding the
enemy. This intelligence report amasses information about gang trends
and their relationships that is critical to effectively targeting and
disrupting these criminal organizations,” said Rep. Joe Pickett, chair
of the House Committee on Homeland Security and Public Safety.
This assessment details the state’s systematic approach to
evaluating and classifying gangs in order to identify which
organizations represent the most substantial threat. The report reveals
that current gang membership across the state may exceed 100,000
individuals.
Additional significant findings include:
Gangs continue to pose a substantial threat to public safety in
Texas and are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime in our
communities.
Many gangs in Texas continue to work with Mexican cartels to
smuggle drugs, weapons, people and cash across the border. The
relationships between some gangs and cartels have evolved over the past
year due in part to volatility and changes in cartel structures
and relationships in Mexico.
Of the incarcerated members of Tier 1 and Tier 2 gangs, more than
half are serving a sentence for a violent crime, including robbery (25
percent), homicide (13 percent), and assault/terroristic threat
(15 percent).
Texas-based gangs, gang members and their associates are active in
both human smuggling and human trafficking, which often includes sex
trafficking and compelling prostitution of adult and minor
victims. Gangs will continue to operate in human trafficking due to the
potential for large and renewable profits and the assumed low risk of
detection by law enforcement.
Tango Blast remains the state’s most significant gang threat. The
Tier 1 gangs in Texas are: Tango Blast and Tango cliques (more than
8,200 members); Texas Syndicate (more than 4,400 members); Texas Mexican
Mafia (more than 5,500 members), and Barrio Azteca (more than 2,000
members).
NYTimes | A
Duke University professor criticized for an online post comparing
blacks and Asians said Monday that it's not racist to discuss what he
sees as differences in how the groups have performed in the U.S. over
the past few decades.
Political
science professor Jerry Hough has been sharply criticized for a
response he posted in the online comments section of the New York Times
editorial "How Racism Doomed Baltimore," dated May 9. The 80-year-old
professor, who is white, has been on an unrelated academic leave for the
past school year.
In
his online comments, Hough wrote that Asians have been described as
"yellow races" and faced discrimination in 1965 at least as bad as
blacks experienced. Of Asian-Americans, he wrote: "They didn't feel
sorry for themselves, but worked doubly hard."
The
posting goes on to say: "I am a professor at Duke University. Every
Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes
their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new
name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration."
In
an email Monday to The Associated Press, Hough defended his comments
but said it's difficult to be subtle in a post on a newspaper's comments
section with a limited word count.
"I
only regret the sloppiness in saying every Asian and nearly every
black," he wrote in the email. "I absolutely do not think it racist to
ask why black performance on the average is not as good as Asian on
balance, when the Asians started with the prejudices against the 'yellow
races' shown in the concentration camps for the Japanese."
Hough
described himself as a disciple of Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s
who supported integration. In his lifetime, he said, he's observed
prejudice ranging from the World War II-era internment camps for
Japanese-Americans to segregation in the South, and he's dismayed that
more progress hasn't been made.
"My purpose is to help achieve the battle of King's battle to overcome and create a melting pot America," he said.
dailymail |FoxNews.com
reported Monday that on February 25, Ms Chamberlin went on a public
Facebook thread and weighed in on a controversial article posted on
TheGrio.com condemning Patricia Arquette's Oscar speech, in which she
famously said that women deserve to get equal pay for equal work.
The
author of the opinion piece, writer and filmmaker Blue Telusma, who is
black, argued that African-Americans and members of the LGBTQ community
do not owe white women any assistance.
‘I
LITERALLY cry and lose sleep over this,’ Ms Chamberlin wrote in
reaction to the op-ed, revealing that she had been raped as a child.
‘What this article did was tell me that I'm not aloud [sic] to ask for
help… Because I am a WHITE woman… So when I read this article… you do
understand what that does to me, right? It kills me…’
In
response, a commenter by the name Sai Grundy, who used the same photo
as the BU professor on her now-private Twitter account, poked fun at the
married mother of two, writing: ‘I literally cry… While we literally
die.’
When
Mrs Chamberlin replied that she ‘got’ Grundy’s message and assured her
that she can now take her ‘claws’ out, the African-American studies
professor unleashed a torrent of vitriol in the form of a foul-mouth
message partially written in caps.
‘^^THIS IS
THE S**T I AM TALKING ABOUT. WHY DO YOU GET TO PLAY THE VICTIM EVERY
TIME PEOPLE OF COLOR AND OUR ALLIES WANT TO POINT OUT RACISM. my CLAWS??
Do you see how you just took an issue that WASNT about you, MADE it
about you, and NOW want to play the victim when I take the time to
explain to you some s**t that is literally $82,000 below my pay grade?
And then you promote your #whitegirltears like that’s some badge you get
to wear… YOU BENEFIT FROM RACISM. WE’RE EXPLAINING THAT TO YOU and
you’re vilifying my act of intellectual altruism by saying i stuck my
“claws” into you?’
Chamberlin
tried to extricate herself from the tense exchange by writing to
Grundy: ‘'I am choosing to "exit" this conversation, You don't know me. I
don't know you. It's really as simple as that.'
But Grundy continued piling on and ended up having the last word in the heated back-and-forth.
'^^YOU
DONT HAVE TO KNOW ME. what you SHOULD know is that you don't know more
about this issue than margenalized women. And instead of entering this
conversation with an iota of humility about that, you have made it a
celebration of your false sense of victimization. no [sic] go cry
somewhere. snce that's what you do.'
Chamberlin signed off with the words: 'Will do.'
Ms
Grundy wrote in a separate comment in the thread: 'am I mocking her
tears or am I saying that her tears are meaningless displays of emotions
because they don't reflect at ALL an intention to understand the issue
from the prospective [sic] of women of color and queer women.'
The entire conversation has since been removed from Facebook, along with Saida Grundy's social media account.
WaPo | For $9, you will soon be able to buy an insanely cheap computer the size of a credit card
that runs Linux and comes with a 1 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, 4 GB
storage, and built-in WiFi and Bluetooth. While that’s enough computing
power to surf the Web, play video games, check e-mail and use word
processing software, the real potential is what DIY innovators, hackers
and inventors will do with this cheap computing platform once they
integrate it into other projects.
The world’s first $9 computer — known
as C.H.I.P. — won’t be available for shipping until early 2016. For
now, it’s still only a Kickstarter project with nearly a month to go –
but the promise and potential of a crazy cheap computer is so alluring
that the Oakland, Calif. company behind the project – Next Thing Co. – has already raised more than $925,000 from more than 18,000 backers in just a few days, easily blowing past the $50,000 they had hoped to raise via Kickstarter.
C.H.I.P. comes from the same innovation oeuvre as the $35 Raspberry Pi — a
credit-card size computer that is cheap, portable, highly programmable
and highly connectable. So if Raspberry Pi has managed to attract a worldwide user community
at a price point of $35, you can just imagine what the lower-cost, more
powerful C.H.I.P. might be able to do once it attracts a critical mass
of users.
WaPo | There is a race to build quantum computers, and (as far as we know)
it isn’t the NSA that is in the lead. Competing are big tech companies
such as IBM, Google, and Microsoft; start-ups; defense contractors;
and universities. One Canadian start-up says that it has already
developed a first version of a quantum computer. A physicist at Delft
University of Technology in the Netherlands, Ronald Hanson, told Scientific American
that he will be able to make the building blocks of a universal quantum
computer in just five years, and a fully-functional demonstration
machine in a little more than a decade.
These
will change the balance of power in business and cyber-warfare. They
have profound national-security implications, because they are the
technology equivalent of a nuclear weapon.
Let me first explain what a quantum computer is and where we are.
In
a classical computer, information is represented in bits, binary
digits, each of which can be a 0 or 1. Because they only have only two
values, long sequences of 0s and 1s are necessary to form a number or to
do a calculation. A quantum bit (called a qbit), however, can hold a
value of 0 or 1 or both values at the same time — a superposition
denoted as “0+1.” The power of a quantum computer increases
exponentially with the number of qubits. Rather than doing computations
sequentially as classical computers do, quantum computers can solve
problems by laying out all of the possibilities simultaneously and
measuring the results.
Imagine being able to open a combination
lock by trying every possible number and sequence at the same time.
Though the analogy isn’t perfect — because of the complexities in
measuring the results of a quantum calculation — it gives you an idea of
what is possible.
There are many complexities in building a
quantum computer: challenges in finding the best materials from which to
generate entangled photon pairs; new types of logic gates and their
fabrication on computer chips; creation and control of qubits; designs
for storage mechanisms; and error detection. But breakthroughs are being
announced every month. IBM, for example, has just announced
that it has found a new way to detect and measure quantum errors and
has designed a new qubit circuit that, in sufficient numbers, will form
the large chips that quantum computers will need.
Most
researchers I have spoken to say that it is a matter of when — not
whether — quantum computing will be practical. Some believe that this
will be as soon as five years; others say 20 years. IBM said
in April that we’ve entered a golden era of quantum-computing research,
and predicted that the company would be the first to develop a
practical quantum computer.
academia | Abstract: For the past two decades, it has widely been assumed by
linguists that there is a single computational operation, Merge, which
is unique to language, distinguishing it from other cognitive domains.
The intention of this paper is to progress the discussion of language
evolution in two ways: (i) survey what the ethological record reveals
about the uniqueness of the human computational system, and (ii)
explore how syntactic theories account for what ethology may determine
to be human-specific. It is shown that the operation Label, not Merge,
constitutes the evolutionary novelty which distinguishes human language
from non-human computational systems; a proposal lending weight to a
Weak Continuity Hypothesis and leading to the formation of what is
termed Computational Ethology. Some directions for future ethological
research are suggested.
Keywords: Minimalism; Labeling effects; cognome; animal cognition; formal language theory; language evolution
Why are you humans mesmerized by the lurid compelling pictures,
the practical, pretend, and photoshopped other-worldliness of the demi-humans in the pantheon of celebrity?
What purpose is served by these larger, more
perfect, and more colorful avatars that cycle above your pedestrian peasant lives?
Is celebrity-worship a sign
of the downfall of western civilization, or, more of the
same augmented by new, pervasive, and not entirely understood cognitive distributive media?
Do celebrities serve the same purpose in fin d'siecle western culture as the pantheon of gods did in Greek and
Roman culture and the saints did in Roman Catholic culture?
hbdchick |you will never understand human biodiversity without first turning an hbd-eye on yourself.
before i elaborate on that, a small exercise. indulge me.
at the end of this sentence, when i ask you to, i want you to raise
your eyes from your monitor (or smartphone or tablet or whatever device
you’re using), glance around for a few seconds, and then come back here.
okay: go!
back? great.
now, i don’t know exactly what you saw during your brief adventure away, but what i do
know is that when you looked around your room or office or the coffee
shop or your own private tropical island (d*mn you!), you experienced
seeing a smooth, undisturbed, flowing picture of your surroundings — it
was a video-like experience (hopefully not a shaky cam-like one! if so,
get to a doctor, quick!). that experience is a false one, created by your brain to make life easier for you. what happens, in fact, is that each and every time
we move our gaze from one object or scene to another, in the
intervening nanoseconds, we are effectively blind. we don’t “see”
anything for those split seconds. the reason we don’t experience what
would presumably be a very disturbing and confusing one — the lights
going off and on all day long! — is because our brains fool us. the
brain interpolates
the visual data captured via eyeballs, etc., and presents it all to its
owner (user?) in a nice, even — but unreal — picture of what that
individual “sees.”
cool, huh? yeah.
the reason i bring this up is just to illustrate how our brains are not really to be trusted.
fantastic, wonderful, unfathomable organ! — but one that fools us. a
lot! it deceives us so that we don’t go around bumping into things all
day long (the saccadic masking mentioned above). it deceives us
(deceives itself!) so that we can decieve others. it probably fools each of us into believing that we are discrete individuals — that we are or have “selves.” h*ck! it even looks like our consciousness is not a stream but more like rhythmic pulses. all for good evolutionary reasons, of course. but, still, there it is: the brain is a trickster.
once you realize this about the human brain — that it’s an indispensible but untrustworthy organ — all of the cognitive biases and dissonances that we suffer from start to make sense. humans are not rational creatures. we are capable of some
amount of logic and rational thought (some more than others), but more
often than not, our “reason” serves as an excuse generator for our
innate drives, desires, and proclivities.
the next thing you need to know — and you really have to internalize
this — is that all of those drives and desires and proclivities are
innate. all behavioral traits are heritable
to some degree or another, which means that genes are behind them, and
which means that there’s not much any of us can do to change our
natures. for instance, there prolly aren’t specific genes that will
make a person a christian versus a muslim, but there are definitely genes “for” religiosity. which
religion a person with “genes for” religious belief follows will
obviously depend to a large degree on the culture in which he is
immersed, but persons with “genes for” religious belief will tend to be religious or spiritual somehow.
all behavioral traits are heritable. and, so, you cannot change people or peoples — not fundamentally.people are what they are.
you are what you are, and so most of your thoughts and conclusions and
feelings about life and the world around you are expressions of your
innate traits. mine, too. (don’t worry. i’ll get to that.) and let’s
be honest: innate traits and a deceiving brain are no foundations for uncovering the truth.
we cannot rely on our gut instincts in trying to uncover the facts
about reality or to (consciously) understand how the world works. the
only way around this problem of our lyin’, cheatin’, no-good brains is
to rely on science and its finding. of course, since science is
conducted by humans, we run into all those cognitive biases, etc.,
again. but with enough effort, i think we can eventually
discover some truths. either that or space stations will some day start
falling out of the sky, and we’ll know we’re doing it wrong.
ndpr.nd.edu | The idea that groups have minds was popular in the late-19th and early-20th
centuries. The group mind was posited as a force that influenced and
dominated individual agency and provided an explanation for various
types of human behavior. But such explanations were deemed mysterious,
and, with the rise of behaviorism and operationalism, the idea fell out
of favor. But interest in group mentality has experienced a rebirth over
the past few decades. Within philosophy, Margaret Gilbert's work (e.g.,
1989, 2004, 2013) has done a great deal to bring attention to the ways
in which individuals might form a single unit of intentional agency, and
Christian List and Philip Pettit's recent book Group Agency
(2011) argues that there are genuine group mental states that cannot be
reduced to the mental states of individuals within the group. Outside of
philosophy, the study of distributed cognition is a growing area of
research in cognitive science, and the hypothesis of group mind is
gaining traction in economics, social psychology, organizational theory,
and politics. Recent theories of group mentality, however, are thought
to be just as mysterious as their 19th and early-20th century ancestors. Macrocognition goes
a long way to demystifying the idea. It provides the most sustained and
detailed defense of group minds available in the literature today. Macrocognition
arvix | "Cognizing" (e.g., thinking, understanding, and knowing) is a mental state.
Systems without mental states, such as cognitive technology, can sometimes
contribute to human cognition, but that does not make them cognizers. Cognizers
can offload some of their cognitive functions onto cognitive technology,
thereby extending their performance capacity beyond the limits of their own
brain power. Language itself is a form of cognitive technology that allows
cognizers to offload some of their cognitive functions onto the brains of other
cognizers. Language also extends cognizers' individual and joint performance
powers, distributing the load through interactive and collaborative cognition.
Reading, writing, print, telecommunications and computing further extend
cognizers' capacities. And now the web, with its network of cognizers, digital
databases and software agents, all accessible anytime, anywhere, has become our
'Cognitive Commons,' in which distributed cognizers and cognitive technology
can interoperate globally with a speed, scope and degree of interactivity
inconceivable through local individual cognition alone. And as with language,
the cognitive tool par excellence, such technological changes are not merely
instrumental and quantitative: they can have profound effects on how we think
and encode information, on how we communicate with one another, on our mental
states, and on our very nature. Cognition Distributed
NYTimes | This
week, during a panel discussion on poverty at Georgetown University,
President Obama lambasted the media, and in particular Fox News, for
creating false, destructive narratives about the poor that paint them
broadly as indolent and pathological.
“Over
the last 40 years, sadly, I think there’s been an effort to either make
folks mad at folks at the top, or to be mad at folks at the bottom. And
I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, don’t
want to work, are lazy, are undeserving, got traction.”
He continued:
“And,
look, it’s still being propagated. I mean, I have to say that if you
watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu — they will
find folks who make me mad. I don’t know where they find them.
[Laughter.] They’re like, I don’t want to work, I just want a free Obama
phone — [laughter] — or whatever. And that becomes an entire narrative —
right? — that gets worked up. And very rarely do you hear an interview
of a waitress — which is much more typical — who’s raising a couple of
kids and is doing everything right but still can’t pay the bills.”
MSNBC’s
Joe Scarborough took umbrage. After saying that “the arrogance of it
all is staggering,” and that he was “a little embarrassed” for the
president, Scarborough demanded of his befuddled panel: “What about the
specific clip about Fox News calling poor people leeches, sponges and
lazy? Have you ever heard that on Fox News?” One panelist responded,
“No, I have not.” Then Scarborough opened the question to them all: “Has
anybody ever heard that on Fox News?”
Well, yes.
In 2004, Bill O’Reilly, arguably the face of Fox News, said:
“You gotta look people in the eye and tell ‘em they’re irresponsible
and lazy. And who’s gonna wanna do that? Because that’s what poverty is,
ladies and gentlemen. In this country, you can succeed if you get
educated and work hard. Period. Period.”
In 2012, O’Reilly listed what he called the “true causes of poverty” including “poor education, addiction, irresponsible behavior and laziness.”
In 2014, during the week that marked the 50th anniversary of L.B.J.’s “War on Poverty,” O’Reilly again said
that “true poverty” (as opposed to make-believe poverty?) “is being
driven by personal behavior,” which included, according to him,
“addictive behavior, laziness, apathy.”
Even
though the president didn’t say that Fox News specifically used the
words “sponge,” “leeches” and “lazy,” O’Reilly has indeed, repeatedly,
called poor people lazy, and the subtext of his remarks is that many
poor people are pathologically and undeservedly dependent on the
government dole.
accuweather | With the state of California mired in its fourth year of drought and a
mandatory 25 percent reduction in water usage in place, reports of
water theft have become common.
In April, The Associated Press
reported that huge amounts of water went missing from the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and a state investigation was launched. The
delta is a vital body of water, serving 23 million Californians as well
as millions of farm acres, according to the Association for California Water Agencies.
The AP reported
in February that a number of homeowners in Modesto, California, were
fined $1,500 for allegedly taking water from a canal. In another
instance, thieves in the town of North San Juan stole hundreds of
gallons of water from a fire department tank.
jayhanson |THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMON REVISITED, by Beryl Crowe
(1969); reprinted in MANAGING THE COMMONS, by Garrett Hardin and John Baden
W.H. Freeman, 1977; ISBN 0-7167-0476-5
"There has developed in the contemporary natural
sciences a recognition that there is a subset of problems, such as population,
atomic war, and environmental corruption, for which there are no technical
solutions.
"There is also an increasing recognition among
contemporary social scientists that there is a subset of problems, such as
population, atomic war, environmental corruption, and the recovery of a livable
urban environment, for which there are no current political solutions. The
thesis of this article is that the common area shared by these two subsets
contains most of the critical problems that threaten the very existence of
contemporary man." [p. 53]
ASSUMPTIONS
NECESSARY TO AVOID THE TRAGEDY
"In passing the technically insoluble problems over to
the political and social realm for solution, Hardin made three critical
assumptions:
a. that there exists, or can be developed, a
'criterion of judgment and system of weighting . . .' that will 'render the
incommensurables . . . commensurable . . . ' in real life;
b. that, possessing this criterion of judgment,
'coercion can be mutually agreed upon,' and that the application of coercion to
effect a solution to problems will be effective in modern society; and
c. that the administrative system, supported by the
criterion of judgment and access to coercion, can and will protect the commons
from further desecration." [p. 55]
ERODING MYTH OF
THE COMMON VALUE SYSTEM
"In America there existed, until very recently, a set
of conditions which perhaps made the solution to Hardin's subset possible; we
lived with the myth that we were 'one people, indivisible. . . .' This myth
postulated that we were the great 'melting pot' of the world wherein the
diverse cultural ores of Europe were poured into the crucible of the frontier
experience to produce a new alloy -- an American civilization. This new
civilization was presumably united by a common value system that was
democratic, equalitarian, and existing under universally enforceable rules
contained in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
"In the United States today, however, there is emerging
a new set of behavior patterns which suggest that the myth is either dead or
dying. Instead of believing and behaving in accordance with the myth, large
sectors of the population are developing life-styles and value hierarchies that
give contemporary Americans an appearance more closely analogous to the
particularistic, primitive forms of 'tribal' organizations in geographic
proximity than to that shining new alloy, the American civilization." [p.
56]
"Looking at a more recent analysis of the sickness of
the core city, Wallace F. Smith has argued that the productive model of the
city is no longer viable for the purposes of economic analysis. Instead, he
develops a model of the city as a site for leisure consumption, and then seems
to suggest that the nature of this model is such is such that the city cannot
regain its health because the leisure demands are value-based and, hence do not
admit to compromise and accommodation; consequently there is no way of deciding
among these value- oriented demands that are being made on the core city.
"In looking for the cause of the erosion of the myth of
a common value system, it seems to me that so long as our perceptions and
knowledge of other groups were formed largely through the written media of
communication, the American myth that we were a giant melting pot of
equalitarians could be sustained. In such a perceptual field it is tenable, if
not obvious, that men are motivated by interests. Interests can always be
compromised and accommodated without undermining our very being by sacrificing
values. Under the impact of electronic media, however, this psychological
distance has broken down and now we discover that these people with whom we
could formerly compromise on interests are not, after all, really motivated by
interests but by values. Their behavior in our very living room betrays a set
of values, moreover, that are incompatible with our own, and consequently the
compromises that we make are not those of contract but of culture. While the
former are acceptable, any form of compromise on the latter is not a form of
rational behavior but is rather a clear case of either apostasy or heresy. Thus
we have arrived not at an age of accommodation but one of confrontation. In
such an age 'incommensurables' remain 'incommensurable' in real life." [p.
59]
EROSION OF THE
MYTH OF THE MONOPOLY OF COERCIVE FORCE
"In the past, those who no longer subscribed to the
values of the dominant culture were held in check by the myth that the state
possessed a monopoly on coercive force. This myth has undergone continual
erosion since the end of World War II owing to the success of the strategy of guerrilla
warfare, as first revealed to the French in Indochina, and later conclusively
demonstrated in Algeria. Suffering as we do from what Senator Fulbright has
called 'the arrogance of power,' we have been extremely slow to learn the
lesson in Vietnam, although we now realize that war is political and cannot be
won by military means. It is apparent that the myth of the monopoly of coercive
force as it was first qualified in the civil rights conflict in the South, then
in our urban ghettos, next on the streets of Chicago, and now on our college
campuses has lost its hold over the minds of Americans. The technology of
guerrilla warfare has made it evident that, while the state can win battles, it
cannot win wars of values. Coercive force which is centered in the modern state
cannot be sustained in the face of the active resistance of some 10 percent of
the population unless the state is willing to embark on a deliberate policy of
genocide directed against the value dissident groups. The factor that sustained
the myth of coercive force in the past was the acceptance of a common value
system. Whether the latter exists is questionable in the modern
nation-state." [pp. 59-60]
EROSION OF THE
MYTH OF ADMINISTRATORS OF THE COMMONS
"Indeed, the process has been so widely commented upon
that one writer postulated a common life cycle for all of the attempts to
develop regulatory policies. The life cycle is launched by an outcry so
widespread and demanding that it generates enough political force to bring
about establishment of a regulatory agency to insure the equitable, just, and
rational distribution of the advantages among all holders of interest in the
commons. This phase is followed by the symbolic reassurance of the offended as
the agency goes into operation, developing a period of political quiescence
among the great majority of those who hold a general but unorganized interest
in the commons. Once this political quiescence has developed, the highly
organized and specifically interested groups who wish to make incursions into
the commons bring sufficient pressure to bear through other political processes
to convert the agency to the protection and furthering of their interests. In
the last phase even staffing of the regulating agency is accomplished by
drawing the agency administrators from the ranks of the regulated." [pp.
60-61].
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