Month: November 2014

Hannity will have a conniption
by Tom Sullivan

That right-wing bugaboo, political correctness, can actually enhance creativity, says Dr. Jack Goncalo, associate professor of organizational behaviors at Cornell. He took hundreds of test subjects, broke them into small groups, and asked some at random to be “politically correct” or “polite.”

All were then asked to spend 10 minutes brainstorming business ideas. Creativity was measured by counting the number of ideas generated and by coding them for novelty.

Contrary to the widely held notion that being politically correct has a generally stifling effect, the results showed that a politically correct norm actually boosted the creative output of mixed-sex groups …

Although political correctness has often been associated with lowered expectations and a censor of behavior, the new culture actually provides a foundation upon which demographically heterogeneous work groups can freely exchange creative ideas, Goncalo said.

Setting boundaries and norms for behavior reduces uncertainty and made men and women more comfortable sharing creative ideas. The effects were reversed in same-sex groups where behavioral expectations are presumably more defined. The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman writes that PC norms apply peer pressure to prevent people from behaving badly who otherwise might:

Mainly, it’s not that there are things you can’t say. It’s that there are things you can’t say without the risk that people who previously lacked a voice might use their own freedom of speech to object.

To something Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity might say, to pick two at random. And they we can’t have that:

Whether a given norm is too restrictive is up for debate, but there’s little sense in the idea that modern culture is uniquely objectionable simply because there are some things people feel they shouldn’t say, because that’s how norms work. The only alternative to living by norms, to adapt Goncalo’s point, would be total social anarchy – which I’m assuming isn’t a prospect your average conservative PC-fighter would relish.

And it’s increasingly widely recognized that an anarchical approach isn’t much use when it comes to creativity, which thrives on constraints. “Blue-sky thinking”, with its total lack of limits, provides nothing to push against and nowhere to get a grip; worse, it leaves people more vulnerable to all sorts of psychological phenomena – like groupthink or bigotry or taking certain ideas more seriously because they’re repeated more frequently – that get in the way of actual good ideas.

Good, profitable ideas, one presumes. Only commies hate those, right?

And a scotch for me …

by digby

Now here’s a children’s book I can endorse:

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What’s the problem? All you have to do is fix it.

by digby

There are lots of reasons to suspect that the Chief Justice will not step in to save the subsidies in the Obamacare federal exchange in the King case, but this from Richard Hasen reflects my instinct on how it’s going to go:

[I]t seems entirely possible that Roberts might focus narrowly this time on the snippet of the act extending subsidies only to those insured by exchanges “established by the state.” One argument he might make in defense of that position is that Congress has the ability to go back and fix any unclear language through a revised statute.

Roberts telegraphed his willingness to take such an approach in the 2013 Shelby County vs. Holder case, which struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. The provision the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional defined which states had to get federal approval (or pre-clearance) before making changes to their voting laws. Roberts’ opinion for the majority ordered the provision struck because it was based on old data. Congress, he reasoned, could simply update the formula to respond to “current conditions” if it wished to.

When Roberts wrote his Shelby County opinion, he knew full well that Congress would not update the coverage formula. Congress is polarized, and the issue was a political hot potato. Indeed, in the period since the opinion, a bill introduced to update the Voting Rights Act has gone nowhere. It is supported by Democrats and a sole Republican, Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.).

Although Congress used to come forward on a bipartisan basis to change laws in response to Supreme Court rulings, the number of such overrides has fallen to a trickle. From 1975 to 1990, Congress overrode an average of 12 Supreme Court decisions in each two-year congressional cycle. In the last decade, that number has fallen to 2.7 every two years, and there have been no significant overrides during the Obama presidency since Republicans took over the House of Representatives. During the last two years, perhaps owing to the intensity of the current political polarization and paralysis, overrides have been even rarer.

All the court has to do is say, “Hey, the language of the law needs a little tweak to make it work so all the congress has to do is hold a pro-forma vote to change it and it’s all good.” Then Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Kennedy and Thomas all high five each other and laugh maniacally.

Sure, the law can be “fixed”. When hell freezes over….

I’m so old I can remember being reassured that once the law, no matter how imperfect, was in place Republicans would be forced to work with Democrats to make it work better.

Yes, people really said that.

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QOTD: Let the sell-out begin

by digby

Red state Dems have a little hissy fit inside the Democratic Senate caucus, hoping a Tea partier will give them a hug:

Over the last several months, a group of about 10 more junior Democratic senators have begun more openly registering their dissatisfaction with Mr. Reid’s approach, many of them former governors like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Angus King, independent of Maine, who have been dismayed by the inactivity on Capitol Hill. Inside their meeting, senators complained that Congress had been dominated by gridlock.

“What was really brought up was the frustration that the whole body was dysfunctional,” said Senator Jon Tester of Montana, who was elected chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “We’ve got to figure out a way to make it functional again to work for the American people,” Mr. Tester said, adding, “I think we take as much blame as the Republicans do.”

Yes, they are equally to blame. After all, all they have to do is pass the Republican agenda unchanged and they can break the gridlock immediately. From what we’re hearing about this lovely group of Quislings, they couldn’t be happier to be free now to vote with the Republicans and pass some noxious shit that people who will never vote for them want. Again.

And so it goes.

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“What are you going to do when they come for you?”


by digby

Via Daily Beast:

Really Big Coloring Books has also published titles such as Superheroes of the Bible and Fairies & Princesses. But it gets way more attention for its political coloring materials for small children. For instance, their September 11th coloring book “We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids’ Book of Freedom,” published in 2011, was slammed as anti-Muslim “disaster porn”. Back in August, the company reissued two terrorism coloring books with supplemental pages depicting the horrors of ISIS and other Islamist killers:

This is a children’s coloring book by the way, which explains why they go to such lengths to explain that children are “required to watch” all the ISIS horrors. I guess if you can give small kids nightmares  and traumatize them for life your work is done. On the other hand, they do get to color the picture in.

And they do offer up a hero to save them.  No, not Jesus Christ, but close:

By the way, I’ve written about the crucifixion thing before. ISIS fighters are vicious and cruel and they are executing large numbers of civilians including children. But it’s disputed that they’re literally crucifying Christians, beheading children and putting their heads on pikes.  War propaganda that accuses the enemy of atrocities is nothing new, of course, but using this Christian vs Muslim framing is a worse idea than usual.

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“Feminist” is a dirty word

by digby

I’ve been writing for years about the rather silly decision to abandon the word “liberal” in favor of the word “progressive” in response to the decades long campaign to turn the word into an epithet. It seems to me that when they hate you for what you believe changing the name isn’t really going to fool anyone. Well guess what? Some foolish editor at TIME Magazine thought it might be time to ban the word “feminist”and defended the idea by saying she though it would allow us to “stick to the issues” and “quit throwing the label around.” (But don’t worry she “has nothing against feminism itself” so that’s good.)I guess she’s “leaned in” so far that she feels she no longer needs to identify with something that made it possible for women to become editors at elite magazines in the first place. Success beyotches!

Anyway, she posed this possibility as part of a quiz that asks if certain words should be banned. The predictable results?

Yes, it’s been determined that a bunch of misogynists flooded the poll. Who could have predicted such a thing?

But regardless of the propensity of certain trolls, it certainly is special that a young woman thinks that the word “feminist” is among those which make you feel that “if you hear that word one more time, you will definitely cringe. You may exhale pointedly. And you might even seek out the nearest the pair of chopsticks and thrust them through your own eardrums like straws through plastic lids.” Yeah, it’s really bad. If only we could get rid of that icky, icky word we could like, totally, talk about the “issues.”

Amanda Marcotte has the whole story here. It makes me depressed.

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On the influence of old men, religion and AMC

by digby

I have a little meditation today on Maher and Islam and the FBI over at Salon today. An excerpt:

[O]ne has to wonder if a person who thinks that a book, however sacred and meaningful, can induce people to commit acts of violence, is equally concerned about other forms of influence? Does Bill Maher think that because television and movies glorify violence they should also be held responsible for many of the violent acts perpetrated here and around the world? After all, if Islam is responsible for the violence of a handful out of nearly two billion adherents you’d think Hollywood should be held responsible for the violence of a handful out of the billions of people who watch their violent programs, wouldn’t you?

There is a history of trying to hold the entertainment business liable for inspiring the criminal activities of its customers. There was the famous case of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers allegedly inspiring a long list of copy-cat crimes and a lawsuit which was rejected numerous times on both First Amendment and the grounds that the filmmakers did not make the film with the intention that its audience should commit violence. The music industry has been similarly accused of inspiring violence, one of the most notorious being the infamous case of Body Count’s 1992 album called Cop Killer, which resulted in a national hissy fit featuring politicians of both parties wringing their hands over what they saw as incitement to violence against the police. Under corporate pressure the group eventually pulled the song from the album and released it as a free single. There was even a lawsuit alleging that Judas Priest’s song “Better by you, better than me” contained subliminal messages that inspired a couple of teen-agers to commit suicide. (That one was dismissed when the judge found that the “message” was actually a mix-up in the studio.)

The only reason to bring all this moldy history up is simply to point out that people often seek to blame an outside influence for violent and destructive actions of individuals. And when it comes to our entertainment industry, which is clearly very violent, we have always found that individuals themselves are responsible.

Read on for more about a young man who watched Breaking Bad and got some bad ideas and how the FBI is also “influencing” young impressionable Muslims to break the law. And how the law treats them differently…

Donkeys of Wall Street

by digby

If you like your Democratic Representatives to be servants of Wall Street, you’re going to love this:

Rep. Jim Himes is among those under consideration for the post of chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, according to sources and published news reports.

The DCCC — or D-triple-C as it’s commonly called — is the Democratic Party arm most directly involved in electing Democrats to the House of Representatives.

Although it raised $171.9 million for the 2014 election — compared to $131 million for the DCCC’s Republican counterpart — Democratic House candidates took a drubbing with a net loss of 12 seats. On top of the loss of 63 seats in 2010, there will be fewer Democrats in the House when the 114th Congress convenes in January than at any time since the 1940s and maybe longer.

Through a spokesman, Himes declined to talk about whether he was interested in the position. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has sole power to appoint the new chairman, who would replace departing chairman Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y.

Of course. Recall this article from a couple of years ago called Wall Street’s favorite Democrat:

Wall Street doesn’t have many friends in Washington these days—especially among Democrats on Capitol Hill. They pushed through the massive Dodd-Frank financial overhaul and are scrutinizing derivatives trading and similar high-risk practices.

There is one House Democrat who’s shown some sympathy for Wall Street: Jim Himes. A former Goldman Sachs (GS) investment banker who represents Greenwich, Westport, and other affluent Connecticut towns where many bankers rest their heads at night, he isn’t shy about defending the industry or decrying Wall Street bashing. Banking policy has devolved into a “morality play that is good vs. evil, Democrat vs. Republican, which is absurd,” he says. Dodd-Frank “contains some very, very good things and very important things. And it contains some silly things.”

From his seat on the House Financial Services Committee, Himes has sided with Democrats in resisting Republican calls to repeal Dodd-Frank—which he helped to write and voted to pass—but he’s also joined with Republicans who argue the law puts the industry on too short a leash. This year, he has authored legislation to limit the ability of regulators to oversee international swaps trades, and worked out a deal between the parties to water down requirements that financial firms keep their derivatives deals separate from their federally insured banks. He has also leaned on regulators to ease restrictions on the speculative trading banks do for their own accounts.

I guess some of them feel as if they were too populist this time out and they need to get back in the good graces of the people who own the country. No, not “the people” — “the rich people.”

If you want to read a piece about just how daft this is, this piece from Howie at Down With Tyranny will make smoke come out of your ears.

This too.

And this
It’s not a done deal. There are others in contention. But we’re hearing that the leadership, including Pelosi, are inclined to support Himes. If that’s true, the lesson from this last election was that they believe their path to victory lies in electing the most Wall Street friendly Democrats they can find. How that’s different from what they did this last time — with disastrous effects — is anyone’s guess.

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Green World Rising, if we want it

by Gaius Publius

I’ve been saving a group of videos that I think need watching, and this is an excellent group to do that watching. The first is Episode 3 in a series of important climate films produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, Thom Hartmann, Dr. Michael Mann and others.

Here’s the video, called Green World Rising. (To open it large in a new tab, click here. Note that an HD version is available at the gear icon.)

The home page for the series is also called Green World Rising. Episode 1, Carbon, is here (I recommend it). Episode 2, Last Hours, is here.

Note the positive tone, the optimism. I agree with the underlying assessment. The solution is available now. We just have to force our will — because that’s what it will take — to implement it, against those who are forcing their will to stop the solution.

I’ve written much about this issue and will write more. But to keep it simple, remember these bottom lines:

As I said, much more later. But as DiCaprio and Hartmann point out in the video, the path is clear and available. Remember that. We just have to bend our will and take it.

GP

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The Other is marrying

by Tom Sullivan

It seems marriage equality is still on the move, scoring victories Wednesday in Kansas and South Carolina:

Gay marriage advocates won another two victories on Wednesday as the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Kansas to become the 33rd U.S. state where same-sex couples can wed and a federal judge struck down South Carolina’s ban.

The high court declined a request from Kansas officials to block U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Crabtree’s Nov. 4 ruling that struck down the state’s gay marriage ban as a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

And, by the way, a hearing on marriage equality Wednesday in Mississippi. From Aaron Sarver at Campaign for Southern Equality just last night:

After 6 hours in federal court today, U.S. District Court Judge Carlton W. Reeves concluded the hearing in Campaign for Southern Equality v. Bryant by stating he would rule “as soon as possible” in the case.

We’re hopeful that a ruling striking down Mississippi’s ban on same-sex marriage will indeed come soon.

All this rush of inclusion has a darker counterpoint. JT Eberhard writes at the WWJTDo blog about the reaction to a letter in the local paper:

The Unitarian Universalist church in my hometown of Mountain Home, Arkansas recently published a letter in the local paper letting the community know that they welcome everyone at their church regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation.

The reaction? The church had its windows shot out one night and were left this note:

The Arkansas Times blog has a bit more. Still, a Facebook commenter asked what “True Southerners” meant. “True” is a verbal tick among the hard right, as in “true facts” and “true locals.” Adding “true” distinguishes any manifestation of the wicked, deceitful Other – THEM – from the authentic, trustworthy US. The note-writer, for example, is likely a true Christian.

Long ago, a friend who had served in the army quipped, “Do you know why all American military gear is marked U.S.?”

“Okay, I’ll bite. Why?” I asked as he grinned.

“So you know who to shoot: anyone who’s not US.”

[h/t Dave Neiwert]