Empty Rhetoric, Inequality, Education and Heroes

¡Hola mi Gente!

I’m in pain! My back is killing me! Feel sorry for me! LOL

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To see the truth, contemplate all phenomena as a lie.

-- Thaganapa

Did you hear? The DNC and Charlotte, NC, the host city for the Democratic National Convention next year to renominate President Obama, has announced that it will actively repress planned Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. The city council has already enacted a series of restrictions on the allowed locations in which protesters can demonstrate and the outright ban on overnight stays.

Goes to show that the “two-party system” is in actuality a bad imitation of a wrestling match -- complete with bad guy/ good guy role plays -- in which the outcome has been decided.

Expect major fallout for the dems if this is allowed. As with the empty talk of hope, Dems want to exploit of the rhetoric of the #OccupyWallStreet movement without actually demonstrating a commitment to it.

I see one of two things happening: either we, the people, fight for real electoral reform, or we’re doomed.

In any case, the legality of these actions is being challenged by the Lawyer’s Guild and whatever the outcome, I don’t see this stopping the many activists who plan to be there.

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Speaking of OWS, the good people at Crooked Timber brought my attention to an excellent Times article on education and inequality. The authors draw from the work of Sean Reardon (here), who uncovers a substantial correlation between income inequality and educational achievement. They pull no punches:

The Occupy movement has catalyzed rising anxiety over income inequality; we desperately need a similar reminder of the relationship between economic advantage and student performance.

The correlation has been abundantly documented, notably by the famous Coleman Report in 1966. New research by Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University traces the achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families over the last 50 years and finds that it now far exceeds the gap between white and black students.

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that more than 40 percent of the variation in average reading scores and 46 percent of the variation in average math scores across states is associated with variation in child poverty rates.

International research tells the same story. Results of the 2009 reading tests conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment show that, among 15-year-olds in the United States and the 13 countries whose students outperformed ours, students with lower economic and social status had far lower test scores than their more advantaged counterparts within every country. Can anyone credibly believe that the mediocre overall performance of American students on international tests is unrelated to the fact that one-fifth of American children live in poverty?

Full Times article here. More on the above topics later in the week... 

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And last, but not least, I was invited to, but (due to work) was unable to attend, an action against police abuse organized by the Parents for Occupy Wall Street. I have written on these pages before on education (here) and how true education is a liberating and transformative act. 

Unfortunately, what passes for education in the US these days is anything but liberating. By the time children pass into adolescence and adulthood, they have come to dread thinking. Those who have escaped the dread of thinking will instead fall prey to the assumption that thinking will not be necessary; that all is needed is to retain information and to regurgitate it at the appropriate moments. 

Those that enter higher education similarly find themselves confronted by a world where independent thinking isn’t encouraged. Fortunately, there are some classrooms in which individual professors work to educate as a practice of freedom. In these settings, thinking, and more importantly critical thinking, is what matters.

The following video illustrates what happens when children are encouraged to think for themselves, to ask for evidence, to question authority, and what is possible if they are encouraged and supported by their parents in their actions.The response by the officials, however, demonstrate that our social institutions are vehemently opposed to freedom:

Today, these children and their parents are my heroes. They should be yours, as well.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Monday Myth Busters [Familiarity/ Contempt]

¡Hola! Everybody...
Tomorrow I will be in Albany doing some politicking, so I’ll be out all day. It’s lobbying, but technically, I’m not allowed to lobby in my capacity as a worker in a non-profit organization. So, we call it “advocacy.”

We’re facing huge cuts at a time when people are most in need of our services. Welcome to Korporate Kristianity. You might think you’re only a temporarily embarrassed rich person in waiting, but the facts say otherwise.

BTW, check out my opinion piece over at the online magazine, Subversify (click here). I tackle the nuclear crisis unfolding in Japan.

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-=[ Contemptuous Familiarity ]=-

Familiarity breeds contempt... and children.

-- Mark Twain

It’s a well-worn truth that familiarity breeds contempt... right? Right?

Wrong!

While it’s true enough that a person’s flaws can be more easily discerned the more you come to know them, all things being equal, familiarity by itself is more likely to breed comfort than contempt. That’s a more readable translation of the more researcher Robert Zajonc’s more clinical, “Repeated exposure is a sufficient condition of attitude adjustment.”

Zajonc gave experimental subjects a set of seven-letter Turkish words and, in a similar study, a set of Chinese characters. His subjects had no idea what the words meant, but they consistently said a word meant something nicer if they had seen it repeatedly. Likewise, after being shown yearbook photographs of male strangers, people said they liked the men whose photos had already been shown to them.

Since Zajonc’s studies, conducted in the 1960s, literally hundreds of independent studies have confirmed his findings. A meta-analysis of all these studies taken in the 1980s by another researcher concluded that Zajonc was right. There was one caveat, however: if the same stimulus is presented too often or for too long a time on each occasion, familiarity may breed boredom. This is especially to occur in young children who tend to prefer new words or pictures to those they have seen before.

Even for adults, of course, more encounters with someone or something you find distasteful to begin with aren’t going to change your mind or warm your heart. But where you have no aversion the maxim seems to be true -- as advertisers and political consultants know too well -- that we like things more as we get used to them.

In fact, if you were to follow the conservative talking points on any given day, they use this truth to great effect. Say it enough times and people will cozy to the idea that President Obama is a Muslim/ socialist/ Nigerian/ communist/ illegal alien/ anti-Christ. This is especially true if you’re predisposed to see African Americans or people of color as the “other.”

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization...

Monday Myth Busters [Beauty is Only Skin Deep]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I’ve been very lazy with writing lately. I’ve been using my laptop at home (I can’t write on those! LOL) and this weekend I finally started unpacking (after almost two months in the new place). My back is only beginning to get back to some semblance of normalcy, so I spent the past weekend painting and I finally started unpacking. First thing I did was unpack my monster Dell desktop.

Whew!

It feels good and I still have literally thousands of books to unpack and arrange... I’m investing in a shelf system that will go great with my decorating scheme and save space to boot. For furniture, I’m getting, yes, IKEA (futon frame, media solutions, dressers)... I’ll take photos and share when I’m finished.

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-=[ Beauty is Only Skin Deep? ]=-

Beauty is only skin deep, and the world is full of thin-skinned people.

-- Richard Armour (1906–1989)

In the early 70s researchers showed that we project various positive characteristics on good-looking people. The study, “What is Beautiful is Good,” literally launched a movement in social psychology and since then, reams of studies have been published on a major self-fulfilling prophecy: Because attractive people are treated as if they have more to offer, they live up to those expectations. Conversely (and sadly), the reverse is true for those not pleasing to look at.

The 1972 study had researchers asking sixty college students to describe people solely on the basis of their photographs. Those whom the researchers took to be the most attractive were rated as socially more desirable were expected to have more prestigious jobs and happier marriages.

I know, I know, you’re probably thinking that surely that’s just the prejudice of the raters, right? It wouldn’t be fair if good-looking people had other things going for them, as well. Well, since when has life been fair? LOL Over the years, researchers have secretly judged the attractiveness of their subjects, measured them on a range of personality variables, and then looked for a relationship for the two. They have rarely been disappointed. Attractive people have turned out to have higher self-esteem, to be happier, less neurotic, and more resistant to peer pressure, than less attractive people. They also have more influence on others; are more valued as friends, colleagues, and lovers; get higher salaries; are dealt with les harshly in court; and are thought by their students to be superior teachers. While not all of these findings have been consistent for males and females, the overall pattern for both sexes is that beauty is definitely more than skin deep.

Even more depressing: Attractiveness is related to the perception (perhaps even the reality) of serious mental disorders. Researchers at the University of Tulsa discovered that students assumed ugly people were more likely than others to be psychologically disturbed. The lead researcher then made a point of telling another group of students that unattractiveness was unrelated to disturbance; he explicitly asked them to disregard this factor. Regardless, they, too, rated unattractive people as more troubled. Another researcher stopped people on the street and asked them to fill out a questionnaire assessing the likelihood that they, themselves, would eventually develop psychological disorders. His findings showed that “increasing attractiveness was related to a decreasing perceived risk of mental illness.”

The problem with these predictions is that they may be right. A study of female psychiatric patients uncovered that they were relatively unattractive compared to other women. It wasn’t that their misfortunes had ruined their looks: Even before they were diagnosed as mentally ill, the less-appealing women had had relationships that were more difficult. And among the patient population, those who were viewed as particularly unattractive were also the ones who had been committed for a longer period of time and had received a more serious diagnosis. Another study of a similar group of patients found them less attractive than their peers even back in high school, based on yearbook photographs.

Of course, all this may happen because appearance affects how we interact with people from the very beginning. Adults are more likely to look at, touch, and hold infants that are deemed “cute,” and this preference for beauty persists. As one researcher from the University of Hawaii put it, “the way we treat attractive versus unattractive people shapes the way they think about themselves, and, as a consequence, the kind of people they become.”

Love,

Eddie

References

For a comprehensive review of the literature see Hatfield, E., & Sprecher, S. (1986). Mirror, mirror. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Hatfield, E., & Rapson, R. L. (2000). Physical attractiveness. In W. E. Craighead & C. B. Nemeroff (Eds.), The Corsini encyclopedia of psychology and behavioral science (Vol. 3, pp. 1203-1205). New York: John Wiley & Sons.