OLD CONTENT
digest.bps.org.uk/2019/04/10/finally-some-research-into-whether-diversity-training-actually-works-unfortunately-its-not-very-promising/
there’s little evidence-backed consensus about which sorts of diversity programmes work, and why, and there have been long-standing concerns in some quarters that these programmes don’t do much at all, or that they could actually be harmful.
Bigots cannot learn not to be bigots, and non-bigots never needed to learn it. The only way to end bigotry is to prohibit the bigoted from reproducing. We have been saying all this long ago.
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Someone starting to shift from False Left to True Left:
www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/we-used-to-think-photos-like-this-could-change-the-world-what-needs-to-change-is-who-we-are/2019/06/26/53c9087a-982d-11e9-830a-21b9b36b64ad_story.htmlWe used to think photos like this could change the world. What needs to change is who we are.
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Salvadoran migrant Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his toddler daughter, Valeria, died Sunday after being swept away by a strong current while the family was trying to cross the Rio Grande into the United States. Unknown to most of the world until this week, they are now briefly famous, a toddler in red shorts and tiny shoes, tucked inside her father’s dark T-shirt, seemingly at rest as if napping with her dad on a hot afternoon.
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Because these images have already broken through our own resistance to seeing pain and tragedy in the world, we imagine that they must break through the collective conscience as powerful political icons. They enter our consciousness almost by stealth and then explode, and that is how we assume they’ll work in the public square, too.
So the image gets shared on social media, and is seen repeatedly on cable television and sometimes in the pages of newspapers. As it circulates, we believe it will acquire enough force and familiarity that our political leaders will have to do something different — change policies, reverse course, revise their own understanding of the severity of a problem. For more than a century, this metaphor has been in operation behind the scenes whenever journalists, or activists, hold up photographs to the world, and say: This is a truth you must acknowledge.
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But when nationalism has successfully dehumanized the other, there is no breaking through, and people who imagine that a photographic message must assuredly be so powerful that it will touch all hearts are forced to grapple with a more confounding truth: Not all consciences operate alike, not everyone is susceptible to what seems a basic, even rudimentary level of empathy. And so, there is a paradox: We resist the idea of living in an us-vs.-them world only to find that our basic sense of “us” is already fractured. We look out at our fellow humans and can’t honestly understand how their minds work. At some level, we think, “Can’t you see what is happening in this image?” As if seeing and understanding are identical.
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You may look at this photo and think that its deep message is “We are all hoping for a better life and will take extraordinary risks on behalf of those we love.” But someone else will probably say, “People shouldn’t cross borders without permission.” The drowning becomes a kind of punishment, a river stands in for ideas of human authority, and the photograph doesn’t break through anything. It merely reiterates an old and cherished belief: Bad things happen to those who break the rules.
There is a fundamental difference between these two interpretations: One requires time and effort, an act of engaged empathy, while the other is a quick judgment that reaffirms an existing sense of the world. The power of a photograph like this depends on the time we devote to it and our basic sense of who these people are. For the few hours or days that this photograph elicits chatter and argument, there will be efforts to make it an allegory of law and judgment rather than an opportunity for moral imagination and compassion.
The part in bold is the shift.
There is no "paradox", however, and it is False Leftist to think that there is. Yes, we - like you - resist the idea of living in an us-vs-them world. But we - unlike you - do not resist the idea of living in a superior-vs-inferior world. Those who lack universalist empathy are inferior. They are not "our fellow humans", they are barbarians who should be exterminated.
And the need for effort to empathize is itself a sign of inferiority, albeit on a more advanced tier. The truly empathic require no effort to empathize (if anything almost all our effort during most of our waking lives is spent on suppressing our empathy so that we can retain marginal functionality in mainstream society where we witness non-stop violence everywhere we look). But this is the difference between True Leftists and False Leftists. In the author's words, False Leftists possess a "resistance to seeing pain and tragedy in the world" (though to their credit they are at least willing to expend effort to overcome this resistance). True Leftists, in contrast, rarely see anything except pain and tragedy.
Furthermore, this False Left author really does fail to understand how rightist minds work. Do you really think the rightists believe "people" shouldn't cross borders without permission? What rightists believe is that "non-whites" shouldn't cross borders without "white" permission, whereas "whites" can do Manifest Destiny for centuries without deserving any punishment whatsoever. And this is underpins the first point. "Whites" do not see "non-whites" as "people", so why should we see "whites" as "our fellow humans"?
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People are starting to understand what is required:
www.infowars.com/death-camps-for-trump-supporters-posted-on-homes-cars-belonging-to-republican-congressmans-staff/The ‘death camps for Trump supporters’ fliers that were seen in New York yesterday have now been posted on homes and cars belonging to the staff of Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin.
Zeldin (Jew) is a notable critic of Omar.
Unfortunately, AOC is not even close to getting it yet:
news.yahoo.com/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-white-supremacists-091015953.html
But then Ocasio-Cortez made a direct appeal to racists and white supremacists ― and her message was simple: “Come back.”
She also called on those “radicalized in a funnel of vitriol” to turn away from hate, promising that they would be welcomed with love in return:
“There is a mother waiting for you, I know it. I know there’s a teacher waiting for you, saying, ‘What happened to my kid? What happened to my friend?’ And we will always be here and hold space for you to come back. We will love you back. You are not too far gone.”
They do not deserve our love. To love them despite what they have done is to insult their victims. What happened to those kids in cages, AOC? Many of them have died. They aren't able to come back to be loved by those who care about them. Yet you want me to believe it is fair to give give those who cheered them being put in cages a chance to come back and be loved?
True Leftists have only one message to white supremacists: WE WILL REPLACE YOU.
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You cannot defeat racism merely by banning its social expression. I have said this from the beginning, and now the researchers confirm it:
gwtoday.gwu.edu/novel-mapping-model-tracks-how-hate-spreads-and-adapts-online (ignore innacurate use of word "hate")
The researchers saw clusters creating new adaptation strategies in order to regroup on other platforms or re-enter a platform after being banned. For example, clusters can migrate and reform on other platforms or use different languages to avoid detection. This allows the cluster to quickly bring back thousands of supporters to a platform where they have been banned and highlights the need for cross-platform cooperation to limit online hate groups.
“The analogy is no matter how much weed killer you place in a yard, the problem will come back, potentially more aggressively. In the online world, all yards in the neighborhood are interconnected in a highly complex way—almost like wormholes. This is why individual social media platforms like Facebook need new analysis such as ours to figure out new approaches to push them ahead of the curve,” Dr. Johnson said.
And even in face of their own results, the False Left researchers still don't get it:
The team, which included researchers at the University of Miami, used insights from its online hate mapping to develop four intervention strategies that social media platforms could immediately implement based on situational circumstances:
Reduce the power and number of large clusters by banning the smaller clusters that feed into them.
Attack the Achilles’ heel of online hate groups by randomly banning a small fraction of individual users in order to make the global cluster network fall apart.
Pit large clusters against each other by helping anti-hate clusters find and engage directly with hate clusters.
Set up intermediary clusters that engage hate groups to help bring out the differences in ideologies between them and make them begin to question their stance.
It should be obvious why all of the above methods will fail for exactly the same reason that they themselves already stated(!): clusters will regroup elsewhere as fast as they are banned anywhere. We can win debates against racists all day and they will just start repeating the same discredited arguments again the next day somewhere else.
Racism exists in the blood of racists. The only serious way to defeat racism is to terminate every last racist bloodline in the world. Anything else is dangerous delusion precisely because it creates the illusion of activism that lulls anti-racists into a false sense of achievement.
Dr. Johnson found that the varied ways individuals can interpret common information leads to polarization. People interpret news stories differently based on what is going on in their lives, he said, and these extremes are likely to be enhanced over time because of social media algorithms designed to reduce division. These findings contradict a common perception that polarized media consumption is what creates greater ideological divides and feeds online extremism.
No, people interpret news stories differently based on their genes. A poor racist who wins the lottery does not become less racist because of winning the lottery.
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I told you so:
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/deradicalize-hate-groups-experts-1.5255835While people might wish for a magic pill or program, there is no easy way to guide someone away from hateful, racist ideologies, deradicalization experts say.
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Deradicalization, the experts said, is most successful if mentors can reach people before their racist or discriminatory views become hardened
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"There has to be a will for them to want to leave that lifestyle behind," he said. "It's not approaching active members. That becomes a very hard and very unsafe and unethical process."
Unethical, because it can put the volunteer or counsellor in jeopardy of retaliation, said Galloway. Even though there's a low chance of success and there could be risks to his safety, he said he still tries to reach them.
"I've done some work speaking with active people online. Just saying to them, 'Hey, you know, if and when you feel like there's a change in your life that you want to make toward leaving those groups, you know we're here.'"
If they want to leave racism, they will do so without your help, and if they don't want to leave racism, you will not convince them to do so. So why do you even bother?
There is a magic pill for ending racism, however. Whatever prevents racists from reproducing will suffice.
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More leftists getting it:
www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/trumps-minneapolis-rally-demonstration-moral-145900190.htmlIt was surely a swift process for some people. Here's a talk-radio soundboard running for president, yelling about Mexicans and Muslims and how we need a Big, Beautiful Wall to keep Those People out. He knows whose country this is. He knows who should make the rules, and who ought to shut up and follow them. He knows who gets a seat at the table in America. They were in from the jump, from the moment they first stood at a rally and felt that twisted power coursing through their veins.
But others, you have to think, were more gradual converts. Maybe they felt the world was passing them by. Maybe they didn't know until he came along how much they needed an outlet for their rage at a million quotidian cuts—the new boss who doesn't look like a boss should look, having to press "1" for English. They were primed for it, sure, but it took a while to fully commit. Day after day, as they continued to support him—through the racist tirades and the attacks on veterans and their families and the exploding allegations that he is a serial sexual predator—they were forced to give up more and more of themselves to stay on-board. And as they gave up more of themselves, they became more and more devout in their allegiance to The Movement. At some point, the sunk cost became insurmountable. There is no going back now. They have given all of themselves to him.
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This is how he thinks he can win reelection: by continuing to pull his base of support towards more vitriolic expressions of this vision of America as a country for and by white people; by scaring other constituencies away from speaking out; by using the Republican Party's machinations to stop inconvenient voters from voting; by smearing his opponents as Just As Bad As Him, They Just Pretend to Be Prim and Proper; by soliciting foreign meddling that will benefit him in exchange for favors when he is reelected.
All the while, he will drag his supporters deeper and deeper into the abyss. They cannot be reached now, only stopped.
They are not going to change their viewpoint even if Trump loses in 2020. If anything, they will only move even further right. In fact many of them have been saying by mid 2017 that Trump himself is not rightist enough. The ideal candidate they would actually want would make Trump look moderate in comparison.