Thursday, June 29, 2017

ANS -- Turn the Page

This one is a must-read.  It's from Doug Muder.  It's about changing the whole system rather than just the figurehead. "We've been living in a conservative era for nearly 40 years, and that is what has destroyed the middle class."  I recommend going to the site and reading the comments. I even shared this one with George Lakoff.  
--Kim



Turn the Page

Since Ronald Reagan, America has lived under a regime of conservative ideas that Democrats have sometimes been able to resist, but not to overcome or replace. That aging regime is ready to fall, but Bastilles never storm themselves. The Democrats' 2018 campaign needs to be negative, but not personal: Bad as he is, Trump is just one example of the larger problem.


I keep hearing two theories about how Democrats can retake Congress in 2018 and start retaking the country. The first is to run against Donald Trump, who is an embarrassment to the nation, is historically unpopular, and may turn out to have committed impeachable offenses. The second is to run on a clear, positive agenda that can win back the working-class voters who have wandered away from the party of FDR and into the hands of the current huckster-in-chief.

Each approach has its virtues, and either would probably produce some gains in 2018, as mid-term elections usually do for the party out of power. But neither is quite right. Neither reflects the way that major change happens in America.

Beyond anti-Trump. The pure anti-Trump message is the easiest one to see through. The reason it's not enough to run against Trump is that Trump isn't the whole problem, not by a long shot. Yes, he's corrupt. And yes, it's dangerous for the country to have a president who understands so little about what presidents do. But think about the worst of what's going on right now: trying to pay for a major tax cut for the rich by kicking millions of the working poor off Medicaid, undoing what little President Obama accomplished on climate change, and (though this isn't getting nearly as much attention) sinking ever deeper into the quagmire conflicts of Syria and Afghanistan.

Just about any Republican president would be up to more-or-less the same stuff. A generic Republican president — picture President Pence, if you need a specific face — would also be favoring employers over their workers, letting big corporations manipulate the marketplace, looking for ways to make it harder to vote, insisting that God created exactly two totally distinct genders (and that only opposite-gender couples can form a real family), favoring Christianity over all other religions, and portraying the inner city as a war zone that needs an occupying force of militarized police (collateral damage be damned).

"Trump is bad" is not an argument against any of that stuff. If you're an anti-Trump Republican, "Trump is bad" becomes an argument for keeping Speaker Ryan in place as adult supervision.

We saw in Tuesday's disappointing special election in Georgia that Trump's unpopularity isn't necessarily contagious. In a historically Republican suburban district that nonetheless nearly went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Jon Ossoff was a fresh young face with none of Hillary's baggage. And yet, running against Karen Handel rather than Donald Trump, he couldn't do quite was well as Clinton did (partly because Handel managed to reverse the demon-association playbook on him and run against Nancy Pelosi).

Major change doesn't happen in America because the voters dislike one guy, even if that guy is the president. The root problem is the conservative worldview, the one that has been ascendant since Ronald Reagan. It won't stop being ascendant just because Trump doesn't know what he's doing and can't control himself.

Beyond our-policies-are-prettier-than-your-policies. But that raises an interesting question: How does major change happen? If you look at American history, a new national direction is never the result of a beauty contest.

If voters still more-or-less approve of the governing worldview, they never abandon it just because somebody else's new ideas sound better. If they believe that the basic philosophy of the recent past still has promise for addressing the nation's problems, they may occasionally choose a new face or opt for a pause while the country consolidates recent advances [1], but they won't respond to calls for fundamental change. [2]

Big change, the kind we associate with names like Lincoln and FDR, happens because the public decisively rejects the ideas that have come before. Only then does a new way of looking at government have a chance to catch on. [3]

It's important to understand what decisively reject really means. It doesn't just mean that public stops buying the arguments in favor of those ideas. It means that the public loses patience with the very attempt to justify them. When a set of ideas has been decisively rejected, you don't have argue against them any more; simply pointing out that these are the old, rejected ideas is enough.

FDR. So in 1932, the Great Depression was raging and Herbert Hoover was unpopular. Franklin Roosevelt probably could have won just on that. But if you look at Roosevelt's speech accepting his nomination, he doesn't mention Hoover's name, or refer to him individually at all. He talks instead about "Republican leaders", once mentions "the present administration in Washington" and twice more refers to "Washington" as short-hand. The case he makes is not against Hoover personally, but against the larger Republican worldview that had shaped the country since 1921, and whose roots went further back into the late 19th century.

There are two ways of viewing the Government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776.

Once elected, he didn't reach out to the Republican Party, he destroyed it for a generation. They represented the "malefactors of great wealth" who had driven the nation into the Depression in the first place, and their worldview prevented the government from helping ordinary people.

For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent. …

We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.

What Reagan did to Great Society liberalism. The last major paradigm shift in American politics was the transition from Carter to Reagan. It was Reagan who established the defining principles of the Republican Party we know today: low taxes (especially on the wealthy), strong defense, alliance with the Religious Right (under the label "family values"), and less regulation of business. [4]

In 1980, as in 1932, the sitting president was unpopular: Inflation and unemployment were both high. (Traditional economics had said that was impossible, creating a national uneasiness that maybe nobody knew what to do.) Americans had been held hostage in Iran for a year, and Carter could neither negotiate their release nor rescue them militarily. Japan was winning the battle of international trade.

Like Roosevelt, Reagan did not just run against Jimmy Carter, but against the liberal orthodoxy of the previous decades. In his First Inaugural Address he laid out the story that conservatives are still telling: The boundless energy and creativity of American business will produce abundance for all if only government would get out of the way.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. …  If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on Earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on Earth. The price for this freedom at times has been high, but we have never been unwilling to pay that price. It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.

After Reagan, Democrats couldn't just be liberals. Suddenly they were tax-and-spend liberalsbig-government liberals, or some other discredited species. The first and best argument against a new government program was simply that it was a new government program: Of course it wouldn't achieve its objectives, would cost more than the wildest estimates, and would entrench yet another bloated bureaucracy. Conservatives didn't have to make that argument; after Reagan, it made itself.

You could still hear the Reaganite echoes when ObamaCare was labeled "a government takeover of healthcare". No evidence was needed to show that such a "takeover" would be bad. That went without saying.

Where Obama failed. In 2008, President Bush was unpopular. But more than that, his failures were deeply bound up in the failure of Reagan-era conservatism: Bush's tax cuts built a deficit without unleashing growth. When government regulators got out of the way, Wall Street bankers turned mortgages that should never have been approved into a multi-trillion-dollar tower of worthless securities (whose AAA ratings fooled the market just long enough to crash the economy, make the banking system insolvent, and endanger the retirement savings of middle-class Americans). Our strong-but-fabulously-expensive military proved to be good at breaking countries, but not so good at putting them back together or preventing the resulting failed states from exporting terrorism.

Obama won a landslide victory and brought big majorities in Congress along with him. But he failed to charge Bush's personal unpopularity or the crisis Bush left behind to the massively overdrawn account of the conservative worldview. He did not proclaim the end of the Reagan Era and made no attempt to chase the old orthodoxy's defenders off the public stage, as Roosevelt and Reagan did in their day. If he had succeeded in doing so, there would be a new set of epithets that every conservative candidate or proposal would have to struggle out from under, terms like Iraq invader or bomb-everywhere Republican or sub-prime conservatismor free-the-wolves deregulation or middle-class-destroying cuts. (Those are just off the top of my head; no doubt professionals could do better.) Those labels would be as instantly disqualifying as tax-and-spend liberal was in the 1980s.

Obama's failure to turn the page is why conservative nostrums (that events have disproved again and again) are still popping up in the ObamaCare-repeal debate: Getting government out of healthcare will unleash the creativity of the marketplace to yield better coverage and care for consumers; yet another big tax cut for the rich will create the good-paying jobs that none of the previous tax cuts did; the millions who will be thrown off of Medicaid — mostly working-poor families who are struggling to get by on minimum wage or slightly more — are Takers who are about to get a much-needed lesson in personal responsibility, giving a break to the massively overtaxed and overburdened Makers who support them.

After the horror of Bush's Great Recession, the tax-cut-and-deregulation Great Recession, no one should be able to say such things with a straight face and without shame.

Turn the pageAfter nearly 40 years, American political discourse still takes place in the rhetorical universe created by Ronald Reagan. Our world is still haunted by the ghosts of Cadillac-driving welfare queens, job-killing regulations, initiative-crushing taxes, and poor people whose will to succeed has been sapped away by their dependence on government. The heroic entrepreneur still fights his eternal battle against the villainous bureaucrat. Private-sector spending on Mar-a-lago memberships and gas-guzzling jet-skis and AK-47s is productive, while public-sector spending on parks and roads and libraries is wasteful. A private-school teacher is a hard-working professional, while a public-school teacher is a blood-sucking parasite.

This rhetoric is aging badly and losing its hold. Republicans at some level know this; that's why their ObamaCare-repeal bills in both houses have had to be jammed through quickly with as little national attention as possible. You don't do that if you believe in what you're doing. If you think you have a compelling argument, you make that argument in the brightest spotlight you can find.

But aging regimes don't fall of their own weight. Somebody has to push them down. The Bastille never storms itself.

The 2018 campaign needs to be negative, but not personal. You can propose Medicare-for-everyone into this environment if you want, and if you can manage to control the narrative well enough to keep everyone calling it that — even after you get outspent 5-1 or 10-1 — you'll probably win. But if instead your proposal gets transmuted into a bureaucracy-bloating, tax-increasing, debt-busting, big-government takeover of the economy, you'll probably lose.

Democrats can't shy away from conservative rhetoric, and we can't hope that it will just slip people's minds if we change the subject by presenting our own solutions. We have to confront it directly: We've been living in a conservative era for nearly 40 years, and that is what has destroyed the middle class.

That central point needs to be backed up with direct rejections of conservative nostrums: You can't cut your way to prosperity. Nobody succeeds in a failing community. Money isn't speech. Fear creates violence, and cruelty will always rebound; more prisons won't make you safe, and more invasions will just cause more terrorism. More freedom for the rich and strong means more servitude for the poor and weak. The free market destroys the middle class. The environment is economic; we are part of Nature, and if we destroy Nature we destroy ourselves. (Again, these are off the top of my head and professionals could do better. The important thing is to express similar ideas in a uniform way, so that voters will know they're hearing the same point from many voices.)

Trump's individual outrages and the specific problems of this or that policy should always be interpreted expansively: Specifics should be presented not because they are important in themselves, but because they anchor the larger critique. Trump isn't an aberration, he's typical. The ObamaCare-repeal bill isn't just a bad policy, it's the logical product of a bad philosophy.

Party unity. A handful of Democrats will feel left out by this message, because they hope to appeal not just to people who have been voting Republican, but to people who still believe in the Reaganite worldview. That seems like a fool's errand to me.

But the vast majority of candidates, progressive and centrist alike, should be able to work with this national message. The positive proposals they present can be tailored to their own philosophies and their own districts. (Bernie Sanders, for example, knew better than to run on gun control in Vermont. Similarly, a rural district in Kansas, full of towns where there's one convenience store and one gas station, both struggling, is not the place to run on a $15 minimum wage. Higher, yes; $15 no.) Some will vaguely want to increase access to healthcare while others will post a detailed 50-page plan on their web sites. As candidates succeed or fail with these specifics, other candidates will or won't imitate them.

Some candidates will want to appear with Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, while others will invite Joe Biden or Cory Booker. But very few candidates will find themselves forced to run against the national message, or to choose between the national party and the voters they hope to represent.

Old and new. It's hard now to remember how fresh Reaganite conservatism sounded in 1980. Whether you agreed with it or not, it started new discussions and opened new possibilities for experimentation. But what was once young and supple has become old and rigid. Discussions shut down now, because powerful organizations have staked out positions that brook no debate: There can be no new taxes. Nothing can be done about gun violence. We can't talk to Iran. Defense spending can only go up.

That's what old regimes look like. They're brittle and have no room to maneuver when new problems appear. New voters come of age looking for insight, and hear only dogma. It may be hard to say exactly what should come next, but it's easy to see when it's time for an old worldview to go.

It's time.


[1] The new faces I have in mind are Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton, both of whom represented their party's acknowledgement that the game had changed, and did not reverse the country's course. Eisenhower let New Deal programs like Social Security stand, and Clinton yielded to a key point of Reaganism by announcing that "The era of big government is over." A "New Democrat", as Clinton sometimes called himself, was a Democrat who had learned the lessons of the Reagan Era.

[2] This a political analogy to the process Thomas Kuhn described in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: As long as researchers believe that the old paradigm is still fruitful and can still lead to new solutions to important problems, new paradigms don't get a fair hearing.

The political scientist most connected with this idea is Stephen Skowronek, who introduced the concept of "political time". Basically, he breaks American history down into a series of multi-decade eras, each dominated by its own widely accepted view of what government is about. Each president grapples with problems within that era's political orthodoxy, which he either promotes or resists. As the era proceeds, the ruling ideology becomes more rigid and unwieldy, until it collapses under an attack by a repudiating leader, who then "resets the political clock" and begins a new era.

[3] Lincoln is a particularly good example here, because the change he is remembered for — ending slavery — isn't what he campaigned on. Point 4 of the 1860 Republican platform explicitly denies any intention to roll back slavery in the existing slave states, and rejects military force as a means to do so:

That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the states, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any state or territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.

What the election of 1860 represented was not an endorsement of abolitionism, much less of a future where free blacks could vote and be assured the due process of law. Instead, it represented a rejection (on both sides) of the political climate that had endured since the Missouri Compromise of 1820: The country could no longer lurch from crisis to crisis as moderates like Henry Clay or Daniel Webster or Stephen Douglas worked out complicated deals to maintain the North/South balance of power.

So the America that came out of the Civil War was fundamentally different than the America of 1859, but not because Lincoln designed a new set of policies and sold them to the electorate.

[4] These ideas are so entrenched inside the GOP that even when Marco Rubio campaigned on the need for "new ideas", he simply repeated Reaganite orthodoxy.

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

ANS -- links to a couple of articles

Here are links to a couple of articles that I thought were interesting, but didn't quite fit for the full treatment.  Read them if you have time.
--Kim




  1. Voices

Crazy Marxists want to give homes to Grenfell survivors – but thankfully we live in a fair capitalist society

It's the same with those communists who went down with blankets and food. They should have set up a pop-up bedding and hot chocolate store to tap into extensive market opportunities







The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST

Mis-Educating the Young

ANS -- The mere presence of your smartphone reduces brain power, study shows

Remember, one study does not a fact make, but this is intriguing.  It's a short article.  Your cell phone may be bad for you even if it's off, even if it's just sitting near you.  
---Kim



Science News
from research organizations

The mere presence of your smartphone reduces brain power, study shows

Date:
June 23, 2017
Source:
University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin)
Summary:
Your cognitive capacity is significantly reduced when your smartphone is within reach — even if it's off — suggests new research.
Share:
     
FULL STORY

The researchers found that participants with their phones in another room significantly outperformed those with their phones on the desk.
Credit: © luengo_ua / Fotolia

Your cognitive capacity is significantly reduced when your smartphone is within reach -- even if it's off. That's the takeaway finding from a new study from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.

McCombs Assistant Professor Adrian Ward and co-authors conducted experiments with nearly 800 smartphone users in an attempt to measure, for the first time, how well people can complete tasks when they have their smartphones nearby even when they're not using them.

In one experiment, the researchers asked study participants to sit at a computer and take a series of tests that required full concentration in order to score well. The tests were geared to measure participants' available cognitive capacity -- that is, the brain's ability to hold and process data at any given time. Before beginning, participants were randomly instructed to place their smartphones either on the desk face down, in their pocket or personal bag, or in another room. All participants were instructed to turn their phones to silent.

The researchers found that participants with their phones in another room significantly outperformed those with their phones on the desk, and they also slightly outperformed those participants who had kept their phones in a pocket or bag.

The findings suggest that the mere presence of one's smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity and impairs cognitive functioning, even though people feel they're giving their full attention and focus to the task at hand. "We see a linear trend that suggests that as the smartphone becomes more noticeable, participants' available cognitive capacity decreases," Ward said. "Your conscious mind isn't thinking about your smartphone, but that process -- the process of requiring yourself to not think about something -- uses up some of your limited cognitive resources. It's a brain drain."

In another experiment, researchers looked at how a person's self-reported smartphone dependence -- or how strongly a person feels he or she needs to have a smartphone in order to get through a typical day -- affected cognitive capacity. Participants performed the same series of computer-based tests as the first group and were randomly assigned to keep their smartphones either in sight on the desk face up, in a pocket or bag, or in another room. In this experiment, some participants were also instructed to turn off their phones.

The researchers found that participants who were the most dependent on their smartphones performed worse compared with their less-dependent peers, but only when they kept their smartphones on the desk or in their pocket or bag.

Ward and his colleagues also found that it didn't matter whether a person's smartphone was turned on or off, or whether it was lying face up or face down on a desk. Having a smartphone within sight or within easy reach reduces a person's ability to focus and perform tasks because part of their brain is actively working to not pick up or use the phone.

"It's not that participants were distracted because they were getting notifications on their phones," said Ward. "The mere presence of their smartphone was enough to reduce their cognitive capacity."


Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin)Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


Journal Reference:

  1. Adrian F. Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, Maarten W. Bos. Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive CapacityJournal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2017; 2 (2): 140 DOI: 10.1086/691462

Cite This Page:

University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). "The mere presence of your smartphone reduces brain power, study shows." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 23 June 2017. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170623133039.htm>.

Monday, June 26, 2017

ANS -- Men Can Be So Hormonal

I've been saying this for years -- ever since I had a time period when I was taking testosterone.  I gave me more confidence, but also increased the depth of my anger.  They don't mention that here -- because they weren't looking for it.  Interesting article.  It seems to impair judgement too.  Hmmmmmm....
--Kim



Photo
Tim Peacock

"Does being over 40 make you feel like half the man you used to be?"

Ads like that have led to a surge in the number of men seeking to boost their testosterone. The Food and Drug Administration reports that prescriptions for testosterone supplements have risen to 2.3 million from 1.3 million in just four years.

There is such a condition as "low-T," or hypogonadism, which can cause fatigue and diminished sex drive, and it becomes more common as men age. But according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, half of the men taking prescription testosterone don't have a deficiency. Many are just tired and want a lift. But they may not be doing themselves any favors. It turns out that the supplement isn't entirely harmless: Neuroscientists are uncovering evidence suggesting that when men take testosterone, they make more impulsive — and often faulty — decisions.

Researchers have shown for years that men tend to be more confident about their intelligence and judgments than women, believing that solutions they've generated are better than they actually are. This hubris could be tied to testosterone levels, and new research by Gideon Nave, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, along with Amos Nadler at Western University in Ontario, reveals that high testosterone can make it harder to see the flaws in one's reasoning.

How might heightened testosterone lead to overconfidence? One possible explanation lies in the orbitofrontal cortex, a region just behind the eyes that's essential for self-evaluation, decision making and impulse control. The neuroscientists Pranjal Mehta at the University of Oregon and Jennifer Beer at the University of Texas, Austin, have found that people with higher levels of testosterone have less activity in their orbitofrontal cortex. Studies show that when that part of the brain is less active, people tend to be overconfident in their reasoning abilities. It's as though the orbitofrontal cortex is your internal editor, speaking up when there's a potential problem with your work. Boost your testosterone and your editor goes reassuringly (but misleadingly) silent.

Continue reading the main story

In a classic study conducted at the University of Wisconsin, college students taking final exams rated their confidence about each answer on a five-point scale, "one for a pure guess" and "five for very certain." Men and women both gave themselves high scores when they answered correctly. But what happened when they'd answered incorrectly? Women tended to be appropriately hesitant, but men weren't. Most checked "Certain" or "Very certain" when they were wrong, projecting as much confidence for their bad answers as for their good ones.

Men are also more likely to overestimate how well they'll perform compared with their peers. Researchers at Kiel University in Germany and at Oxford gave a group of adults a test that assesses judgment and reasoning called the Cognitive Reflection Test, or C.R.T.

To see what the C.R.T. looks like, try answering this question: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

If you're like most people, your first thought is that the ball costs 10 cents. But that is incorrect. If the ball costs $0.10, and the bat costs $1.00 more (or $1.10), then the total would be $1.20. So the ball costs 5 cents and the bat costs $1.05.

If you got this wrong, you're not alone. Even at Ivy League schools such as Harvard and Princeton, less than 30 percent of students answer all the questions correctly. This is how the clever questions are designed. There's an immediate, obvious answer that feels right but is actually wrong.

In the Kiel University study, both genders thought they'd scored higher on the test than they actually had. When asked to predict how others would fare, however, women expected other women to earn comparably high scores, but men thought they'd significantly outperform other men.

People don't like to believe that they're average. But compared with women, men tend to think they're much better than average.

If you feel your judgment is right, are you interested in how others see the problem? Probably not. Nicholas D. Wright, a neuroscientist at the University of Birmingham in Britain, studies how fluctuations in testosterone shape one's willingness to collaborate. Most testosterone researchers study men, for obvious reasons, but Dr. Wright and his team focus on women. They asked women to perform a challenging perceptual task: detecting where a fuzzy pattern had appeared on a busy computer screen. When women took oral testosterone, they were more likely to ignore the input of others, compared with women in the placebo condition. Amped up on testosterone, they relied more heavily on their own judgment, even when they were wrong.

The findings of the latest study, which have been presented at conferences and will be published in Psychological Science in January, offer more reasons to worry about testosterone supplements.

Dr. Nave and Dr. Nadler's team asked 243 men in Southern California to slather gel onto their shoulders, arms and chest. Half of the men rubbed in a testosterone gel, and the rest rubbed in a placebo. Once the gel dried, they put on their shirts and went about their day.

Four and a half hours later, enough time for their testosterone levels to peak and stabilize, the men returned to the lab. They sat down at a computer and took several tests — a math test, a mood questionnaire and the C.R.T.

For the men with extra testosterone, their moods hadn't changed much, but their ability to analyze carefully had. They were, on average, 35 percent more likely to make the intuitive mistake on the bat and ball question. They were also rushed in their bad judgment and gave incorrect answers faster than the men with normal testosterone levels, while taking longer to generate correct answers.

Some will shrug and say that making a mistake on a sneaky word problem isn't a concern in daily life, but researchers are discovering that these reasoning errors could affect financial markets. A team of neuroeconomists, led by Dr. Nadler, along with Paul J. Zak at Claremont Graduate University, gave 140 male traders either testosterone gel or a placebo. The next day, the traders came back into the lab and participated in an asset trading simulation.

The results are disturbing. Men with boosted testosterone significantly overpriced assets compared with men who got the placebo, and they were slower to incorporate data about falling values into their trading decisions. In other words, they created a trading bubble that was slow to pop. (Fortunately, Dr. Nadler didn't have these men participate in a real stock market, out of concern for what a single dose of this drug could do.)

History has long labeled women as unreliable and hysterical because of their hormones. Maybe now it's time to start saying, "He's just being hormonal."

The research has its limitations. On average, men in these studies were in their early 20s, and a surge in testosterone might not impair older men's reasoning in quite the same way. And of course this research doesn't prove that all men are bad decision makers because of their testosterone or that they're worse decision makers than women. Confidence can spur a person to action, to take risks. But we should all be more aware of when confidence tips into overconfidence, and testosterone supplements could encourage that. Ironically, these supplements might make someone feel bold enough to lead but probably reduce his ability to lead well.

The television ads promise youth and vigor, but they've left out the catch: Testosterone enhancement doesn't just make you feel like an invincible 18-year-old. It makes you think like one, too.

ANS -- REDNECK REVOLT BUILDS ANTI-RACIST, ANTI-CAPITALIST MOVEMENT WITH WORKING CLASS WHITES

And now for something completely different.  This is exciting, and reminiscent of some of the work the Black Panthers did in the late '60s- early 70's, which you maybe have never heard about, but Joyce worked with them and knows about it.  (The positive side of these movements never seems to make the news).  It's also a bit scary, because of the guns.  Notice-- no one fired a shot.  Watch for saboteurs to get in there and try to start some violence if this movement gains any power.  
If the Democratic Party doesn't want to address the wealth inequality in this country, someone like this is going to have to do it.  So if you don't like it, it lays at the door of the Democratic Party if you want someone to blame.  
A sample paragraph:  "Redneck Revolt provides survival assistance tailored to the needs of their local community. This includes food programs, community gardens, clothing programs, and needle exchanges in addition to their armed self-defense programs."
--Kim


REDNECK REVOLT BUILDS ANTI-RACIST, ANTI-CAPITALIST MOVEMENT WITH WORKING CLASS WHITES

In the infancy of the Trump presidency, a new community defense network is espousing anti-racist and anti-capitalist politics to build coalitions in cities, small towns, and rural areas across America.

Redneck Revolt recruits predominantly poor and working class white people away from reactionary politics. The organization advances an analysis of their class condition and white supremacy's role in upholding the wealth and privilege of a small, white elite.

Redneck Revolt inserts themselves into overwhelmingly white spaces—NASCAR races, gun shows, flea markets in rural communities, and country music concerts—to offer a meaningful alternative to the white supremacist groups who often also recruit in those spaces.

The organization's growing membership comes as media pundits, the Democratic Party, and the United States' relatively small socialist parties all grapple with how to address the plight of working class white Americans in the wake of Donald Trump's election.

"Economic anxiety," a term presented by the media to defend Trump's ascension, has become an internet meme for acts of racial terror. Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance has been paraded around to defend and mythologize the travails of working class white Republican voters.

Establishment liberals debate whether these people, particularly in red states, are worth reaching out to at all. They find the ease with which they embrace nativism, social conservatism, and racism might threaten a liberal voting coalition that includes people of color, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community.

Yet the American historical context that animates the Republican Party-working class white alliance is often absent. The historical failure of neoliberalism to present sustainable pathways out of poverty or a meaningful safety net for American workers is scarcely contemplated.

It is unfair to let poor white people off the hook for their lack of solidarity with the rest of the working class. But it is only through engagement, recognition of the failures of both political parties, and organizing for a more radically unified working class politic that these issues can be overcome.

Historically small socialist organizations like Democratic Socialists of America have gained some traction promoting socialist, or more progressive liberal, politics in the wake of Senator Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential bid, but Redneck Revolt is not  prescriptive in regards to how to confront the inequities of the capitalist state.

"We don't have some grand plan for how we want to remake the world. We're tackling a specific problem, which is white supremacy, which we find to be built into capitalism," said Pittsburgh Redneck Revolt organizer Shaun who, along with Mitch, spoke with Shadowproof about their organizing with Redneck Revolt.

Shaun and Mitch of spoke to Shadowproof about their work with Redneck Revolt. Their last names are being withheld because other members of Redneck Revolt have faced doxxing and harassment by militia members and white supremacists. They don't want to put their families at greater risk.

"Our gripe with capitalism is it has utterly failed to make the vast majority of people free, because it was never really designed to," Shaun continued.

"It concentrates wealth in the hands of a small portion of the population, it concentrates power and access to resources in the hands of a small portion of the population, and it leaves the rest of us in a state of variable abjection. It doesn't work for anybody except the people who are exploiting the rest of us."

Despite their lack of a prescriptive political ideology, they do have a fairly broad set of principles posted on their website. They include a rejection of capitalism, and "wars of the rich," standing against "the nation-state and its forces which protect the bosses and the rich" and standing in "organized defense of our communities." They declare their belief in the "need for revolution."

Redneck Revolt's anti-racist, anti-capitalist message seems to be taking hold in communities across the United States. The organization had just 13 chapters in January but has nearly tripled its chapters nationally in the last 6 months. The group now has 34 different branches, 26 of which are in states that voted for Trump. Multiple chapters have over fifty members.

Shaun notes the Pittsburgh chapter is representative of a wide variety of political ideologies, including "anarchists, libertarians, socialists, and even a couple of hold-out Republicans."

Despite their diverse ideologies and backgrounds, Shaun explains that members are united by their rejection of white supremacy are drawn toward the group's emphasis on community defense and survival programs.

Phoenix John Brown Gun Club at a MAGA rally in Arizona. Source: https://www.redneckrevolt.org/single-post/2017/03/28/PHOENIX-MAGA-MARCH-REPORTBACK

Phoenix John Brown Gun Club at a MAGA rally in Arizona. Source: https://www.redneckrevolt.org/single-post/2017/03/28/PHOENIX-MAGA-MARCH-REPORTBACK

Anti-Fascism

Redneck Revolt's community defense strategy extends to showing up to white power rallies, where hate groups broadcast their ideology into the public sphere.

On April 29, members of Redneck Revolt traveled to Pikeville, Kentucky to counter the Traditionalist Worker's Party (TWP) and the National Socialist Movement.

Nestled within Appalachia, Pikeville has a population of less than 7,000 and a median household income of $22,026. Ninety-five percent of people living there are white and 80 percent voted for Donald Trump.

"I've been to events countering the TWP before. They're a particularly virulent new pan-white power organization," Shaun said, reflecting on his trip to Pikeville. "They're doing a lot of work trying to consolidate different white power movements under one umbrella, which is obviously very dangerous."

"They've been very specifically, targeting Appalachia in a lot of their propaganda and organizing in the last couple of years, and as a native Appalachian, I take that very personally."

"It was really high stress," Shaun said, because the TWP and their allies were specific about "wanting to come armed and use Kentucky's stand your ground laws as a threat and a bludgeon," against those who would oppose them. "They definitely showed up in force and armed to the teeth," he said.

George Ciccariello-Maher is an Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies at Drexel University, where his work often focuses on left-wing political movements. He said the "result of debating and discussing with fascists and white supremacists is that you're legitimizing their ideas. And you're also misunderstanding how it is that those ideas function."

"The rational idea would be to come together as poor people to fight against the system and yet that systematically doesn't happen," Ciccariello-Maher said. "So when you realize white supremacy functions on an irrational level, that it is a system, a structured system of institutionalized irrationality, then you begin to realize that you can't argue your way out of it. Then you start to realize that the only thing you can do is to fight."

"We didn't argue your way into white supremacy and slavery, we're not going to argue our way out of white supremacy," Ciccariello-Maher said.

With that in mind, Redneck Revolt emphasizes the importance of teaching armed self-defense to its members and more marginalized communities.

"People need to be able to defend themselves. [We] live in a country in the world where people of color and LGBTQ people are routinely victimized and systematically victimized by the people who claim to be there for their defense," Shaun said.

"We provide free basic firearms training to pretty much everyone who needs it. We focus on trying to provide [self-defense training] when asked for [by] communities of color and LGBTQ folks." Their John Brown Solidarity Fund helps community defense initiatives "get off the ground and get training."

Despite facing heavily armed white supremacists, anti-fascists descended from the region to protest TWP and the National Socialist Movement. The people of Pikeville stood along side them in opposition to the hate.

These confrontations have not turned violent. There weren't brawls or property damage like has been seen in Berkeley and Portland. Violence did not break out at Pikeville, or at the proposed KKK rally in Asheboro, NC a week later, or at a MAGA rally in Phoenix, Arizona in March.

Some have speculated that Pikeville remained relatively peaceful because both sides were armed in a state with stand your ground laws, where a fight would inevitably lead to the discharging of firearms, a chilling deterrent.

The KKK never even bothered to show up in Asheboro, but the local Silver Valley Redneck Revolt managed to put together a counter-rally of approximately 100 people. Another community group organized similar numbers to march as well.

Shaun applauded the Pikeville community's resistance. "There was a complete refusal to let that fear stop them from showing up to do everything they could to keep it from being some sort of a walk of victory," Shaun said. "And that was intensely inspiring, because people were scared and people were afraid and they showed up anyway. And they showed up organized and in force."

Regardless of their political affiliation, Pikeville residents "came out and took a stand, a very vocal stand against white power movements trying to move into their territory and consolidate power. In fact some of the locals were some of the loudest, most strident anti-fascist voices there."

Survival Pending Revolution

"There's a narrative that a lot of the media misses about rural areas," said Mitch, a member of Redneck Revolt's Silver Valley chapter.

"The perception is that Appalachia and the deep south is just inundated with racist white supremacists. It's no secret that there's certainly a higher concentration in those areas," Mitch said, "but there's also swaths of disaffected people who want nothing to do with politics, who don't think that they can be represented by politicians, and are tired of being jerked around by both parties."

"They don't like liberals and they don't like conservatives. They want to take care of their needs and they're kind of at the behest of all these other parties that are just jerking them around and they're just tired of it. That's part of the demographic that we have a lot of messaging to."

Mitch described the lack of infrastructure, services, and meaningful political representation in his community in rural North Carolina as the setting where reactionary politics can easily take hold and where presidential elections generally represent a choice between two politicians with nothing meaningful to offer.

"Scattered throughout Silver Valley are some pretty low income places and very much rural ghettos in the form of trailer parks and just really low income housing that nobody bats an eye at, or tries to meet their needs, or organize with them. They're really forgotten communities," he said.

Redneck Revolt provides survival assistance tailored to the needs of their local community. This includes food programs, community gardens, clothing programs, and needle exchanges in addition to their armed self-defense programs.

Mitch has a garden on his property, on about ⅓ acre of land, where members try to connect with nearby low income and rural communities to provide free fresh food.

"We get people invested — time and energy wise — into working with us and finding ways to empower those communities to grow their own food, so that it doesn't have to come just through charity. It's not just us giving away food, it's the community itself finding ways to come together to feed their own," Mitch said.

In the future, Silver Valley members want to assist with distributing Meloxin and other medical supplies, and provide free clinics. "You've got to root yourself in the community first and see what their needs are and move to organize in that manner from there," he said.

Considering Redneck Revolt's vision, their embrace of the term 'redneck,' their belief in building solidarity with working and poor communities, their recruitment within rural white communities, and their embrace of late '60's-style survival programs, it is hard not to draw parallels to the original Rainbow Coalition, and specifically to the Young Patriots (YPO).

The Rainbow Coalition was an attempt—initially lead by Fred Hampton and the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s—to unify the Black Power movement led by the Black Panther Party, the Puerto Rican Nationalist movement led by the Young Lords, and a white working class movement led by the YPO in Chicago.

Shaun confirms that members recognize parallels with the YPO internally.

"The YPO is a huge inspiration for us, specifically because it's one of the most visible instances of that sort of rupturing racial lines when folks from different demographics were able to step back and realize that their interests allied with one another not with a politician or a company," he said.

"There was a real tangible understanding that their liberation was bound up with one another's liberation. So we draw a lot of really explicit inspiration from the YPO and the work that they did with the Chicago Panthers and the Young Lords."

Professor Ciccariello-Maher believes that while the Young Lords should be an aspiration, organizers must be prepared for the challenges of coalitions.

"The danger of a Rainbow Coalition is that you can run into a left wing politics that, for example, asks Black Americans to stand-down with their complaints to embrace a broader coalition," he said.

Ciccariello-Maher cited the Communist Party USA's organizing as an example.

"I like to think of this in terms of an opposition that comes out of the old Communist Party strategy of what was called 'unite and fight.' The U.S. communist party, over a certain period, had a really incredible history of contributing to struggles against white supremacy in the U.S."

"It was really the main organization accomplishing these aims, but also had its limitations—in particular, when it retreated from those struggles, it argued essentially that workers should unite and fight, meaning a kind of lowest common denominator of what Black and white workers could agree on. The result of this was really to erase the centrality of white supremacy in the workplace and in US history."

In a modern context, Ciccariello-Maher suggests it's "Not just how can we get together, you know can Black, white, and brown agree to fight for 15 — the question is what helps us to overcome the very real divisions of the poor and working classes and sometimes that means fighting against white workers, over racial privileges."

"We need to see these things in motion, we need to understand the ways in which we could build a Rainbow Coalition, but one that understands the historic weight of anti-Blackness or one that understands the historical weight of Indigenous Genocide or of U.S. Imperialism in Latin America."

Ciccariello-Maher believes W.E.B.s Du Bois' Black Reconstruction In America provides valuable historical lessons, supporting Redneck Revolt's principles of standing against white supremacy, capitalism, and the wars of the rich. For Du Bois, the story of the white working class is a tragedy.

"It's the betrayal of a shared class condition," Cicariello-Maher said. "Du Bois is so struck by the fact that poor whites and slaves had so much in common and had so much potential for solidarity, and yet ultimately poor whites sided with the slaveowners and sided with what Du Bois called 'the petty wages of whiteness.' Psychological wages that make you feel better than someone else, but also material wages in the sense that you can work as a slave catcher and that's better than not having any job at all."

Shaun from Pittsburgh's chapter of Redneck Revolt discussed the conditions of these "psychological wages."

Shaun likes to tell potential members, "white supremacy is essentially a fight to be the best treated dog in the kennel."

"All poor and working class folks suffer at the hands of the rich. We all have trouble — bordering to the point of impossibility — making house rent, paying medical bills especially these days, covering food, making sure that our children and families are cared for and it doesn't have to be that way," he said.

"It's that way because a vastly small percentage of the population hordes access to resources and they're able to do this because they've managed to get one half of the working class to turn against the other half in exchange for basically preferential treatment."

"It's in everyone's best interests that we as quickly and aggressively as possible dismantle that system so that poor and working folks essentially have something resembling a fair shake at a decent life."