Here, on how personal and institutional stress make it more difficult for people to defend their interests – and on the need to respond to political strategies increasingly aimed at exploiting that principle to reduce public participation. For further reading…– Again, Chris Mooney discussed the effect of stress on voter
Continue readingTag: Psychology
Politics, Re-Spun: Elevate the World from Mediocrity to Greatness? Lululemon? GMAFB
GMAFB Capitalism dissociates us from each other. It makes us embrace consumerism and individualism and erodes community and cohesion. Yet, oddly, Lululemon’s mantra of elevating the world from mediocrity to greatness is about liberating us from those shackles. Oddly, based on Ayn Rand’s whacko philosophy [see below], we need to
Continue readingScripturient: Blog & Commentary: When good people do bad things in groups
The headline is taken from a piece on Science Daily on a study about how groups change personal behaviour and morality. The study is reported on the MIT website. I’ve seen that change myself, many times over the years, and most recently locally. The study adds intelligence on the neurology of how
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Slut Shaming, And Other Idiocy
Welcome to the cusp of spring-summer. Now that the weather is turning, the slut shaming and attacks on women’s clothing choices will ramp up. In Labrador, 28 girls were sent home from school because their clothing contravened the dress code. They also sent home two boys whose shirts bared their
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: The Protest and Popular Assembly (Plenum) Movement in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Get up to speed with this interview with Politics, Re-Spun contributor Jasmin Mujanovic on the protest and popular assembly (plenum) movement in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bosnia’s protest movement is already receiving less media coverage, with some declaring the end of the ‘Bosnian spring’. But the causes behind the ongoing protests are complex,
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: When Blog Comment Spam Goes Bad
You know you want it! Someone really crossed the line from whoops, to nuclear codes. One of the15,000 weekly blog spam comments that never make it to the human eyes stage on this website, accidentally made it through. Sadly, it is a compendium of all the kinds of faux-sincere blog
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Poor Kids, Poor Families and Shame
“When Centennial’s students found out Seymour couldn’t hold a pyjama day because many students didn’t have pyjamas, they fundraised to buy every Seymour student a pair last Christmas.” – When the Field Trip’s Too Pricey, Students ‘Self-Exclude’ BC’s disgusting and preventable child poverty crisis. Let’s stop coddling the rich! When
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Occupying Homelessness?
Homelessness isn’t a policy thing regarding random people. It’s a thing for actual people. It’s not abstract, it’s in our face, yet we live in denial. Clearly, I’m no brain surgeon. But if there are homeless people, a civilized culture would find a way to use a progressive tax system
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Honing In On Friday’s #WaveOfAction
We need to think about two things for this Friday’s Occupy Movement reboot in the Worldwide #WaveOfAction: When thinking about pursuing social, political and economic equality, what is the list of things we need to change, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally? Who do we need to build coalitions with to
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Random Terrorism From North American Police
Five police beat and kill Luis Rodriguez. You know you’re living in an increasingly terrorized state when the police kill for no good reason. Sure there are extenuating circumstances, but that should lead to caution, not an impulse to deadly violence. That impulse marks the increased tendency/willingness of the police
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Stop. Obeying. The. Rich. NOW!
Once upon a time, we were taught to envy and respect our “betters,” like the rich. No more. They’re taking our money and throwing us under the bus every day. And it’s not even just the super-rich or those in America, it’s the aspirational rich; they’re just as toxic. This
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Are You Also Sick of Politicians’ Childish Behaviour?
The language toward women can also turn vulgar. In an interview I conducted with the Hon. Sheila Copps, the former MP recalled being called a ‘slut.’ A female NDP MP wrote about a time when she heard a Liberal frontbench MP stand up to speak only to be called a
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Don’t Tolerate Ignorance About the Minimum Wage
Now, stop tolerating ignorance! And smile, TGIF. Hello. It’s Friday. For many people it’s TGIF. But for many people who aren’t even teenagers, the work week isn’t ending today. We often THINK minimum wage is for the new entries to the job market. Maybe it was one day. Maybe just
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: How to Influence Teenagers and other People too.
Working in behavioural education means that much of this stuff is old hat for me, but sometimes isn’t as common knowledge as I think it is for others, so lets review some the tricksy-hobbit ways P-sychologists work their magic. We’ll pick up midway though the article: I asked Dahl what
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: How the Conservative Government Dishonours the Military
So Canada is leaving its occupation of Afghanistan. I never liked the mission. I never liked the context. I never liked the propaganda. I never liked the transformation of some kind of Canada into this occupying Canada. 162 killed and 2,179 wounded? But here’s the very very hard question. Who
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Do the Rich Think a Class War Isn’t Already Happening?
You’d think we were building guillotines. The rich, however, are starting to feel antsy and they want our pity and compassion. Here are some of the ludicrous fears they are spilling out to the masses, to avoid a genocide against the rich: It’s almost like there hasn’t already been a
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Stop Listening to the Big Oil Spin!
Do the math. Please. For a great long time, I’ve been talking about how we must dump the oil, gas, fracking, tankers, pipelines, coal…all the carbon-based energy systems because of climate breakdown [aka climate change, aka global warming, aka the greenhouse effect]. We need to transform our society to a
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Lupita Nyong’o On Validation, For International Women’s Day
A sublime meditation on validation. Bravo! …in which a young woman shares her adolescent anxieties and blossoms into a role model for us all. Happy International Women’s Day! Enjoy the whole clip here: July 15, 2013 Fearing Kate MacEachern: The Latest Canadian Military Blunder (40) November 22, 2010 A
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Women: The Majority, Not a Media Niche
I couldn’t really fault you if you felt that only about 22% of humanity were women. If we based it all on how frequently they are represented in politics and the media, we wouldn’t know they made up a 51-ish% majority. This is why Cate Blanchett and Geena Davis have
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: The Pandemic of Rape Culture
Speaking out against rape culture can create some serious backlash, which reflects our culture of rape. At UBC the dean of the business school muses about firing all the students who took part in the chant that celebrates rape, which was also sung at Saint Mary’s in Halifax. And the
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