Sorry, But I Can't Help You

You need help.  You seek help.  Your health provider makes recommendations, and your problems persist.  Then the provider reluctantly admits, "I can't help you."  Health providers rarely make that explicit admission.  That doesn't mean they don't think it.  And that doesn't mean you don't think it.  

Health care is phenomenally successful in many areas, most of which involve relatively acute problems that can be corrected as a result of precise imaging and surgery.  But health care is abysmally poor in combating many chronic conditions.  For instance, the three leading causes of death in America - heart disease, stroke, and Alzheimer's Disease - all are lifestyle sensitive.  Every one of the big three can be caused or exacerbated by stress, excessive alcohol, faulty nutrition, and sedentariness.  My not-so-big revelation is that your health provider cannot live for you.

So, how are you living?  I mean real living, not rationalized living.  One example should be sufficient to make my point.  Everyone knows that exercise is essential for health.  You see your doctors, they ask about exercise, and you tell them what you do.  What do studies say about how truthful exercise-related patient-doctor dialogues are?  Take a guess. Ten percent?  Fifteen percent?  No and no.  Andrea Gurmankin Levy and colleagues (2018), for example, found that as many as 81% of patients lie to their doctors about how often they exercise.  (They were equally likely to lie about the amount they eat).  Why?  The researchers suggested that most often the lies were due to desire to avoid judgement and embarrassment.  

There undoubtedly are other reasons for lying to doctors about lifestyle.  But what is the bottom-line implication?

I believe that lying to your doctor about lifestyle usually betrays an external locus of control.  It is as if the patient feels that she/he has to please their doctor, and nothing could be further from the truth.  The sad reality is that most doctors move rapidly from patient to patient.  They do not have the time, the energy, or the desire to ruminate about you.

Don't worry about your doctors' opinions of your lifestyle.  Don't bother to lie to them.  Don't bother to lie to family, friends, or associates about your lifestyle. Adopt an internal locus of control.  Once you do that, you become the only target for your lifestyle lies.  And if you believe you can lie to yourself with impunity, you are wrong. Sure, failure to adopt a healthful lifestyle will harm you, whether you have an external or internal locus of control. But an internal locus means that you cannot avoid responsibility for unhealthful lifestyle consequences.  Perhaps that unavoidable "pressure" will help motivate you to make the changes you need.

One final suggestion.  You often are advised to set lifestyle goals for yourself.  And that is good advice.  But goals are of little value if they are not paired with clear, employable strategies to reach them.  Make sure that you have thought through the strategies, and that you consistently act consonantly with them. When you approach your lifestyle that way, you no longer will need to lie to doctors, nor will you need doctors to help you with common sense lifestyle-oriented health practices.  You will reach your goals by being faithful to your strategies.  

Reference

Gurmankin Levy A, Scherer AM, Zikmund-Fisher BJ, Larkin K, Barnes G, Fagerlin A.  Dishonesty in patient disclosures to healthcare providers. JAMA Network Open 2018; 1(7):e185293. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.5293

 

Physical & Mental Health Before and After COVID-19

No, I am not going to dwell on COVID. You have heard enough about that.  Rather, let’s think about how it has affected your lifestyle.

Your lifestyle evolved over time.  Every one of your routines had a starting point.   Every one of your routines became “routine” because it provided something for you.  Few, if any of us, have not had our lifestyles majorly impacted by COVID.  Whatever changed about your lifestyle might now have replaced, in part, or in full, something healthful that preceded it.  Each passing day during which you behave in the changed unhealthful fashion makes it more and more likely that the new unhealthful routine will become a habit that replaces the pre-pandemic one, or that, at least, compromises it.  

You do not need researchers to tell you what you know, but, for the record, Teresa Arora and Ian Grey (2020) reported some COVID-oriented epidemiological information about a few physical and mental health threats.  They found that UK respondents reported 38% less sleep, 49% suffered more anxiety and depression.  Arora and Grey suggested, too, that boredom and seclusion had caused snacking to increase.  Similarly, they said that Australia in March 2020 saw liquor sales rising 86%, and in the United Kingdom and the United States the increases were 22% and 27%, respectively.  Lebanon had a doubling  of domestic violence calls and France had a 32% rise.

But enough of my telling you facts that seem obvious once you hear them. What is the personal relevance to your physical and mental health?  Only you can determine that.  But I can provide some areas for you to consider—health essentials about which I wrote in my book, Don’t Rest in Peace.

Think about whether your status progressed, declined, or remained static during the COVID onslaught relative to the following:

Cognitive-emotional functioning: More or less positive intellectual and affective experiences?

Interpersonal Relationships: Better or worse times with others?

Physical Conditioning: More fit or less fit?

Diet-Nutrition: Healthier or less healthy eating?

Work: More or less productive?

Relaxation-Recreation: Increased or decreased stress?

I expect that you, like I, had more trouble than usual in virtually all the health essential areas.  But that is not my focus.  Rather I advise, first, that you now look at all the health essential areas and determine where, if anywhere, they have changed for the worse.  Second, ask yourself the extent to which the new, lower level of physical and mental health have started to become habitual.  Third, what are you going to do starting today to eliminate the COVID-induced unhealthful habits?  Fourth, and most important, what physically and mentally healthful habits will you begin to cultivate?   

Whatever changed about your lifestyle might now have replaced, in part or in full, something healthful that preceded it.  Each passing day during which you behave in the changed fashion makes it more and more likely that the new unhealthful routine will become a habit that replaces the healthful pre-pandemic one, or that, at least, compromises it.  Don’t let that happen.  

Reference

Health behaviour changes during COVID-19 and the potential consequences: A mini-review

Teresa Arora*, Ian Grey*First Published June 18, 2020 Editorial Find in PubMed

https://doi.org/10.1177/1359105320937053

How to Decide ?

Most of our decisions occur through totally or largely unconscious processes.  And, usually, that is of no concern.  Whether we decide on vanilla or chocolate ice cream will have no appreciably important effect on our well-being.  But, of course, there are other unconsciously determined decisions that literally can have life or death consequences.  We might automatically, unreflectively decide to drive to the grocery store after “a couple drinks” because we previously have done so with no adverse consequences.

For important decisions such as those that concern relationships, we often, but not always, consciously deliberate.  In those cases, we tend to believe that we are proceeding rationally.  But are we?

When deliberate decisions concern interpersonal relationships, regardless of our intention, our mood very often exerts the most powerful influence.  This point was driven home by a Joseph P. Forgas study  (1989).  Subjects were provided a personnel file that included task and interpersonal skills of eight candidates, one of whom to be chosen as a work partner for themselves or for someone else.  But before choosing, one third of the subject population was primed into a sad, happy, or neutral state.

Forgas found that sad subjects gave greater weight to candidates’ interpersonal qualities rather than their competencies, and took longer to reach decisions than did subjects in the other mood states.  In general, happy subjects made the fastest choices, but only when choosing candidates to work with others.  When choosing partners for themselves, they proceeded a little more slowly and carefully.

The Forgas study, then, emphasized the obvious point that mood and personal benefit affects decisions that are consciously deliberated.  Notice, though, that speed of choosing also was a most significant influencer.  One way to think about this is to contrast the relative decision making value of fund of relevant information versus time taken to decide.  Guy E. Hawkins and Andrew Heathcote (2020) framed the issue as evidence-based versus time-based deciding.  They did so by employing a Timed Racing Diffusion Model (TRDM) that considered how deadlines – explicit and implicit – impact the accuracy and speed of correct and incorrect decisions.

The esoteric details of TRDM probably would lull you to sleep.  So, suffice to say that it is a quantitative unified, comprehensive model of deliberate decision making.  Germane to our discussion is what the model purports.  In brief, whenever we begin to deliberate, we have personal explicit or implicit expectations for the amount and quality of evidence and time required to decide.  Apropos of the model’s title, a race ensues between evidence and time that ends when either evidence or time reaches its boundary.  At that point, we feel acute, intense pressure to reach our conclusion, typically sacrificing either ideal evidence or ideal timing.  In essence, decisions often come down to being willing to trade some measure of information accuracy for decision speed, or vice versa.  Once the accuracy-speed race has ended definitively, the enacted decision depends on the individual’s abilities to encode and execute an appropriate motor response.  To summarize, TRDM must include consideration of evidence, time, encoding, and action requirements.

In light of the two aforementioned studies, what can be said succinctly to address the question, “How do we decide?” or, more specifically, “How do we deliberately decide?”  The cited authors probably would refer to our current mood, personal involvement, readily accessible relevant information, and time allocation.  But I said from the start that most decisions are not consciously deliberated or partially so, at best.  I believe that, overwhelmingly, important decisions proceed unconsciously according to our “Baseline ego strength” (BES) — aspects of ourselves and our behavior that are normative for us.  We usually operate according to them automatically, unless they, themselves, are revised in an enduring and fundamental manner.  There are seven interacting BES elements—history, body, temperament, environment, personality, cognition, and affect.  BES history: such as whether you were raised by one or two parents, and whether you were rich or poor.  BES body: such as whether you are constitutionally thin or heavy, attractive, or plain.  BES temperament: such as whether you are inherently hyper-reactive or hypo-reactive.  BES environment (physical and interpersonal): such as whether you grew up in the city or suburbs, have many friends or few.  BES personality: such as whether you are naturally extroverted or introverted.  BES cognition: such as whether you are more inclined to think abstractly or concretely.  And BES affect: such as whether you laugh often or rarely.  These enduring BES trait characteristics predispose us toward some features of reality and away from others. They determine most of our automatic, everyday decisions.

You certainly do make some conscious, rational, deliberate choices based upon evidence, time, encoding, and action requirements.  But if you hope to reach adaptive decisions in your most critical frequent, routine contexts, you need to understand your BES and how it channels your decisions.  I am close to completing a book to facilitate that understanding.

References

Forgas, J. P. (1989). Mood effects on decision making strategies. Australian Journal of Psychology, 41(2), 197–214. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049538908260083

Hawkins, G. & Heathcote, A.  (2020)  Racing against the clock: Evidence-based versus time-based decisions.  Psychological Review, Feb 18, No Pagination Specified https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000259

Happy Compared to Whom?

 Keeping score is a defining characteristic of contemporary societies.  Civilization, itself, breeds continual tension between human cooperation and competition. Samuel Bowles (2006) explicitly asserts that our evolutionary success required "intense intergroup competition ...in the interest of avoiding group (and hence individual and family) annihilation in the context of intergroup aggression (warfare)."

Fortunately, for most of us, 21st century success rarely is a matter of "annihilation".  Cooperation and competition are not tooth and claw, life and death struggles. We usually choose when and how to compete --discretionary competitions that depend on what we define as important and unimportant.  And those definitions are mostly determined by the ways that we perceive interpersonal issues.

For many people, athletes embody competition, and they self-define similarly.  We hear them say, "I love this game. I'd play for free. I love the battles."  It is reasonable then that athletes compare their game skills to those of their opponents.  But sometimes the competition extends far beyond the playing field.  The classic example is Latrell Sprewell, NBA superstar, who declined a 3 year, $21,000,000 basketball contract, complaining “I've got my family to feed.” (Gaine, 2018).  At the time, seven NBA players had been offered more than Latrell.  Perhaps he declined due to interpersonal competition rather than to athletic competition.  In any case, I guess he did not love the game so much that he would play for free.

Sprewell undoubtedly was comparing himself with the seven basketball stars "above" him, and money was the comparison metric.  Had he never heard the adages that money cannot buy happiness and that we should not try to keep up with the Joneses?   Are those adages true or mere vestiges of the past?

It is hard to be happy if you are starving, freezing, or homeless.  Money obviously is necessary for life's necessities.  But, how much is needed for a contented life?   In 2018, Jebb and colleagues published a Gallup World Poll-based study of approximately 1.7 million individuals sampled from 164 countries.  Converting all finances into their U.S. dollar equivalents, they concluded that once income reached about $95,000 annually, additional income did not appreciably increase individual happiness.   But how much is needed for the most basic emotional well-being, so that lack of money does not add undue stress?  They placed that figure at $60,000 to $75,000 per annum.  If you are skeptical about these results, I am on-board with you.

As this blog title suggests, I believe that the money-happiness-emotional well-being connections depend on who is compared to whom, and who does the comparison.   The work of Piff and Moskowitz (2018) has more utility and face validity.  Their work, conducted exclusively in the USA, suggested that high income individuals tend to base their happiness on pride and amusement.  That is, their comparisons are based on how their personal capacities and pleasures compare to those of their elite peer group.  By contrast, so-called “lower class” individuals determine their happiness and well-being not by counting their money, but by comparing how much interpersonal support they have relative to their peers. 

The Jebb and colleagues and Piff and Moskowitz studies are more reasonable, and are more consistent with my views, when they are combined with the work of Xi Chen (2015).  That international work emphasized comparison in terms of relative wealth and relative poverty.  In short, it concluded that people look around them and contrast their standard of living with that of their peers.  That comparison was most impactful for persons within the working class and below.  Xi Chen provided evidence to explain the obvious fact that poor people world-wide are far better off today than they ever were.  With few exceptions, today’s poor have more to eat, better housing, and better health care than in the past.  But today, impoverished people are acutely aware of the “lifestyles of the rich and famous” within their countries and throughout the world.  They would readily realize, for instance, that Latrell Sprewell is not having any trouble feeding his family.

References

Bowles, S. (2006). Group competition, reproductive leveling, and the evolution of human altruism. Science, 314, 1569–1572.  https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1134829

Gaine, C. (2018).  12 Athletes Who Turned Down Mega Contracts and Missed Out on Millions.https://www.complex.com/sports/2018/03/12-athletes-who-turned-down-mega-contracts-missed-out-millions/

Piff, P. K., & Moskowitz, J. P. (2018). Wealth, poverty, and happiness: Social class is differentially associated with positive emotions. Emotion, 18(6), 902-905. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000387

Xi Chen (2015).  Relative deprivation and individual well-being.  March IZA World of Labor 2015 DOI: 10.15185/izawol.140

I'm Not Answering That Question

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” was the colloquial term for official U.S. military policy from 1993 to 2011.  What was that all about?  Americans born on or before about 1973 probably remember—it concerned the armed forces approach to homosexuality.  Actually, the entire policy was “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue, and don’t harass,” and it was Bill Clinton’s and the Legislature’s way simultaneously to both address and  avoid the issue.

The policy is one obvious example of questioning and answering influences on human psychology and interpersonal relationships.  All people personally are inclined to ask about some issues and to avoid others.  Knowing those inclinations of your own can empower you to make good decisions.  For instance, given the current toxic social environment, most of us have learned to be very circumspect about what formerly would have been casual, harmless political questions and answers.  

Even folk wisdom and popular entertainment have touted the value of the avoidance technique.   For instance, in the Disney cartoon, "Bambi," (first released in 1942) a diminutive, shy bunny, Thumper, quietly advised, "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all."

So, what does psychology say about avoidant questioning and answering?  As usual, I will discuss just an idea or two.  First, consider context.  Your status vis-à-vis your conversation partner is, of course, critical.  Can you obviously avoid answering without undue negative repercussions?  Is the topic very serious, marginally so, or light?  What about your interlocutor?  Is it important for you to save face or impress that person?  

Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie K. John (2018) divide questions as occurring within a cooperative context and within a challenging one.  In cooperative situations, the relative risk would be avoiding a correct uncomfortable answer but, in the process, inadvertently providing another one unfavorable to you.  That can happen if you are so relaxed that you do not sufficiently monitor that which you say, and, therefore, say too much.  The excess could be quantitative or qualitative, either by rambling on too long, or by revealing sensitive information.

Answering questions within a challenging context, of course, is more likely to produce negative consequences for you.  Accordingly, Brooks and John recommend, ideally, that you enter such conversations after having already decided what to keep private.  They also want you to be mindful of the importance of maintaining trust, and, therefore, try not to blatantly refuse answering proffered questions. 

Bitterly and Schweitzer (2020) elaborate the basic principles presented above, but they focus on describing five answer avoidance strategies much more than assessing their pros and cons.  The first is simply to decline answering, with its attendant risks.  The second is to blatantly lie and hope to get away with it.  Third, is to palter—provide a truthful answer or partial answer that deliberately avoids revealing information that the questioner clearly wants to know.  Fourth, one could dodge the question, avoiding it by giving an answer sufficiently close to the original question that the questioner readily accepts it.  Fifth, and finally, avoidance can be achieved via deflection.  There are two common approaches to do so.  One can evade answering a direct question by presenting a new one, or by injecting an emotional distraction, such as a joke.  

The aforementioned study offered some advice about question avoidance.  Those who avoided direct questions by deflection were less likely to be regarded as untrustworthy or unlikeable than were those who used the other assessed strategies.  However, with those findings in mind, Bitterly and Schweitzer  provided some suggestions to questioners.  They encouraged questioners to anticipate deflection, to have plans to counter it, and to persist in those efforts.  If the deflection simply cannot be remedied, questioners should know how to interpret the deflections, and to factor that information into their judgements about the issue, the deflector, and the deflector’s sensitivities.

Perhaps, in some situations, “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue, and don’t harass” policy is good general advice.  Brooks & John and Bitterly & Schweitzer seem to agree.  But neither of their works said one word about my preferred method of avoiding difficult questions.  I would rather metacommunicate - communicate about the communicaiton - to handle the to-be-avoided question.  The metacommunication strategy allows one to be both honest and empowered.  Why not provide an authentic reason for your reluctance to answer? Ninety-nine percent of the time, your interlocutor will accept your legitimate reason, and agree to defer the question, at least temporarily.  Of course, that strategy will not suffice in some special situations.  But, more often than not, if your conversation partner cannot accept your wish to defer a question, maybe you need to rethink your relationship with them.   

 References

Bitterly, T. B., & Schweitzer, M. E. (2020). The economic and interpersonal consequences of deflecting direct questions.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118(5), 945-990. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000200

Brooks, A. W. & John, L. K.  (2018). The surprising power of questions.  Harvard Business Review, May 17.

Think About How You Think and Vote

This blog post is written on September 29, 2020, a few hours before the first Trump-Biden televised debate.  Private and public speculation has been frenzied and frantic.  Some have suggested or implied that the fate of America, even of the planet, will be determined by the presidential election—“the most important election in our history.”  Democrat and Republican partisans are employing every influence trick to nudge, scare, or bludgeon you to vote their way.

I am not in that business.  Rather, I have a modest suggestion that is easier said than done: think, really think, for yourself.  Since neither you nor I have the time or expertise to parse every essential detail required to make the best voting decision, I limit myself to briefly discussing two related topics.

First, let’s consider an often mentioned but rarely practiced mental activity – mindfulness.  Our simple working definition is mindfulness as your being aware of what is happening to you internally and externally.  For instance, when you see a Biden or Trump advertisement do you reflexively nod or shake your head, smile or snarl?   If your response precedes any point that the advertisement proffers, you are not being mindful.  Of course, you can justify your affirming or negating reflex by indicating – correctly – that the ad is meant to get your vote independent of its truth value.  You can justify that instinctive, mindless agreement or disagreement with any bit of information about Trump or Biden, regardless of its source or validity.  As you may have experienced, many family or friend feuds have their origins in the affirming or negating reflex that makes any political discussion useless and/or contentious.

Why the absence of rationality?  Chang, J., Kuo, C., Huang, C. et al. (2018) approach the issue indirectly by considering both reactive and proactive cognitive control mechanisms.  The former refers to thought that is “top-down” in the sense that our preexisting thoughts overwhelm our interpretation of present information such that they stifle the incoming information.  The latter is the opposite – bottom-up - in the sense that incoming information is processed before preexisting thoughts significantly impact it.   The study in question found that high mindfulness individuals were able to evidence adaptive reactive and proactive cognitive control whereas low mindfulness ones relied excessively on proactive control. 

This finding leads us to a second often-mentioned concept – confirmation bias.  As you probably know, confirmation bias causes us preferentially to seek information that reinforces our current beliefs and to avoid information that contradicts them.  That is, confirmation bias is exclusively top-down/proactive.

Mindfulness, then, is most often an advantage in virtually all mentation.  Do you tend toward mindfulness?  Psychologists would like to be able to differentiate those who do from those who do not.  Toward that end, Altizer, Ferrell, and Natale (2020) investigated mindfulness and personality types.  They concluded that mindfulness was more prominent in “well-adjusted” persons, since they are inclined to cope adequately with stress.  Similarly, mindfulness tended to be higher in ambitious persons, but only those whose ambition included a high level of positive human relationships.  The Altizer group proposed that mindfulness was less present in overly cautious, defensive, and excitable persons.

What does all this say regarding the Biden-Trump election?  The obvious conclusions are that we would do well to be as mindfully open-minded as possible, and by refraining insofar as possible from confirmation bias.  You can facilitate those processes by:

1. Taking a deep, stress-reducing breath when confronted with election ads and other influencers, animate or inanimate.

2. Considering how your election attitudes are affecting your personal well-being and your interpersonal relationships.

3. And by trying to reduce your defensiveness.

A final point about which I never have seen research, but that deserves it: selective mindfulness.  By that I mean being attentive and rational about one feature of reality and not about another closely related feature.  Applying the idea to the election, that would concern being mindful about a democrat or republican, but not about the opposite-party candidate.  Please think about whether selective mindlessness applies to you, and about how it could influence how you decide to vote.

References

Altizer, C. C., Ferrell, B. T., & Natale, A. N. (2020). Mindfulness and personality: More natural for some than others and how it matters. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research. Advance online publication.   http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/cpb0000189

 Chang, J., Kuo, C., Huang, C. et al.   The Flexible Effect of Mindfulness on Cognitive Control.  Mindfulness 9, 792–800 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-017-0816-9

Obfuscate, Inundate, Intimidate

 Only one issue poses a greater threat to American democracy than racial discord.  Only one issue poses a greater threat to the well-being of every American than does racial discord.

No.  The issue is not politics, per se.  Blame does not lie exclusively with Democrats or Republicans.  The best way, I believe, for me to describe the threat is with a current example.  You can judge its relevance and meaning for yourself.

Our example includes two protagonists.  Wikipedia introduces them as follows:

Donna Lease Brazile (born December 15, 1959) is an American political strategist, campaign manager and political analyst who served twice as acting Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). She is currently a Fox News contributor, and was previously a CNN contributor until her resignation in October 2016, after leaking CNN's debate questions to Hillary Clinton's campaign in the 2016 United States presidential election.

 

Tammy K. Bruce (born August 20, 1962) is a conservative American radio host, author, and political commentator. Earlier she had been president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women. She is currently an on-air contributor to Fox News Channel and host of Get Tammy Bruce on Fox Nation.

 

I believe we safely can conclude that both ladies are accomplished, intelligent, educated, high-profile, and imbued with clout.  Unfortunately, they exemplify the threat of most concern to me.  Listen to their discourse (and I use the term loosely) that followed the Republican National Convention, and you will know why.

On the first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention, Fox and Friends television host, Brian Kilmeade, interviewed Donna Brazile and Tammy Bruce together.  To really appreciate the “gory details” you should view the video.  There is no way that I can provide more than a glimpse of the bloodbath. 

Ms. Bruce began one segment with a defense of President Trump.  Among other things, she said that he has sacrificed “… everything as has his family to change this nation and get her back on her feet so we as Americans can live lives that best suit us.”  Bruce lamented that “no Democrat has spoken out” about the violent demonstrations that ravaged United States cities.

Ms. Brazile countered “… sounds like I will never be an American in your world.  Because after 400 years, my family cannot walk out of the house without fearing violence.”

Ms. Bruce defended her comment, replying “No one is saying that!” To which Brazile countered, “Yes, you are.  What you do is ignore the pains of people who are hurting, you ignore the pains of people who just want to breathe.”  When Bruce again tried to clarify, Brazile interrupted, remarking “Don’t be so condescending and patronizing! To tell me that I cannot tell my story. Tammy, the story of people who are struggling to live and breathe are just as important as the story of one man.”

Exasperated, Bruce asserted, “She doesn’t want to answer” to which the incensed Brazile replied, “It’s offensive when you say that.”

Attempting to get an answer out of Ms Bruce, Kilmeade asked her: “Did you ignore 400 years?” but Ms Brazile instead quickly interjected “Yes, she did!” and added “She’s ignoring it because they don’t see it.”  Brazile then continued, “Tammy, I see it every day. Brian, you got me up this morning to have me listen to this diatribe from someone who does not live my existence and does not recognize my existence. You do not recognize my existence, Tammy.”  Bruce defended herself with “And you haven’t recognized mine or anyone else’s.  We’re all at the same table as Americans.”

 This example involves highly political characters.  But, as noted from the start, the issue is infinitely more important than politics.  The issue, of course, is communication, in general, and problem solving communication, in particular.  The principal characters in the drama could not be more capable of civil discourse.  In theory, at least, they are communication experts who eminently should be able to employ discourse to resolve disagreement.  Their use of language unequivocally reveals discourse as a weapon.  The strategy truly is to obfuscate, inundate, and intimidate—in this case, with Donna Brazile being the major obfuscator, inundator, and intimidator.  I remind you that you need to see the video to appreciate that.  You also might be interested to read what Brazile said on March 18, 2019 entitled, “Donna Brazile: Why I am excited to join Fox News and take part in a civil - and sensible – debate.”

The truth is that I don’t care who you believe is the major or minor perpetrator in the aforementioned mixed martial arts contest.  My concern is that the combatants were professional communicators and women.  You might jump on me (as in mixed martial arts) for the latter, but do a reality check and you will find incontrovertible proof that women USUALLY are more civil and more anger-restrained than men.  If professional communicator women cannot engage in rational verbal problem solving, what is the chance for androgen-infused, alpha male (or aspiring alpha males) to do so?

Let me be clear: women are not responsible for men. Females are responsible for their own civility and verbal problem solving, and so are males. Whenever someone on "our side" of either sex uses obfuscation, inundation, or intimidation  to win a point, I hope we can refrain from encouraging them.  Instead, we need to promote honest, rational problem solving that offers a chance to reach consensus that improves the well-being of all Americans.  

       

References:

Donna Brazile battles Fox pundit Tammy Bruce: 'You do not recognize my existence    August 25, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZbrlR5VkrU

Donna Brazile on joining Fox News as a contributor  

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/donna-brazile-why-i-am-excited-to-join-fox-news-and-take-part-in-a-civil-and-sensible-debate

Tear Down the Statue of Liberty ?

So-called American "progressive" politicians and intelligentsia often use a light metaphor to encourage everyone to see what they want them to see.  They say that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that we need to shine a bright light to illuminate whatever they define as true.  Many of the same progressives praise or ignore when Ivy League students turn out the lights on those who attempt to introduce ideas that they oppose.  For instance, they closed down Condoleezza Rice's 2014 Rutgers University commencement speech and the 2017 "Stand Against Fascism" speech of University of Oregon President Michael Schill.

Since elite Americans are in a mood to "enlighten" the populous by encouraging young people to tear down statues, maybe they should turn on Lady Liberty on which is inscribed, "I lift my lamp beside the golden door". After all, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the French sculptor who created it reportedly had "...cultivated friends and clients among republican activists, monarchical nostalgics, and the powerful Napoleonic elites of the Second Empire" (nps.gov, 2020).  And, as all intelligentsia should know, "The Second French Empire (French: Second Empire), officially the French Empire (French: Empire français), was the Imperial Bonapartist regime of Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870, between the Second Republic and the Third Republic, in France. Historians in the 1930s and 1940s often disparaged the Second Empire as a precursor of FASCISM"  (Wikipedia 2020). Reasoning as the iconoclastic mob does, one could argue that the presence of the Statue of Liberty inadvertently “elevates” its fascist creator, and, therefore, Lady Liberty should be torn down.

But no present day leader would try to dim the lights of knowledge. Wouldn't they support truth tellers, such as those who write for the widely respected New York Times (NYT) that publishes "All the News That's Fit to Print"?  The NYT is so open to diverse ideas that they specifically hired a journalist, Bari Weiss, who said that she was chosen "with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home." (Weiss, 2020).   But because Bari just couldn't keep her unpopular opinions to herself, she soon suffered such unrelenting harassment there that she felt compelled to quit her job.

In her resignation letter to the Times, she explained,

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

So, Bari Weiss apparently was felt to be too harsh toward some NYT party-line topics.  She was too defiant for the New York Times who wanted her to shut up and write what they believe is "all the news fit to print."

The Times is just one example of an American elitist, progressive group that controls the reins of power.  They decide which statues to erect and which to tear down.  They determine where to shine the light and where to snuff it out.  These are the very people who rail against Fascist book burning, Soviet history revisionism, and Chinese communists' tendencies to crush all dissent.  They are quick to condemn anyone who opposes them, but support mobs who do their bidding by tearing down our statues, burning our cities, and attacking law enforcers in the process.  Of course, American "progressive" politicians and intelligentsia don't have to worry about anarchy, since they live in guarded enclaves far from the maddening crowd.  It is okay with progressives when inner-city citizens daily suffer urban riots and chaos, as long as that helps progressives win elections and promote their agendas.

References

Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi
https://www.nps.gov/stli/learn/historyculture/frederic-auguste-bartholdi.htm

Second French Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_French_Empire

Weiss, B. (2020) Resignation letter to the New York Times.  https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

Does Society Value You As Much As It Does An Athlete?

Everyone has the right to voice their opinions about virtually anything.  Not everyone has the opportunity to voice their opinions on a platform that guarantees a worldwide audience.  Everyone has the right to make a living.  Not everyone has an opportunity to make a living that is about 127 times the salary of the average citizen.

_{Can anyone justify someone being guaranteed a worldwide audience whenever they want to comment about virtually anything?  Can anyone justify someone making 127 times the national salary?  If you are a “world-class” athlete, the answers are “yes” and “yes.”  And the world-class athletes can do so because you and I enable them to.  We listen to world-class athletes spout off about anything as long as they do so with passion.  We pay big bucks to watch them in stadia, or on pay-for-view television.  Our complicity emboldens them to believe that their athletic prowess makes them capable of knowing what is right, wrong, and what “ordinary people” should believe.} 

_{An article by Jeff Zillgitt and Mark Medina of USA Today (October 17, 2019) is relevant here: “LeBron James' controversial comments 'furthers his brand power in China.'”  For those of you who missed it, James had chastised Daryl Morey, General Manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team for tweeting, “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong” when the People's Republic of China forcefully crushed dissent against the communist government.   LeBron replied to the tweet by claiming that Morey was “misinformed or not really educated on the situation” and that Morey’s comments could “put people’s livelihoods at risk.”  James apparently was speaking from his heart.  To quote Zillgitt and Medina, “LeBron James has deep, lucrative ties to China because of his partnership with Nike, which does considerable business there, both as a manufacturer and apparel seller.  The global superstar who plays for the Los Angeles Lakers has traveled to the country 15 times since he signed with the sports apparel company 16 years ago and has visited several Chinese cities promoting physical fitness, education, basketball as a unifier and of course Nike.”}

_{Obviously, I am not writing to influence you about China or even about LeBron, per se.  I simply want you to think about what many societies explicitly or implicitly value.  The financial side of the values issue is starkly obvious in the chart below:}

<sub>Notice, for instance, that the column entitled Citizen Income % of athlete for India is .000.  That is because the true number would skew the chart.  The average Indian citizen actually makes .000374074074074074 of the income of the average Indian Premier League player.  What do you think about that?  And what do you think is fair for any athlete to earn, especially since when professional athletes are interviewed they often say something like, “I love this game.  I love it so much I would play even if I had to do so for free."

You may be someone who advocates social, racial, ethnic, or gender equality.  What if we were to give athletes an income reasonably higher than average, and allocate the remainder of their previous exorbitant incomes to programs that promote the well-being of everyday citizens?</sub>

Reference

Zillgitt & Medina (2019).  LeBron James' controversial comments 'furthers his brand power in China'.  October, USA TODAY

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2019/10/17/lebron-james-nike-china-revenue/3989915002/

      

Democrat Values

Liberals are forever denouncing Republicans as racists who stereotype black people.  They claim that all blacks, just as all people, are individuals who should be “permitted” to make their own choices—as long as black people make the choices that liberals require.  For instance, below is an exerpt from a recent Joe Biden interview:

https://news.yahoo.com/joe-biden-tells-popular-radio-host-you-aint-black-if-considering-voting-for-trump-154645383.html

Joe Biden tells popular radio host 'you ain't black' if considering voting for Trump

by

Brittany Shepherd National Politics Reporter         Yahoo News May 22, 2020.

Former Vice President Joe Biden suggested Friday morning that an African-American radio personality “ain’t black” if he was questioning whether he should support the presumptive Democratic nominee over President Trump in the general election.

After an aide interrupted the interview to say that the former vice president was running short on time, Charlamagne tha God asked that Biden pay the studio a visit the next time he’s in New York.

“It’s a long way until November,” he said. “We’ve got more questions.”

“You’ve got more questions?” Biden replied. “Well, I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

  

The above quote is totally consistent with Joe Biden language.  You might remember, for instance, that Biden used stereotyping language regarding Barack Obama in 2007 when the two were competing for the United States Democratic presidential nomination.  Jack Tapper from ABC wrote about it, and I quote once more:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=2838420&page=1

A Biden Problem: Foot in Mouth

By JAKE TAPPER

February 27, 2008, 11:16 PM

WASHINGTON, Jan. 31, 2007 — -- Senator Joe Biden, D-Del., the loquacious chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who launched his presidential campaign today, may be experiencing an ailment not entirely unknown to him: foot in mouth disease.

Biden is taking some heat for comments he made to the New York Observer, in which he said of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., a rival for the nomination: "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man." 

El Fin !  There is nothing more to add to this blog.  The quotes speak for themselves.