Lmst

Publishing foreign criminals' nationalities? Because nothing says 'progressive' like stoking xenophobia. Well played, #Labour. #DogWhistlePolitics

Starmer doesn’t lead — he echoes. One day, it’s ‘trans rights are human rights,’ the next he’s cheering a ruling that strips them away. What does he believe - whatever polls best. Publishing foreign criminals' nationalities? Nothing says 'progressive' like stoking xenophobia. #DogWhistlePolitics

Stories and Myth: Countering Structural Myths with a Progressive Storytelling Ecosystem

Right now, America is holding auditions for the next story.
Hank Green, Why Was Every President Born in the Same Year? – YouTube

The pro-democracy movement needs to build its own funnel, now. It cannot and should not be a mirror image of the right’s funnel. It should be grounded in truth, not lies, and generosity, not closedness. But it needs to be a total media ecology that can meet people at any level of annoyance, curiosity, irritation, gripe, doubt, with any question — and move them toward a more humane and magnanimous view of the world. It needs to take lost and lonely boys and men and move them toward a sense of how to be in a gender-equal world. It needs to invite people to see their own story in the story of a pluralist America of the future. It needs to be longer on invitation, shorter on blame. It needs to meet you where you are, and be confident enough to move you, over years even, toward greater consciousness.
Where’s our Rogan? – by Anand Giridharadas – The.Ink

This recent election in the US emphasized how right-wing messaging and storytelling has permeated every facet of American life.

Table of Contents

Myths of the System
The Power of Resentment
Change Your Heuristics
Name the Systems of Power
Name the Obstacles to DEI-AB
People Understand the World in Stories

Myths of the System

US Americans are among the most propagandized people in human history. The Southern Strategy, Traditional Segregationist Discourse, Meritocracy Myth, and Dog Whistle Politics are the default framing for most.

framing = mental structures that shape the way we see the world

https://youtu.be/bTp7TILYfkE?si=lYiSS9ieJL04z46d

We’ve been programmed to empty our pockets for the ruling class and think we’re saving ourselves money. LBJ and McGovern called it.

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, LBJ: ‘Convince the Lowest White Man He’s Better Than the Best Colored Man’

What is the Southern Strategy? It is this. It says to the South: Let the poor stay poor, let your economy trail the nation, forget about decent homes and medical care for all your people, choose officials who will oppose every effort to benefit the many at the expense of the few-and in return, we will try to overlook the rights of the black man, appoint a few southerners to high office, and lift your spirits by attacking the ‘eastern establishment’ whose bank accounts we are filling with your labor and your industry.
George McGovern, quoted in: Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked the Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 27.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6A3NQiJpH0

With 18-29 year old men voting decisively for bigotry, combating the manosphere is urgent work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4oxm7LWnEM

Rogan, Musk, Peterson, et al and the polluted ecosystems of anti-woke comedy, crypto, gaming, sports, sports betting, and podcasting have propagandized a generation of men.

https://youtu.be/4LqZdkkBDas?si=sRPbeCmPdyK4TU47

The Power of Resentment

Interviews with men saying they were voting to protect the “masculine identity” underline how prevalent and powerful the stories of the manosphere are. They’ve been convinced they are victims. Resentment narratives are powerful.

https://youtu.be/d8PndpFPL8g?si=WHV-qLA_Fr9C2hog

The systems are bad and they are designed by people who are bad to help people who don’t deserve it while ignoring the people who do deserve it.
Populism and the Politics of Resentment as distilled by Hank Green, Populism, Media Revolutions, and Our Terrible Moment – YouTube

Progressives need to tell better stories and hammer those stories repeatedly. We need to defuse resentment.

Change Your Heuristics

We perceive through habit, expectation, bias, and assumption. The heuristics that guide us through our days are full of predictable biases (systematic errors). These unconscious, predictable biases are rooted in the machinery of our cognition.

When making judgments or decisions, people often rely on simplified information processing strategies called heuristics, which may result in systematic, predictable errors called cognitive biases (hereafter CB). For instance, people tend to overestimate the accuracy of their judgments (overconfidence bias), to perceive events as being more predictable once they have occurred (hindsight bias), or to seek and interpret evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs and expectations (confirmation bias).
The Impact of Cognitive Biases on Professionals’ Decision-Making: A Review of Four Occupational Areas – PMC

Jiggle the machinery of your cognition by adopting new framing. We can more easily change our framing by adopting new heuristics (rules of thumb). By changing our framing, we correct for the systematic error of predictable biases installed in us by structural and systemic forces, by the myths of the system.

Reason uses the logics of image-schemas, frames, conceptual metaphors, prototypes, and narratives.
The Neuroscience of Language and Thought, Dr. George Lakoff Professor of Linguistics – YouTube

Words activate frames, and frames are ways in which you structure the world. You cannot think without frames. You cannot speak without frames being there, and those frames are physical, they are circuitry in your brain that carries out all those inferences and imposes that structure. And that circuitry, once you learn a frame, is there mostly for life.
The Neuroscience of Language and Thought, Dr. George Lakoff Professor of Linguistics – YouTube

Change your heuristics, and change your framing, so that you can perceive the systems of power.

Name the Systems of Power

We must name the systems of power and name the myths of the systems.

Name the Obstacles to DEI-AB

Getting human-centered, neurodiversity affirming, progressive practices into education, healthcare, and other systems is a battle, a grueling and grinding battle through bad narratives and bad framing.

Our community of neurodivergent and disabled people encounters the following narratives over-and-over with dreadful regularity. They are fundamental contributors to the Double Empathy Extreme Problem (DEEP) we neurodivergent and disabled people must attempt to bridge. We make the attempt in hope that, once we do all the work of building the bridge, you will endeavor to meet us halfway.

double empathy problem = the mutual incomprehension that occurs between people of different dispositional outlooks (Milton 2013); when people with very different experiences of the world interact with one another, they will struggle to empathise with each other (Milton, 2018)

double empathy extreme problem (DEEP) = mass societal disconnect from each other, our own bodyminds, and nature that obstructs empathizing across cultural, sexual, political, religious, neurodivergent, and any other cross-section of differences (Edgar, 2024)

Get over the bridge by recognizing these frames in your own thinking.

Obstacles to DEI-AB and Neurodiversity Affirming Practice

(links are to our glossary, where you can learn much more)

politics of resentment = manipulations of status anxiety; organization of interest groups based on perceived deprivation or the threat of deprivation

sameness-based fairness = notion of fairness where everyone gets the same thing rather than each getting what they need

fundamental attribution error = to underestimate the impact of situational factors and to overestimate the role of dispositional factors in controlling behaviour

conquering gaze from nowhere = the interpretation of objectivity as neutral and not allowing for participation or stances; an uninvolved, uninvested approach that claims objectivity to “represent while escaping representation”

toxic positivity = belief that success happens to good people and failure is just a consequence of a bad attitude rather than structural conditions

neurodiversity-lite = using neurodiversity as a buzzword; a way to profit from the appropriation of a human rights movement; a cottage industry for therapists, clinics, and companies to sell their associated products, classes, books, and training to the public without having a clue about neurodiversity

scientism = the belief that science is the only route to useful knowledge

epistemic injustice = where our status as knowers, interpreters, and providers of information, is unduly diminished or stifled in a way that undermines the agent’s agency and dignity

behaviorism = a dehumanizing mechanism of learning that reduces human beings to simple inputs and outputs

ableism = a system of assigning value to people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness

deficit ideology = a worldview that explains and justifies outcome inequalities by pointing to supposed deficiencies within disenfranchised individuals and communities

better get used to it = preparing people for oppression by oppressing them

meritocracy myth = a widely held but false assertion that individual merit is always rewarded; the myth of meritocracy is one of the longest lasting and most dangerous falsehoods in American life

lowering the bar = a racist, sexist, and ableist narrative with no basis in reality that represents diversifying hiring pipelines, attracting candidates from underrepresented groups, and supporting them in the workplace as “lowering the bar” by hiring less-qualified individuals

People Understand the World in Stories

To counter the myths of systems and the obstacles they present, we need consistent and convincing story and “myth” scalable from a sound bite to textured storytelling. People understand the world in stories.

People are asking me for anti-propaganda advice. IDGAF so will give it: We are still a lizard brain species that needs ritual to feel safe. It’s why appeals to mythology are so effective. People’d rather believe in comforting mythology than scary reality. It’s why these movements take hold in scary times. We can’t beat it with logic. We must substitute a new mythology for theirs. Push out whatev story about pluralistic modernity also gives warm fuzzies. That’s sincerely what works.
@deirdre.assenza • People are asking me for anti-propaganda advice. IDGAF so will give it: We are still a lizard bra… • Threads

Yup. It’s gotta be a new story, not just new facts.
@amybrownhughes • Yup. It’s gotta be a new story, not just new facts. • Threads

That’s why myth works so well. That’s why myth is so evocative and so enduring; it’s because all these diverse ignorances come together and truth emerges from that, from all those different data sets. Because the ignorance is just that: you’ve only analyzed it from one point of view. But collectively, collective analysis—ah, that’s amazing. That’s the only way it can be done.
Deep Time Diligence – with Tyson Yunkaporta

Over the course of our movement work, we have learned that people understand the world in stories. This means organizers must be effective storytellers.
Hayes, Kelly; Kaba, Mariame. Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care (p. 44). Haymarket Books.

We think that the reason that humans values and belief systems and ideals are such powerful motivators is literally that they’re hooking themselves into biomechanical machinery that has evolved to keep us alive over time. So emotions are a critical piece of learning always.
Meaningful learning, learning that really matters to you, that changes who you are and that endures over time, always has an emotional component.
Keynote: Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang – Fora

https://youtu.be/FUG_ATjjiw4?si=IPG6gAEXOT10lp2Y

#dogWhistlePolitics #manosphere #pluralism #resentment #segregationistDiscourse #southernStrategy #storytelling

#DogWhistlePolitics ?

#dogWhistles #DogWhistlePolitics the dog whistles are so loud. 😖. #fascism #debate #vpdebate

Starmer accused of ‘dog whistle’ politics by Tory Home Secretary | Morning Star
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/starmer-accused-dog-whistle-politics

#Starmer
#Labour
#GE
#GE2024
#DogWhistlePolitics
#Racism
#Cleverly
#HomeSecretary
#Tory
#Bangladeshis
#Scapegoating
#Hussain
#Walsall
#Palestinians
#Civilians
#PalestinianSolidarity
#Sunak
#Farage
#Reform
#BoothIsherwood
#Sexism
#Davey
#LibDems

TL;DR

Australia is a racist country.

Laura Tingle #auspol #racism #DogWhistlePolitics #dogwhistle #abc

https://www.abc.net.au/about/media-centre/speeches-and-articles/laura-tingle-statement/103908942

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_oCOY7WDgd0&si=trifo7dyIYqgQlxO
⚠️🇺🇸Trump deploys racist tactics as Biden rematch appears likely (PBS News Hour VIDEO) #Ukraine #Mastodon #USA #UnitedStates #Press #News #DogWhistlePolitics #russiaUkraineWar #9yrInvasionofUkraine #BoycottMusk #AxisOfEvil
#NoEUPrezForHungary
#NoUSRepublicans2024

You probably know that dogwhistles as a political tactic have a racist past, but did you know that literal dog whistles do, too?

In this latest article on Medium, I take a deep dive into dogwhistles, so that you can see how they're used…and how you can disarm their power.

https://medium.com/@KimWitten/dogwhistles-the-new-pitch-of-the-same-old-racist-tune-6caf041b4b9c?sk=a5b8303cc583e433b126ee6ac524bd03

#Medium #racism #politics #dogwhistle #DogwhistlePolitics

#Florida #FloridaIsFucked #FloridaIsANaziState #DogWhistlePolitics #xenophobia

Florida SB 1718 is yet another example of mismanagement by Florida’s Ruling GOP. It opens up all kinds of opportunities for selective enforcement and adds to a business-hostile environment. Hate is the point- https://www.npr.org/2023/05/30/1177657218/florida-anti-immigration-law-1718-desantis