To divide members of a movement into allies and others undermines the bases of deep solidarity and destroys what standing left means.

If you think it’s impossible to distinguish truth from narrative, you won’t bother to try.

What distinguishes the left from the liberal is the view that, along with political rights that guarantee freedoms to speak, worship, travel and vote as we choose, we also have claims to social rights which undergird the real exercise of political rights. Liberal writers call them benefits, entitlements, or safety nets. All these terms make things like fair labor practices, education, healthcare and housing appear as matters of charity rather than justice. But social rights are codified in the United Nation’s 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” While most member states ratified it, no state has yet created a society which assures those rights. To stand on the left is to insist that those aspirations are not utopian.

When contemporary postcolonial theorists rightly insist that we learn to view the world from the perspective of non-Europeans, they’re echoing a tradition that goes back to Enlightenment thinkers, who risked their livelihoods, and sometimes their lives, to defend those ideas.

when many of the latter come from thinkers who were outright Nazis.

Why not be honest, cut out the middleman and simply demand power for your tribe?

reactionary assumptions

By the fall of that year few voices defending Black Lives Matter were universalist, though some allowed that white allies could play a role.

a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. All these ideas are connected

requires us to acknowledge the split between progressive emotions and reactionary theories

justice is a concept invented to disguise claims to power; there is no common humanity; tribal connections and genetic interests determine our actions; most attempts at progress turn out to be subtler forms of domination, like the use of reason itself.

people who feel they are “outside” of politics may feel that nobody shares their views

Vera Nabokov,

Some of the defenders took the unfortunate position that art is not dangerous because, ultimately, it has no impact.

’d identified with Lolita. I read many Nabokov novels back in the day, but a novel centered around the serial rape of a kidnapped child, back when I was near that child’s age was a little reminder how hostile the world, or rather the men in it, could be. Which is not a pleasure.

Non-white people get much the same rubbish about how there isn’t racism and they don’t get treated differently and race doesn’t affect any of us, because who knows better than white people who are trying to silence people of color?

hat I’ve been performing interesting experiments in proffering my opinions and finding that some of the men out there respond on the grounds that my opinion is wrong,

But they personally think the trade-off between the small risks of side effects and the big benefit of herd immunity is a fair one. They decided this long ago, and that belief is built into every aspect of their work. For a lot of them – a lot of us, if I’m honest – it’s easy to forget that our perspective on the trade-off is a belief, and not a provable fact.

ory, his success in that arena seems to be due, at least partly, to his willingness to listen to parents and spend large amounts of time talking and thinking about the problems they notice in their children and what they think might be causing those problems

The whole thing was really about a long-standing lack of trust in the government

Goldenberg found parents who were perfectly happy to believe that the MMR vaccine was generally safe, even as they decided they wouldn’t be vaccinating their kid.

they can’t quite mesh the goals of widespread, population-scale public health with their personal goals for their individual children.

if the preservation of herd immunity is a trade-off, who has the right to make you accept the trade? Why should the government have that power?

‘it is the absence, or close to it, of some illnesses in the United States that keep some parents from opting for the shots’.

‘Most of these parents have never seen measles, and don’t realise it could be a bad disease so they turn their concerns to unfounded risks.

They need to see evidence comparing the risks of disease with the risks of vaccination.

But if your kid is the rare person who experiences a severe side effect, the greater good no longer matters.

isks to other people

So you don’t avoid risk by avoiding vaccination. You just change what the risk comes from.

And catching measles comes with risks of its own, including, again, encephalitis.

None of the tested techniques worked. When the researchers tried debunking vaccine misinformation, they succeeded in convincing more parents that vaccines don’t cause autism. B

2000 and 2009

2 per cent

Vaccines work in two ways. They decrease your personal risk of contracting a disease, and they reduce the number of potential hosts and carriers in the population. That means the more vaccinated people there are, the harder it is for a disease to spread.

Maybe it’s us: maybe journalists aren’t listening

The story was framed as a conflict between parents such as him and medical experts

And if you’re going to write an angry email telling me how wrong I am, I beg you: Please proofread it before you hit “send.”

The real point is to stand up for the values that have made our universities the guardians of civilization

We should teach students traditional etiquette for the same reason most great abstract painters first mastered figurative painting. In order to abandon or riff on a form, you have to get the hang of its underlying principles.

Yet she has noticed that the informality of the tech industry can mislead new millennial employees.

The values of higher education are not the values of the commercial, capitalist paradigm. At a time when corporate executives populate university boards and politicians demand proof of a diploma’s immediate cash value, this distinction needs vigilant defense.

It undermines the message that academic titles are meant to convey: esteem for learning. The central endeavor of higher education is not the pursuit of money or fame but knowledge.

I reserve the right to judge if you’re a good professor.”

a special kind of inequality.

a teacher’s job to correct sloppy prose, whether in an essay or an email.

Insisting on traditional etiquette is also simply good pedagogy.

the atmosphere of mutual respect that she cultivates in her classes. These days, simply being considerate can feel like a political act

But today, on the other side of the civil rights revolution, formal titles and etiquette can be tools to protect disempowered minorities and ensure that the modern university belongs to all of us. Students seem more inclined to use casual forms of address with professors who are young, nonwhite and female — some of whom have responded by becoming vocal defenders of old-fashioned propriety.Angela Jackson-Brown, a professor of English at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., told me that “most of my students will acknowledge that I’m the first and only black teacher they’ve ever had.” Insisting on her formal title is important, she said: “I feel the extra burden of having to go in from Day 1 and establish that I belong here.”

33 percent

When the president of the college cracked down and suspended the entire sophomore class, the juniors retaliated by hanging and burning him in effigy and setting off a rudimentary explosive in the campus chapel.Editors’ PicksWhy Did 488 Golden Retrievers Gather in Scotland?If You’re Looking for a Real Taste of Alaska, Try a Food TruckWith Just a 5 Percent Down Payment, What Would $650,000 Buy in Bed-Stuy?AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTLater in the 19th century, etiquette manuals proliferated in bookstores, and Americans began to emphasize elaborate social protocols. As colleges expanded and academic disciplines professionalized, they mimicked the hierarchical cultures of the German research universities, where students cowered before “Herr Professor Doktor.”The historian John Kasson has noted that back then, formal etiquette was not aimed at ensuring respect for all. It was, in part, a system to enforce boundaries of race, class and gender at a time when the growth of cities and mass transit forced Americans into close quarters with strangers. Codes of behavior served “as checks against a fully democratic order and in support of special interests, institutions of privilege and structures of domination,” he writes in his book “Rudeness and Civility.”

His webpage covers matters ranging from appropriate email addresses (if you’re still using “cutie_pie_98@hotmail.com,” then “it’s time to retire that address”) to how to be gracious when making a request (“do not make demands”).

“When students started calling me by my first name, I felt that was too far, and I’ve got to say something,” he told me. “There were also the emails written like text messages. Worse than the text abbreviations was the level of informality, with no address or signoff.”

Over the past decade or two, college students have become far more casual in their interactions with faculty members

t the start of my teaching career, when I was fresh out of graduate school, I briefly considered trying to pass myself off as a cool professor. Luckily, I soon came to my senses and embraced my true identity as a young fogey.After one too many students called me by my first name and sent me email that resembled a drunken late-night Facebook post, I took a very fogeyish step. I began attaching a page on etiquette to every syllabus: basic rules for how to address teachers and write polite, grammatically correct emails.

Don’t dismiss these calls for old-fashioned courtesy as a case of fragile ivory tower egos or misplaced nostalgia. There is a strong liberal case for using formal manners and titles to ensure respect for all university professionals, regardless of age, race or gender. More important, doing so helps defend the university’s dearest values at a time when they are under continual assault.

commedia dell’arte

Thus literary language is ordinary language deformed and made strange.

it was conceived in terms of subject matter and in novelty of expression.

ormation of guilds and local chapters of medical associations, in which health workers may gather to discuss, not just technical issues, but also how health relates to society. Hospitals need also to encourage community life amongst its staff (sports tournaments, cultural events), so that staff can form a greater sense of commitment to social issues (and thus alienation is prevente), and consequently come up with more effective ways of approaching policymakers as to what may be the most effective way of empowering dispossessed communities in the access to healthcare. Furthermore, hospitals can arrange for weekly seminar series open to the wider public, in which particular social and political problems related to conspiracy theories claims are discussed (e.g., the price of medications, government healthcare plans, race representation in particular diseases), and seize the opportunity to hear attendees that may potentially be sympathetic to medical conspiracy theories, and engage them in dialogue.

In that sense, one important aspect of public health campaigns to address medical conspiracies, is the regulation of the internet.

that focus groups

any health literacy campaign in addressing conspiracy theories is a reliance on a more thorough understanding of what people believe, and the reasons they offer for doing so.

In concrete terms, this implies that if a campaign is to address, say, a conspiracy theory regarding HIV denialism, the message should sufficiently emphasize the details that theory does not sufficiently explain well.

it is more useful for policy makers to design campaigns that engage the rational aspect of information processing in people, when attempting to address medical conspiracy theories.

oncrete parameters as to how to make communicative campaigns more effective,

t greater levels of education are useless in countering

and attempts at refutation with convincing evidence, would presumably be interpreted as confirmation of the original conspiracy theory. This is known as the “backfire effect”

are not necessarily pathological, and that they rely on evolved mental mechanisms that are hardwired in human brains.

Ethics and implications for policy

Thus, the capacity to detect alliances and figure out how outsiders get together against our own inner group,

“threat management systems”

conspiracy beliefs are high particularly among members of stigmatized minority groups

intuitively, we are intention seekers.

even believes that conspiracy theories may serve an ethical purpose, as in democratic societies where public opinion is a force to be reckoned with, they hold in check potential conspirator

Paranoia works on a personal level (the individual feels personally attacked), whereas conspiracy theories are about threat perception as a group

These serve as foundations for conspiracy theorists to elaborate on the basis of factual information that ultimately makes their claims more intuitive.

for example, only 44% disagree that doctors want to vaccinate children, even though they know vaccines are harmful; 37% agree that the FDA refuses to release the cure of cancer; only 46% disagree that fluoridation is a secret plot to poison people (Oliver and Woods 2014)

I shall rely on principles of cognitive science to attempt to understand why people believe conspiracy theories

narratives about events or situation

s, t

In sum, these data show that, overall, Black, Hispanic, and AIAN people have experienced higher rates of COVID-19 infection and death compared to White people when accounting for age differences across racial and ethnic groups.

He landed on several theories as to what may be driving the changes — such as a reduction in overall movement, strains in illicit drug markets, more gunmen opening fire on rivals at close range and police officers being stretched thin in high-crime areas amid citywide emergencies, operational changes and officers quarantining or missing work due to illness.

“The pandemic changes everything about the world, so this equilibrium gets shaken up,” he said. “You’ve got this period now without an equilibrium, and maybe one of the ways that shows up is this heightened number of homicides and shootings.”

The LAPD’s budget was cut by $150 million this summer, as protests raged, and the department is planning for more than 350 officer layoffs as part of an effort by city leaders to close a $650-million deficit caused by the pandemic’s economic devastation.

uilding back the social infrastructure t

shootings and homicides rise most dramatically in “the very disadvantaged neighborhoods most impacted by the pandemic

Vernon said data suggest that more gunmen are getting out of their cars and shooting multiple targets at once, at close range, and that more people are driving around with guns at the ready.

As the weather began to warm, shootings and homicides started spiking, and fast. The increases intensified as the summer progressed and have largely continued ever since, with a brief September lull offset by intense bouts of bloodshed in recent weeks.

Through January and February 2020, gun violence was slightly elevated over the same period in 2019.

eyed Siphon