#America's General Social Survey
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The U-Bend of Life! Why, Beyond Middle Age, People Get Happier As They Get Older
— December 16th 2010 | Wednesday 16th August 2023 | Christmas Specials | Age and happiness
ASK people how they feel about getting older, and they will probably reply in the same vein as Maurice Chevalier: “Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.” Stiffening joints, weakening muscles, fading eyesight and the clouding of memory, coupled with the modern world's careless contempt for the old, seem a fearful prospect—better than death, perhaps, but not much. Yet mankind is wrong to dread ageing. Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend.
When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.
This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility—the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself.
These ideas have penetrated the policy arena, starting in Bhutan, where the concept of Gross National Happiness shapes the planning process. All new policies have to have a GNH assessment, similar to the environmental-impact assessment common in other countries. In 2008 France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, asked two Nobel-prize-winning economists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to come up with a broader measure of national contentedness than GDP. Then last month, in a touchy-feely gesture not typical of Britain, David Cameron announced that the British government would start collecting figures on well-being.
There are already a lot of data on the subject collected by, for instance, America's General Social Survey, Eurobarometer and Gallup. Surveys ask two main sorts of question. One concerns people's assessment of their lives, and the other how they feel at any particular time. The first goes along the lines of: thinking about your life as a whole, how do you feel? The second is something like: yesterday, did you feel happy/contented/angry/anxious? The first sort of question is said to measure global well-being, and the second hedonic or emotional well-being. They do not always elicit the same response: having children, for instance, tends to make people feel better about their life as a whole, but also increases the chance that they felt angry or anxious yesterday.
Statisticians trawl through the vast quantities of data these surveys produce rather as miners panning for gold. They are trying to find the answer to the perennial question: what makes people happy?
Four main factors, it seems: gender, personality, external circumstances and age. Women, by and large, are slightly happier than men. But they are also more susceptible to depression: a fifth to a quarter of women experience depression at some point in their lives, compared with around a tenth of men. Which suggests either that women are more likely to experience more extreme emotions, or that a few women are more miserable than men, while most are more cheerful.
Two personality traits shine through the complexity of economists' regression analyses: neuroticism and extroversion. Neurotic people—those who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety—tend to be unhappy. This is more than a tautological observation about people's mood when asked about their feelings by pollsters or economists. Studies following people over many years have shown that neuroticism is a stable personality trait and a good predictor of levels of happiness. Neurotic people are not just prone to negative feelings: they also tend to have low emotional intelligence, which makes them bad at forming or managing relationships, and that in turn makes them unhappy.
Whereas neuroticism tends to make for gloomy types, extroversion does the opposite. Those who like working in teams and who relish parties tend to be happier than those who shut their office doors in the daytime and hole up at home in the evenings. This personality trait may help explain some cross-cultural differences: a study comparing similar groups of British, Chinese and Japanese people found that the British were, on average, both more extrovert and happier than the Chinese and Japanese.
Then there is the role of circumstance. All sorts of things in people's lives, such as relationships, education, income and health, shape the way they feel. Being married gives people a considerable uplift, but not as big as the gloom that springs from being unemployed. In America, being black used to be associated with lower levels of happiness—though the most recent figures suggest that being black or Hispanic is nowadays associated with greater happiness. People with children in the house are less happy than those without. More educated people are happier, but that effect disappears once income is controlled for. Education, in other words, seems to make people happy because it makes them richer. And richer people are happier than poor ones—though just how much is a source of argument.
The View From Winter
Lastly, there is age. Ask a bunch of 30-year-olds and another of 70-year-olds (as Peter Ubel, of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, did with two colleagues, Heather Lacey and Dylan Smith, in 2006) which group they think is likely to be happier, and both lots point to the 30-year-olds. Ask them to rate their own well-being, and the 70-year-olds are the happier bunch. The academics quoted lyrics written by Pete Townshend of The Who when he was 20: “Things they do look awful cold / Hope I die before I get old”. They pointed out that Mr Townshend, having passed his 60th birthday, was writing a blog that glowed with good humour.
Mr Townshend may have thought of himself as a youthful radical, but this view is ancient and conventional. The “seven ages of man”—the dominant image of the life-course in the 16th and 17th centuries—was almost invariably conceived as a rise in stature and contentedness to middle age, followed by a sharp decline towards the grave. Inverting the rise and fall is a recent idea. “A few of us noticed the U-bend in the early 1990s,” says Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick Business School. “We ran a conference about it, but nobody came.”
Since then, interest in the U-bend has been growing. Its effect on happiness is significant—about half as much, from the nadir of middle age to the elderly peak, as that of unemployment. It appears all over the world. David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, and Mr Oswald looked at the figures for 72 countries. The nadir varies among countries—Ukrainians, at the top of the range, are at their most miserable at 62, and Swiss, at the bottom, at 35—but in the great majority of countries people are at their unhappiest in their 40s and early 50s. The global average is 46.
The U-bend shows up in studies not just of global well-being but also of hedonic or emotional well-being. One paper, published this year by Arthur Stone, Joseph Schwartz and Joan Broderick of Stony Brook University, and Angus Deaton of Princeton, breaks well-being down into positive and negative feelings and looks at how the experience of those emotions varies through life. Enjoyment and happiness dip in middle age, then pick up; stress rises during the early 20s, then falls sharply; worry peaks in middle age, and falls sharply thereafter; anger declines throughout life; sadness rises slightly in middle age, and falls thereafter.
Turn the question upside down, and the pattern still appears. When the British Labour Force Survey asks people whether they are depressed, the U-bend becomes an arc, peaking at 46.
Happier, No Matter What
There is always a possibility that variations are the result not of changes during the life-course, but of differences between cohorts. A 70-year-old European may feel different to a 30-year-old not because he is older, but because he grew up during the second world war and was thus formed by different experiences. But the accumulation of data undermines the idea of a cohort effect. Americans and Zimbabweans have not been formed by similar experiences, yet the U-bend appears in both their countries. And if a cohort effect were responsible, the U-bend would not show up consistently in 40 years' worth of data.
Another possible explanation is that unhappy people die early. It is hard to establish whether that is true or not; but, given that death in middle age is fairly rare, it would explain only a little of the phenomenon. Perhaps the U-bend is merely an expression of the effect of external circumstances. After all, common factors affect people at different stages of the life-cycle. People in their 40s, for instance, often have teenage children. Could the misery of the middle-aged be the consequence of sharing space with angry adolescents? And older people tend to be richer. Could their relative contentment be the result of their piles of cash?
The answer, it turns out, is no: control for cash, employment status and children, and the U-bend is still there. So the growing happiness that follows middle-aged misery must be the result not of external circumstances but of internal changes.
People, studies show, behave differently at different ages. Older people have fewer rows and come up with better solutions to conflict. They are better at controlling their emotions, better at accepting misfortune and less prone to anger. In one study, for instance, subjects were asked to listen to recordings of people supposedly saying disparaging things about them. Older and younger people were similarly saddened, but older people less angry and less inclined to pass judgment, taking the view, as one put it, that “you can't please all the people all the time.”
There are various theories as to why this might be so. Laura Carstensen, professor of psychology at Stanford University, talks of “the uniquely human ability to recognise our own mortality and monitor our own time horizons”. Because the old know they are closer to death, she argues, they grow better at living for the present. They come to focus on things that matter now—such as feelings—and less on long-term goals. “When young people look at older people, they think how terrifying it must be to be nearing the end of your life. But older people know what matters most.” For instance, she says, “young people will go to cocktail parties because they might meet somebody who will be useful to them in the future, even though nobody I know actually likes going to cocktail parties.”
Death of Ambition, Birth of Acceptance
There are other possible explanations. Maybe the sight of contemporaries keeling over infuses survivors with a determination to make the most of their remaining years. Maybe people come to accept their strengths and weaknesses, give up hoping to become chief executive or have a picture shown in the Royal Academy, and learn to be satisfied as assistant branch manager, with their watercolour on display at the church fete. “Being an old maid”, says one of the characters in a story by Edna Ferber, an (unmarried) American novelist, was “like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.” Perhaps acceptance of ageing itself is a source of relief. “How pleasant is the day”, observed William James, an American philosopher, “when we give up striving to be young—or slender.”
Whatever the causes of the U-bend, it has consequences beyond the emotional. Happiness doesn't just make people happy—it also makes them healthier. John Weinman, professor of psychiatry at King's College London, monitored the stress levels of a group of volunteers and then inflicted small wounds on them. The wounds of the least stressed healed twice as fast as those of the most stressed. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Sheldon Cohen infected people with cold and flu viruses. He found that happier types were less likely to catch the virus, and showed fewer symptoms of illness when they did. So although old people tend to be less healthy than younger ones, their cheerfulness may help counteract their crumbliness.
Happier people are more productive, too. Mr Oswald and two colleagues, Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi, cheered up a bunch of volunteers by showing them a funny film, then set them mental tests and compared their performance to groups that had seen a neutral film, or no film at all. The ones who had seen the funny film performed 12% better. This leads to two conclusions. First, if you are going to volunteer for a study, choose the economists' experiment rather than the psychologists' or psychiatrists'. Second, the cheerfulness of the old should help counteract their loss of productivity through declining cognitive skills—a point worth remembering as the world works out how to deal with an ageing workforce.
The ageing of the rich world is normally seen as a burden on the economy and a problem to be solved. The U-bend argues for a more positive view of the matter. The greyer the world gets, the brighter it becomes—a prospect which should be especially encouraging to Economist readers (average age 47).
— This article appeared in the Christmas Specials section of the print edition under the headline "The U-Bend of Life"
#Middle-aged | Older People#U-Bend of Life#Christmas Specials | Age and Happiness#Maurice Chevalier#Old Age | Alternative#Vitality | Mental Sharpness | Happiness#Bhutan 🇧🇹#Gross National Happiness#Nobel Prize Winning Economists | Amartya Sen | Joseph Stiglitz#America's General Social Survey#Happy | Contented | Angry | Anxious#Main Factors: Gender | Personality | External Circumstances and Age#Women 😂 | Men 😤
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most active time of day on tumblr since it's after work or school for the majority of people in the US and catches the night owls in most of Europe as well. // And not one thought for the rest of the world, it's mostly third world countries, anyway 💀
My earlier response wasn't about "blah blah I only think the US and UK use the internet," but I am sorry if that's how it came across.
My response was about social media and maximizing engagement numbers. One oversight on my part was that Africa has many of the same time zones as Europe, and should have been included in my statement. However, It's generally understood that tumblr is most heavily used by Americans and Europeans; I did some searching and although it's hard to find very much concrete numerical data, people generally agree that the most active time on tumblr is between 5pm and 1am Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5). This information is frequently given to writers and artists on tumblr as advice to help increase the visibility of their work.
Taking a look back through past polls on this blog, here's one about what you call your parents and what area of the world you're from. Out of 8,600 responses, the Americas (North and South) account for 60.6%, and Europe accounts for 28.3%. All other surveyed regions combined (Asia, Africa, and Oceania) make up 11.1% of responses.
Here's a graph of this blog's activity for the last month.
It's hard to see– I wish tumblr made it easier to collect data– but each of those peaks is between 8pm and 11pm EST (UTC-5). Some of that is from the polls posted on each of those nights, but most of the polls on this blog tend to steadily gain notes over the course of the week, not all at once as soon as they're posted– those peaks in activity are mostly from people interacting with polls posted on previous days.
My decision to target Western time zones with the timing of these polls is based solely on the fact that this is what results in the most responses and widest spread of any given post. Again, if I have been dismissive of any area of the world, I apologize.
Just for you, here's a geography poll.
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"Major AI companies are racing to build superintelligent AI — for the benefit of you and me, they say. But did they ever pause to ask whether we actually want that?
Americans, by and large, don’t want it.
That’s the upshot of a new poll shared exclusively with Vox. The poll, commissioned by the think tank AI Policy Institute and conducted by YouGov, surveyed 1,118 Americans from across the age, gender, race, and political spectrums in early September. It reveals that 63 percent of voters say regulation should aim to actively prevent AI superintelligence.
Companies like OpenAI have made it clear that superintelligent AI — a system that is smarter than humans — is exactly what they’re trying to build. They call it artificial general intelligence (AGI) and they take it for granted that AGI should exist. “Our mission,” OpenAI’s website says, “is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”
But there’s a deeply weird and seldom remarked upon fact here: It’s not at all obvious that we should want to create AGI — which, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will be the first to tell you, comes with major risks, including the risk that all of humanity gets wiped out. And yet a handful of CEOs have decided, on behalf of everyone else, that AGI should exist.
Now, the only thing that gets discussed in public debate is how to control a hypothetical superhuman intelligence — not whether we actually want it. A premise has been ceded here that arguably never should have been...
Building AGI is a deeply political move. Why aren’t we treating it that way?
...Americans have learned a thing or two from the past decade in tech, and especially from the disastrous consequences of social media. They increasingly distrust tech executives and the idea that tech progress is positive by default. And they’re questioning whether the potential benefits of AGI justify the potential costs of developing it. After all, CEOs like Altman readily proclaim that AGI may well usher in mass unemployment, break the economic system, and change the entire world order. That’s if it doesn’t render us all extinct.
In the new AI Policy Institute/YouGov poll, the "better us [to have and invent it] than China” argument was presented five different ways in five different questions. Strikingly, each time, the majority of respondents rejected the argument. For example, 67 percent of voters said we should restrict how powerful AI models can become, even though that risks making American companies fall behind China. Only 14 percent disagreed.
Naturally, with any poll about a technology that doesn’t yet exist, there’s a bit of a challenge in interpreting the responses. But what a strong majority of the American public seems to be saying here is: just because we’re worried about a foreign power getting ahead, doesn’t mean that it makes sense to unleash upon ourselves a technology we think will severely harm us.
AGI, it turns out, is just not a popular idea in America.
“As we’re asking these poll questions and getting such lopsided results, it’s honestly a little bit surprising to me to see how lopsided it is,” Daniel Colson, the executive director of the AI Policy Institute, told me. “There’s actually quite a large disconnect between a lot of the elite discourse or discourse in the labs and what the American public wants.”
-via Vox, September 19, 2023
#united states#china#ai#artificial intelligence#superintelligence#ai ethics#general ai#computer science#public opinion#science and technology#ai boom#anti ai#international politics#good news#hope
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2024 Book Review #4 – War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat
This is my first big history book of the year, and one I’ve been rather looking forward to getting to for some time now. Its claimed subject matter – the whole scope of war and violent conflict across the history of humanity – is ambitious enough to be intriguing, and it was cited and recommended by Bret Devereaux, whose writing I’m generally a huge fan of. Of course, he recommended The Bright Ages too, and that was one of my worst reads of last year – apparently something I should have learned my lesson from. This is, bluntly, not a good book – the first half is bad but at least interesting, while the remainder is only really worth reading as a time capsule of early 2000s academic writing and hegemonic politics.
The book purports to be a survey of warfare from the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens through to the (then) present, drawing together studies from several different fields to draw new conclusions and a novel synthesis that none of the authors being drawn from had ever had the context to see – which in retrospect really should have been a big enough collection of dramatically waving red flags to make me put it down then and there. It starts with a lengthy consideration of conflict in humanity’s ‘evolutionary state of nature’ – the long myriads between the evolution of the modern species and the neolithic revolution – which he holds is the environment where the habits, drives and instincts of ‘human nature’ were set and have yet to significantly diverge from. He does this by comparing conflict in other social megafauna (mostly but not entirely primates), archaeology, and analogizing from the anthropological accounts we have of fairly isolated/’untainted’ hunter gatherers in the historical record.
From there, he goes on through the different stages of human development – he takes a bit of pain at one point to disavow believing in ‘stagism’ or modernization theory, but then he discusses things entirely in terms of ‘relative time’ and makes the idea that Haida in 17th century PNW North America are pretty much comparable to pre-agriculture inhabitants of Mesopotamia, so I’m not entirely sure what he’s actually trying to disavow – and how warfare evolved in each. His central thesis is that the fundamental causes of war are essentially the same as they were for hunter-gatherer bands on the savanna, only appearing to have changed because of how they have been warped and filtered by cultural and technological evolution. This is followed with a lengthy discussion of the 19th and 20th centuries that mostly boils down to trying to defend that contention and to argue that, contrary to what the world wars would have you believe, modernity is in fact significantly more peaceful than any epoch to precede it. The book then concludes with a discussion of terrorism and WMDs that mostly serves to remind you it was written right after 9/11.
So, lets start with the good. The book’s discussion of rates of violence in the random grab-bag of premodern societies used as case studies and the archaeological evidence gathered makes a very convincing case that murder and war are hardly specific ills of civilization, and that per capita feuds and raids in non-state societies were as- or more- deadly than interstate warfare averaged out over similar periods of time (though Gat gets clumsy and takes the point rather too far at times). The description of different systems of warfare that ten to reoccur across history in similar social and technological conditions is likewise very interesting and analytically useful, even if you’re skeptical of his causal explanations for why.
If you’re interested in academic inside baseball, a fairly large chunk of the book is also just shadowboxing against unnamed interlocutors and advancing bold positions like ‘engaging in warfare can absolutely be a rational choice that does you and yours significant good, for example Genghis Khan-’, an argument which there are apparently people on the other side of.
Of course all that value requires taking Gat at his word, which leads to the book’s largest and most overwhelming problem – he’s sloppy. Reading through the book, you notice all manner of little incidental facts he’s gotten wrong or oversimplified to the point where it’s basically the same thing – my favourites are listing early modern Poland as a coherent national state, and characterizing US interventions in early 20th century Central America as attempts to impose democracy. To a degree, this is probably inevitable in a book with such a massive subject matter, but the number I (a total amateur with an undergraduate education) noticed on a casual read - and more damningly the fact that every one of them made things easier or simpler for him to fit within his thesis - means that I really can’t be sure how much to trust anything he writes.
I mentioned above that I got this off a recommendation from Bret Devereaux’s blog. Specifically, I got it from his series on the ‘Fremen Mirage’ – his term for the enduring cultural trope about the military supremacy of hard, deprived and abusive societies. Which honestly makes it really funny that this entire book indulges in that very same trope continuously. There are whole chapters devoted to thesis that ‘primitive’ and ‘barbarian’ societies possess superior military ferocity and fighting spirit to more civilized and ‘domesticated’ ones, and how this is one of the great engines of history up to the turn of the modern age. It’s not even argued for, really, just taken as a given and then used to expand on his general theories.
Speaking of – it is absolutely core to the book’s thesis that war (and interpersonal violence generally) are driven by (fundamentally) either material or reproductive concerns. ‘Reproductive’ here meaning ‘allowing men to secure access to women’, with an accompanying chapter-length aside about how war is a (possibly the most) fundamentally male activity, and any female contributions to it across the span of history are so marginal as to not require explanation or analysis in his comprehensive survey. Women thus appear purely as objects – things to be fought over and fucked – with the closest to any individual or collective agency on their part shown is a consideration that maybe the sexual revolution made western society less violent because it gave young men a way to get laid besides marriage or rape.
Speaking of – as the book moves forward in time, it goes from being deeply flawed but interesting to just, total dreck (though this also might just me being a bit more familiar with what Gat’s talking about in these sections). Given the Orientalism that just about suffuses the book it’s not, exactly, surprising that Gat takes so much more care to characterize the Soviet Union as especially brutal and inhumane that he does Nazi Germany but it is, at least, interesting. And even the section of World War 2 is more worthwhile than the chapters on decolonization and democratic peace theory that follow it.
Fundamentally this is just a book better consumed secondhand, I think – there are some interesting points, but they do not come anywhere near justifying slogging through the whole thing.
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bc of a stoners guide to starbucks im so obsessed w getting an email to rate my uni starbucks 😭😭i just realized i finally got a survey but missed the deadline bc it’s been 11 days
omg im so glad you’re enjoying a stoner’s guide to starbucks !! :’) although that is a sweet sentiment i DO have something i would like to address on that note
i’ve been meaning to say something about this for a while actually due to the very obvious setting of my smau, but i’d greatly appreciate if we can separate the fictional starbucks in my social media au from starbucks as a real life corporation ! anon btw i hope you don’t see this as a jab at you at all, i just want to put this out there in general for everyone who’s reading !!
if you don’t know already, more than 8000 palestinians in gaza have been killed by israel just this month. israel is a settler colony, which is a form of colonization that aims to replace the native population of the land they’re colonizing with their settlers. so palestine has been oppressed by israel for decades with the support of nations like the united states and the united kingdom
why im bringing this up is because three targeted boycotts are happening: starbucks (suing its union for posts about supporting palestine), mcdonald’s (donated free meals to israeli army), and disney+ (pledged $2m support for israel). so i please ask that you don’t support starbucks by buying food/drink from them or giving them high ratings ! the starbucks worker union itself is asking us to boycott starbucks and their stocks have been plummeting rn btw
also PLEASE do not harass people who work at starbucks or mcdonald’s. most people don’t support genocide but don’t have the financial capabilities to quit their current jobs, especially with the state the job market is at right now in america. plus the main reason why people are being asked to boycott starbucks is because starbucks union workers themselves were fired for standing with palestine
if you have any questions or would like further resources then lmk or look for informational threads online !! be careful about certain news outlets because there’s a LOT of pro israel propaganda going around
there is a lot going on in our world right now—several active genocides. it’s important we educate ourselves as the ones who have the privilege to not experience the fear and trauma that millions of palestinians are going through and have to live with. if you think that sharing posts and speaking up about it on social media is fruitless then do remember that israel has cut off palestine’s internet for a REASON so please use your privilege and your voice to speak up about palestine!
note that this post is specific to palestine, but there are genocides happening in several countries as we speak and NO big news outlets are covering the horrors. free palestine, free sudan, free congo, free armenia, free tigray
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My friend,
Please tell me what you are studying, for I greatly desire to study it too.
With many thanks,
A frustrated philosopher
I’m assuming you’re asking after seeing that Adorno post lol - I don’t wanna get too specific but my dissertation work is on fascist movements in north america! the first text I encountered that really made me want to study it (in addition to just like observing and experiencing what’s happening in the world, especially as a trans person lol) is The Authoritarian Personality by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford. I think it’s a pretty flawed text for a lot of reasons but it + some of Adorno’s other work are pretty formative for my research interests and understanding of the social world. I’m deeply indebted to it intellectually and it’s a landmark text in western studies on fascism (so it contains all the issues of western thought on fascism in general in addition to Adorno’s flaws and limitations as a thinker more specifically).
It’s a thousand pages long so if you wanted to read parts of it, I would recommend finding a pdf of the 2019 edition and reading Adorno’s critical reflections on the work written after it was published (it’s inserted as a preface in the 2019 edition) + the introductory chapter. The intro outlines the context and rationale for the study (basically: why did people support Nazi Germany, what motivates antisemitism in the modern day) and describes the methodology of the study. The methods section is incredibly interesting, the authors talk about how they go about collecting fascist sentiment from the public while basically deceiving their participants, since one of the methodological problems they (and prior research) run up against is that most people do not publicly and openly declare, even on anonymous surveys, their support for fascist governments, so you should instead measure their support for the underlying rhetoric and sentiment of fascist beliefs without explicitly telling people they’re being polled on how fascist they are (their unit of analysis is the potentially fascistic subject, not necessarily explicit fascists - they wanted to, in addition to outright fascists, measure potentiality for fascist support and were interested in people who might reject explicit fascist talking points but still agree with the underlying logics of fascist thought). The study is very heavily wedded to psychoanalysis, which I have a lot of problems with, but I think they capture something legitimate and real with their psychological framework. Part of Adorno’s defense of their psychological approach is that personality is the medium through which ideology gets expressed (essentially his claim is that you are your beliefs about the world, and that you become a different person when you believe different things, an argument I find basically compelling), so measuring personality ‘traits’ of a person will reveal their potentiality for fascist support, possibly even moreso than their publicly stated beliefs. Again I think generalising from this framework needs to have a lot of qualifications attached to it, but despite my many reservations with psychology I don’t think this is a totally illegitimate approach.
anyway lol going a bit long but I hope that answers your question !
#I haven’t done comps yet so not claiming any kind of expertise either. currently at the stage of doing a lot of reading#both for coursework and research#asks#the authoritarian personality#< I have a bunch of liveblog notes in that tag if you want to look through it as well#although I feel like I disagree with a bunch of what I said about it when I read it#or that like I’d frame my thoughts differently and problematise some of Adorno’s language more (eg his assertion that fascism is#inherently irrational - I don’t disagree with this per se but I think it lets western history off the hook for a lot of fascist thought)#book club
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addy. addy. can we get a rough summary of the results so far... this is going to make me curious!!!
HI!!!! OF COURSE!!! i've been having such a blast looking over these responses! it'd be selfish not to share some info with you all!!
i posted this survey on reddit as well, so i'm getting a lot of variety in the results! i have about 92 responses so far. if anyone wants to post this on twitter, discord, or any other social media, definitely do!! the bigger the sample size, the more accurate the results!
age seems to be very evenly spread across the 14 - 30+ range, funny enough. this one will be interesting to look into more once i have more responses, could make for some super interesting correlations.
vast majority of responses are from cis females (approximately 70% as of rn), however there have been absolutely zero cis males, meaning the remaining 30% of the respondents are trans, nonbinary, genderfluid, or prefer not to answer :)
majority of respondents are straight, however, there are also a lot of asexuals. like a lot. following that are the bisexuals and then aromantics. this is just from a quick glimpse, but it seems the straight/bisexual respondents trend towards ayn, the aromantic respondents trend towards cael (this one is actually very notable), the asexual respondents trend towards alkaid, and clarence and lars are wildcards and are a good mix of everything.
this is also besides the point but the small number of lesbian respondents are currently evenly split between both alkaid and clarence, haha.
north america, europe, and asia are the most reoccurring continents, so i'm not too surprised there. majority of respondents are white or asian. following these two are black respondents, and then those of hispanic, latino, or spanish origin.
alkaid is doing very well in the general character preferences section, and i regret not adding mc as a character as a few people put her in the "other" section! alkaid is also leading in the bias section, with ayn and cael trailing in second and third respectively. though, it is worth noting this section is evenly spread, with no major stand outs as of rn.
general route preference is heavily biased in favor of clarence's godheim route and alkaid's eden route! it also seems a large chunk of the respondents have not even played the eden routes yet, which makes for alkaid's second place status somewhat impressive.
when i held everyone as gunpoint to pick one (1) favorite route, clarence's godheim route is leading in first, with alkaid's eden route trailing in second. other routes of interest here are ayn's eden route and alkaid's godheim route.
world preferences are very evenly spread, though "whatever the hell is going on with cael's world" is leading by like, two right now HAHA
most people (approx 65%) use japanese voice acting, while the remaining 21% use the chinese voice acting (shout out to my fellow chinese voice acting girlies, the zhao lu pull is Too Strong), and 13% swap between both.
spending seems very split. half of us are free to play and half of us spend only a little on monthly passes or tiny purchases. a very small portion (7% or so) spend more than that.
and to finish this off, here are some of my favorite open ended responses so far. i will be posting official results with screenshots, correlations, and other fun stuff in a week or so hehe
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The crisis in American girlhood
Stark findings on the pervasive sadness, suicidal thoughts and sexual violence endured by teen girls have jolted parents and the wider public
By Donna St. George, Katherine Reynolds Lewis and Lindsey Bever
February 17, 2023
When Sophie Nystuen created a website for teens who had experienced trauma, her idea was to give them space to write about the hurt they couldn’t share. The Brookline, Mass., 16-year-old received posts about drug use and suicide. But a majority wrote about sexual violence.
These expressions of inner crisis are just a glint of the startling data reported by federal researchers this week. Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls said they had considered suicide, a 60 percent rise in the past decade. Nearly 14 percent had been forced to have sex. About 6 in 10 girls were so persistently sad or hopeless they stopped regular activities.
The new report represents nothing short of a crisis in American girlhood. The findings have ramifications for a generation of young women who have endured an extraordinary level of sadness and sexual violence — and present uncharted territory for the health advocates, teachers, counselors and parents who are trying to help them.
The data comes from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from a nationally representative sample of students in public and private high schools. “America’s teen girls are engulfed in a growing wave of sadness, violence and trauma,” the CDC said.
“It’s alarming,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said Thursday of the report. “But as a father of a 16-year-old and 19-year-old, I hear about it. It’s real. I think students know what’s going on. I think sometimes the adults are just now realizing how serious it is.”
But high school girls are speaking out, too, about stresses that started before the pandemic — growing up in a social media culture, with impossible beauty standards, online hate, academic pressure, economic difficulties, self doubt and sexual violence. The isolation and upheaval of covid made it tougher still.
‘Teens are really good at hiding it.’
When Caroline Zuba started cutting her arms in ninth grade, she felt trapped: by conflict at home, by the school work that felt increasingly meaningless, by the image her friends and teachers had of a bubbly, studious girl. Cutting replaced the emotional pain with a physical pain.
She confided in a trusted teacher, who brought in the school counselors and her mother. But Zuba’s depression worsened and, at age 15, she attempted suicide. That sparked the first of a series of hospitalizations over the summer and subsequent school.
Now a 17-year-old junior at a public high school in Potomac, Md., Zuba relies on therapy, medication, exercise and coping strategies. She started a mental health club at her high school to support classmates also struggling with depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts.
At the lowest point of her depression, she said, she kept many secrets from her friends, parents and teachers because she felt stuck in her role: a cheerful high achiever who had it all together.
“My mom’s like my best friend, and there’s no way she would have ever expected it,” Zuba said. “Teens are really good at hiding it, which is really sad.”
Internalizing conflict, stress and fear
While the teen mental health crisis was clear before the CDC report, the stark findings have jolted parents and the wider public.
“These are not normal numbers,” said Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy. “When you grow up with this, I think the risk is thinking, ‘Well, this is just how it is.’”
The reasons girls are in crisis are probably complex, and may vary by race, ethnicity, class and culture. Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd points out that “girls are more likely to respond to pain in the world by internalizing conflict and stress and fear, and boys are more likely to translate those feelings into anger and aggression,” masking their depression.
Weissbourd added that girls also are socialized not to be aggressive and that in a male-dominated culture girls can be gaslit into thinking there is something wrong with them when problems or conflicts arise. “They can be prone to blaming themselves,” he said.
Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and author of the book “iGen,” said that increases in most measures of poor mental health in the past decade were more pronounced for girls than boys.
She said part of the problem is that digital media has displaced the face-to-face time teens once had with friends, and that teens often don’t get enough sleep. Adding to those influences are the hours teens spend scrolling social media. For girls, she said, this often means “comparing your body and your life to others and feeling that you come up wanting.”
That’s not to say everything that people do on smartphones is problematic, Twenge said. “It’s just social media in general and internet use show the strongest correlations with depression,” she said.
Ben Handrich, a school counselor at South Salem High School in Salem, Ore., said teen girls often feel that “people are watching them — that no matter what they do, there’s this invisible audience judging their movements, their actions, the way they smile, the way they eat.”
Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist and author of “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers,” said it’s important to note that the CDC data was collected in the fall of 2021, a time when many teens were anxious about returning to in-person school and wearing masks.
“Teenagers were miserable,” Damour said. “It absolutely confirms what we were looking at clinically at that time. We don’t know what the next wave of data will tell us.”
Damour noted that the CDC findings are distressing because today’s teens, in many ways, are in better physical health and more risk-averse than most previous generations.
“We’re raising the best-behaved generation of teenagers on record,” said Damour. “They drive with seat belts, they smoke less, they have less sex, they wear helmets. They do all these things that we did not do.”
And yet they are in crisis.
Whistles and ‘gross comments’
Many girls across the country describe teen cultures of casual slut-shaming, of peers greeting girls with sexist slurs such as “whore” or “ho,” based on what they wear or how they look.
In Los Angeles, Elida Mejia Elias says it’s a no-win situation. “If you’re skinny, they judge you for being skinny and if you’re fat, they judge you for being fat,” explains the 18-year-old, a senior.
In ninth grade, a friend of Mejia Elias’s sent a naked picture of herself to a boy she was dating, at his urging, and he spread it around to his friends. “Everyone was talking bad about her. They were calling her names, like ‘ho,’” said Mejia Elias. “That affected her mental health. She needed to get therapy.”
In Maryland, at her Bethesda public high school, 14-year-old Tulip Kaya said that girls in her friend group hear whistles or “gross comments” about their breasts and are texted unsolicited penis pictures by boys at school. “If there’s anything slightly unique about you, you’re not going to have a fun time, and you will be targeted,” she said.
Social media can be overwhelming. “On Snapchat and TikTok, you see all these pretty girls with tiny waists and a big bottom. I know I’m only 14, but it makes me feel like there’s something wrong with myself,” Kaya said. “When I start to feel like that, I will delete the app for a little while.”
Girls interviewed by The Post expressed uncertainty and self-doubt over everything from what to wear, what to post or comment on social media, what it meant if someone wasn’t following them back on a social platform, and even in daily interactions. When in-person school resumed, during the fall of 2021 for many, routine encounters and moments felt weird after a year or more of separation from peers.
“Sometimes I don’t want to wear shorts because I don’t have the body type I had in middle school,” said Leilah Villegas, of Eastvale, Calif., who ran track before the pandemic. Now in 10th grade, she’s started running again, but her changed body brings pangs of self-consciousness.
Aanika Arjumand, 16, from Gaithersburg, Md., who sits on her county’s Domestic Violence Coordinating Council, said she was not surprised by the increases in sexual violence.
“We deal with a lot of cases on like teen dating violence and kind of informing schools about teen dating violence because the health curriculum right now basically does not cover abuse or sexual violence as much as it should,” she said.
School itself can sometimes be physically unsafe, as happened with Harker, a 13-year-old in Savannah, Ga., who spoke on the condition that her full name not be used because of the sensitivity of the issue.
At school, she received unwanted attention from a boy in sixth grade. He would whisper in her ears and grab her shoulders. Once, he seized her across her chest and did not release her until she screamed. A teacher was nearby, but she said the boy went unpunished and remained in her classes. The teen has resorted to learning at home.
“They didn’t believe me even though there were witnesses,” she said. “A boy in school can get away with something, but if I do one mess-up, I get called out for it.
Unrealistic beauty standards and financial pressure
At the Bronx High School of Science in New York, 17-year-old Najiha Uddin talks about a White beauty standard perpetuated in mainstream and social media, which she says girls of color can’t possibly meet. She and others describe status-oriented peers and media messages about shoes, clothes, styles and experiences that outstrip their families’ means.
For Montanna Norman, 18, a senior at a private high school in Washington during the fall of 2021, the killing of unarmed Black men by police was foremost in her mind after the murder of George Floyd. At the time she was the co-leader of her school’s Black Student Union. “The toll that that took on my mental health was a lot,” she said.
Some of her friends have contemplated, or attempted, suicide, Norman said. “You wish you could do more to help,” she said.
Garvey Mortley, a 14-year-old in Bethesda, Md., who is Black, said she has been teased because of her hair and still feels microaggressions. “Racism can be a stressor for depression or a cause of depression because of the bullying that happens, not just Black kids but Asian kids and Hispanic kids who feel they are unwanted,” she said.
Students who are LGBTQ face some of the highest rates of depressive symptoms and sexual violence, including rape. In 2021, nearly 1 in 4 reported an attempt to take their life.
Rivka Vizcardo-Lichter, a student activist in Virginia, pointed out that high school is a time when many LGBTQ students are still figuring out who they are and solidifying their identity. “Even if you have an accepting environment around you, you are aware that there are millions of people who don’t want you to exist,” she said.
Waking up to a nightmare
Some of the most alarming data collected by the CDC involved the rise in suicidal thoughts among teen girls — 24 percent of teen girls have made a plan for suicide while 13 percent have attempted it, almost twice the rate for boys.
Rich and Trinna Walker, from New Albany, Ind., searched for a therapist for their 13-year-old daughter Ella but struggled to find one in the overloaded mental health-care system during the pandemic. Once Ella finally started treatment, however, her demeanor seemed to improve, they said.
“I really felt like she was doing so much better,” Trinna Walker said. Ella had been asking her dad how she could earn extra money to buy a birthday gift for her sister. She told her mom she wanted doughnuts for breakfast.
“Then we woke up to a nightmare the next morning,” Trinna said.
Ella died by suicide on Jan. 22, 2022. Her parents said they wish someone would have alerted them to the warning signs. Unknown to them, Ella was being bullied, and she was devastated by a breakup, they said.
Now the couple is urging teens to speak up when their peers are in trouble. “It was like a bomb going off,” Rich Walker said. “It’s like it mortally wounded my wife and me and Ella’s two older sisters, and then it reverberated outwardly to her friends.”
Listen to girls
Many of the girls interviewed for this story asked that adults listen to and believe girls, and stop dismissing their concerns as drama. “Adults don’t get all the pressure that teenage girls have to deal with, from appearance to the way they act to how smart they are, to the things they do,” said Villegas, the Eastvale 10th-grader. “It can be very overwhelming.”
Asma Tibta, a 10th-grader in Fairfax County, Va., said she is “close friends” with her mother but doesn’t talk about mental health at home. “I haven’t told her too much. And I don’t plan to.”
In Savannah, Harker took a break from playing “Roblox” with her friend to be interviewed. Before heading back to the game, she had one request: “I want adults to believe young girls.”
They covered every possible angle and factor, except one.
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Finland is world's happiest country for 7th year while US drops out of top 20 (France 24, March 20 2024)
"And Nordic countries kept their places among the 10 most cheerful, with Denmark, Iceland and Sweden trailing Finland.
Afghanistan, plagued by a humanitarian catastrophe since the Taliban regained control in 2020, stayed at the bottom of the 143 countries surveyed.
For the first time since the report was published more than a decade ago, the United States and Germany were not among the 20 happiest nations, coming in 23rd and 24th respectively.
In turn, Costa Rica and Kuwait entered the top 20 at 12 and 13.
The report noted the happiest countries no longer included any of the world's largest countries.
"In the top 10 countries only the Netherlands and Australia have populations over 15 million. In the whole of the top 20, only Canada and the UK have populations over 30 million."
The sharpest decline in happiness since 2006-10 was noted in Afghanistan, Lebanon and Jordan, while the Eastern European countries Serbia, Bulgaria and Latvia reported the biggest increases.
The happiness ranking is based on individuals' self-assessed evaluations of life satisfaction, as well as GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and corruption.
Jennifer De Paola, a happiness researcher at the University of Helsinki in Finland, told AFP that Finns' close connection to nature and healthy work-life balance were key contributors to their life satisfaction.
In addition, Finns may have a "more attainable understanding of what a successful life is", compared to for example the United States where success is often equated with financial gain, she said.
Finns' strong welfare society, trust in state authorities, low levels of corruption and free healthcare and education were also key.
"Finnish society is permeated by a sense of trust, freedom, and high level of autonomy," De Paola said.
This year's report also found that younger generations were happier than their older peers in most of the world's regions -- but not all.
In North America, Australia and New Zealand, happiness among groups under 30 has dropped dramatically since 2006-10, with older generations now happier than the young.
By contrast, in Central and Eastern Europe, happiness increased substantially at all ages during the same period, while in Western Europe people of all ages reported similar levels of happiness."
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Cereseto and Waitzkin analysed 10 quantitative indicators of human wellbeing for the year 1980, including life expectancy and the adult literacy rate. They found that at any given level of GDP per capita, socialist states tend to have superior outcomes to capitalist states. Similarly, in his detailed study of health indicators around the world, Navarro concluded that socialist countries generally had superior population health standards. Navarro noted that socialist China had much higher life expectancy than capitalist India, while Cuba outperformed the rest of Latin America. ‘This international survey shows that at least in the realm of underdevelopment, where hunger and malnutrition are part of the daily reality, socialism rather than capitalism is the form of organisation of production and distribution of goods and services that better responds to the immediate socioeconomic needs of the majority of these populations’.
Capitalist reforms and extreme poverty in China: unprecedented progress or income deflation?
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Published: Dec 7, 2023
On December 5th, for over five hours, lawmakers grilled the presidents of elite universities in a congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses. In one of the testiest exchanges a Republican congresswoman, Elise Stefanik, asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violates university rules. It is “context-dependent”, replied Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania. Clips of the exchange went viral on X, formerly Twitter. Yad Vashem, a Holocaust museum and research centre, issued a condemnation and stressed the importance of “raising awareness about the history of antisemitism and the Holocaust”.
A new poll from YouGov/The Economist suggests that Yad Vashem has its work cut out. Young Americans—or at least the subset of them who take part in surveys—appear to be remarkably ignorant about one of modern history’s greatest crimes. Some 20% of respondents aged 18-29 think that the Holocaust is a myth, compared with 8% of those aged 30-44 (see chart). An additional 30% of young Americans said they do not know whether the Holocaust is a myth. Many respondents espouse the canard that Jews wield too much power in America: young people are nearly five times more likely to think this than are those aged 65 and older (28% versus 6%).
Now for the harder part: why do some young Americans embrace such views? Perhaps surprisingly, education levels do not appear to be the culprit. In our poll, the proportion of respondents who believe that the Holocaust is a myth is similar across all levels of education.
Social media might play a role. According to a 2022 survey from the Pew Research Centre, Americans under 30 are about as likely to trust information on social media as they are to trust national news organisations. More recently Pew found that 32% of those aged 18-29 get their news from TikTok. Social-media sites are rife with conspiracy theories, and research has found strong associations between rates of social-media use and beliefs in such theories. In one recent survey by Generation Lab, a data-intelligence company, young adults who used TikTok were more likely to hold antisemitic beliefs.
Though young Americans’ views are most stark, antisemitism is rearing its head in other demographic groups. The same YouGov/The Economist poll found that 27% of black respondents and 19% of Hispanics believe that Jews have too much power in America, compared with 13% of white respondents who say so. Whatever the reasons, the polling is alarming.
==
To miquote George Santayana: "Those who think the past is a conspiracy theory are condemned to repeat it."
No wonder they're suddenly pro-al Qaeda and talk like actual Nazis.
#holocaust#holocaust denial#holocaust deniers#antisemitism#conspiracy theories#conspiracy theory#conspiracy theorists#misinformation#disinformation#history#religion is a mental illness
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Given the resources of the US, we could be at the top of this list. But due to a variety of historical factors, the US is not even among the world's most developed countries.
The Social Progress Index categorizes country performance into 5 tiers. Ranked at 29, the US languishes in tier 2:
"America is in decline" is a refrain on both right and left, and with this progress index there's evidence to substantiate it.
Disagreement exists of course on the causes and definitions of decline and progress, but it's worth noting how seldom measures of social well-being get mentioned in conservative political discourse or become the basis of public policy. Certainly this is the major component of why the US performs so poorly relative to its potential: One of the US's two major political parties and the social formations on which it's based is ideologically bound to traditionalist sociocultural values that generate lower levels of social development.
(For the research that links values to socioeconomic development, see World Values Survey.)
Religiosity, traditional values, family, flag patriotism, national pride, etc., - generate only marginal relevance to human well-being in terms of public policy.
This is one explanation anyway for the US's relatively poor performance on this well-being index.
America's history of racism also plays a large role, in that racist belief historically correlates with rejection of social policies that might benefit people of color.
The legacies of racism, religiosity and social conservatism are still extant in political belief and practice, with predictable results:
(Darker blue represents higher well-being scores, lighter green represents lower measured well-being.)
#social progress index#social measurement#well-being#country comparisons#state comparisons#u.s.#health#education#rights#environment
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Lingthusiasm Episode 74: Who questions the questions?
We use questions to ask people for information (who’s there?), but we can also use them to make a polite request (could you pass me that?), to confirm social understanding (what a game, eh), and for stylistic effect, such as ironic or rhetorical questions (who knows!).
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about questions! We talk about question intonations from the classic rising pitch? to the British downstep (not a dance move...yet), and their written correlates, such as omitting a question mark in order to show that a question is rhetorical or intensified. We also talk about grammatical strategies for forming questions, from the common (like question particles and tag questions in so many languages), to the labyrinthine history that brings us English’s very uncommon use of “do” in questions. Plus: the English-centrically-named wh-word questions (like who, what, where), why we could maybe call them kw-word questions instead (at least for Indo-European), and why we don’t need to stress out as much about asking “open” questions.
Read the transcript here.
Announcements:
Lingthusiasm turns 6 this month! We invite you to celebrate six years of linguistics enthusiasm with us by sharing the show - you can share a link to an episode you liked or just share your lingthusiasm generally. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, and lots of them don’t yet realise that they could have a fun linguistics chat in their ears every month (or eyes, all Lingthusiasm episodes have transcripts!). If you share Lingthusiasm on social media, tag us so we can reply, and if you share in private, we won’t know but you can feel a warm glow of satisfaction - or feel free to tell us about it on social media if you want to be thanked!
We’re also doing a listener survey for the first time! This is your chance to tell us about what you’re enjoying about Lingthusiasm so far, and what else we could be doing in the future - and your chance to suggest topics! It’s open until December 15, 2022. And we couldn’t resist the opportunity to add a few linguistic experiments in there as well, which we’ll be sharing the results of next year. We might even write up a paper about the survey one day, so we have ethics board approval from La Trobe University for this survey. Take the survey here!
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about a project that Gretchen did to read one paper for each of the 103 languages recorded in a recent paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia about child language acquisition. We talk about some of the specific papers that stood out to us, and what Gretchen hoped to achieve with her reading project.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 60+ other bonus episodes, as well as access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
Take our listener survey here!
‘British intonation: Meghan teaches us’ post from English Speech Services
‘Question–response sequences in conversation across ten languages: An introduction’ Editorial, Journal of Pragmatics
Wikipedia entry for question grammar in Modern Standard Chinese
WALS entry for Polar Questions
All Things Linguistic post on tag questions
Yale Grammatical Diversity Project English in North America entry on Canadian Eh
Liz Stokoe Twitter thread on open-ended questions
Lingthusiasm episode ‘Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta’
Confirmation or Elaboration: What Do Yes/No Declaratives Want? by Lucan M. Seuren & Mike Huiskes
Dariusz Galasiński blog post on open questions
Superlinguo post ‘New Publication: Questions and answers in Lamjung Yolmo’
Lingthusiasm episode ‘You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality’
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening. To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content, our Discord server, and other perks.
Lingthusiasm is on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.
Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
#linguistics#language#episodes#episode 74#lingthusiasm#questions#interrogatives#syntax#intonation#prosody#phonetics#pragmatics#conversation
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10 years of All Things Linguistic
I've officially been blogging on All Things Linguistic for ten years! This boggles my mind so much that I decided to also write a whole decade in review post for tomorrow, but let's start with looking back at some of my favourite posts and other things that happened in the past year:
Projects
I started a new project to read one paper per language of the 103 languages reported in a recent paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia surveying the languages represented in the four main child language acquisition journals.
Peeking face, palm up, and palm down - the emoji I proposed with Lauren Gawne and Jennifer Daniel are now officially in Unicode 14.0 and will be coming to your devices in the next few years!
Now that Because Internet has been out for two years, I can attest that people have successfully used it as a way of opening up cross-generational conversations about changing texting norms.
I set up a survey for anyone who's been using Because Internet for teaching - put in what you've been doing and I'll compile and share it with other instructors!
Interviews and talks
How Linguistics Can Help You Learn a Language - talk for Duolingo's DuoCon
I'm quoted in a New York Times Wordplay piece about ending texts with a period
Keynote at the Unicode Conference in San Francisco on "Taking Playfulness Seriously - When character sets are used in unexpected ways" (slides here, video here for similar talk at Bay Area NLP)
Keynote at Sotheby's Level Up in Los Angeles (not online)
Virtual talk for some internal folks at YouTube (not online)
Back-to-school virtual talks: The Internet is Making English Better at Yale with Claire Bowern and about Internet Linguistics and Memes as Internet Folklore with a student at the University of Oklahoma
Guest interview about internet language on That Word Chat, an online talk show for editors and word nerds
In conversation with Rosemary Mosco about her book, A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching at Argo Bookshop
Contestant on Webster's War of the Words, a virtual quiz show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House
Conferences and events
LSA 2022, the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (Washington DC but a last-minute pivot to virtual, judged the Five Minute Linguist competition again)
WorldCon in Washington DC
Dictionary Society of North America conference
the annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association
LingComm
The organizing committee of LingComm21, the International Conference on Linguistics Communication which I co-organized last year, wrote a six-part series on how we designed the conference last year, for anyone else who's been trying to figure out how to do virtual events that are actually social:
Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)
Designing online conferences for building community
Scheduling online conferences for building community
Hosting online conferences for building community
Budgeting online conferences or events
Planning accessible online conferences
I'm also very pleased to report that a new organizing committee is making the LingComm Conference happen again, in February 2023.
The LingComm Grants returned for 2022, giving out five $500 Project Grants and twelve $100 LingComm Startup Grants. These small grants to help fledgling linguistics communication projects get off the ground were sponsored by Lingthusiasm and several other generous contributors, and you can see the full list of grantees here.
Lingthusiasm
Lingthusiasm hit its fifth anniversary! I've officially been making a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics with my cohost Lauren Gawne and our linguistically enthusiastic team for five years now!
In addition to releasing our usual 12 main episodes and 12 bonus episodes, some Lingthusiasm things that happened this year included: a redesigned Lingthusiasm website (I wrote an incredibly long meta post about the website design process), a Lingthusiasm crossover appearance on the NPR show Ask Me Another (featuring two fun quiz segments, one on accepted or rejected emoji and one on famous book titles), and a Lingthusiasm liveshow, a sweary liveshow about swearing, on the Lingthusiasm Discord. Also, Lingthusiasm now has a LinkedIn page, in case that's somehow a thing you need in your life.
We also released new Lingthusiasm merch! You can now ask people which shape is kiki and which one is bouba from the comfort of your own scarf, tshirt, mug, and other items. And...did we do a whole episode on fricatives just so that we could release "what the fricative" merch? In the immortal sounds of another fricative: Shhhhhhh. Plus, we did a time-limited Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack special offer for people who support the podcast on Patreon.
Main episodes:
Making machines learn Fon and other African languages - Interview with Masakhane
A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip
Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Theory of Mind
That’s the kind of episode it’s – clitics
Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta
Cool things about scales and implicature
Where to get your English etymologies
Making speech visible with spectrograms
Knowledge is power, copulas are fun
Word order, we love
What it means for a language to be official
Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages
Bonus episodes:
Gotta test ‘em all – The linguistics of Pokemon names
Language under the influence
Sentient plants, proto-internet, and more lingfic about quirky communication
Q&A with Emily Gref from language museum Planet Word
Lingwiki and linguistics on Wikipedia
Linguistic 〰️✨ i l l u s i o n s ✨〰️
Linguistics puzzles for fun and olympiad glory
We interview each other! Seasons, word games, Unicode, and more
Emoji, Mongolian, and Multiocular O ꙮ - Dispatches from the Unicode Conference
Behind the scenes on how linguists come up with research topics
Approaching word games like a linguist – Interview with Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer of Spectacular Vernacular
What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫& Liveshow
Selected blog posts
Communication:
It's Complicated/Because Internet on why teens socialize online
Conversation, cooperation, and dementia (from superlinguo)
"old people really need to learn how to text"
The origin of language and interspecies communication
Reduplication Bread Bread
Tumblr graffiti
Languages:
The fight to save Hawaii sign language from extinction
A McGill student and professor realized they both speak Mi'kmaq; it changed everything
Pitch, intonation, and the role of technology in language description
On standard dialects
A list of the languages mentioned on Crash Course Linguistics
Pronouncing words in English (by Chinese speakers)
When your accent is better than your vocabulary
Linguist humour:
The kiki to bouba pipeline
Dinosaur Comics on the "I dunno" hum
Kawaii Desu Innit Bruv
ancient translation to badger
xkcd: neoteny recapitulated phylogeny
Experts in a Sci-Fi Fantasy Setting
General linguistics:
I asked people for their favourite fun fact about linguistics and ended up with a delightful thread of replies
Fictional Gestures
Greenmeats
Peanut cheese
Finnish pronouns
Stomach is the truest Sundial
Eeyore Linguistic Facts
The art and science of beatboxing
Beatboxing in IPA
Linguistic jobs:
Technical writer
CEO of a SaaS company
Impact Lead
Social media lead (for NASA)
Senior Analyst, Strategic Insights & Analytics
Academic linguist
Online Linguistics Teacher
Customer Success Manager
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How to write a successful pop linguistics book (an extremely long advice post)
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This is getting ridiculous!
September 25, 2023
ROBERT B. HUBBELL
Geez! This is getting ridiculous! Trump calls for the execution of the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and the Washington Post performs a botched poll that is so bad the Post acknowledges it is “an outlier.” Guess which one leads the news on Sunday? Hint: It is not the story that calls for the killing of a perceived political opponent by the leading candidate for the GOP 2024 nomination.
Let’s get the WaPo/ABC poll out of the way, first. The results were simply implausible. They were so bad that Post included this disclaimer:
[A]lthough the sizable margin of Trump’s lead in this survey is significantly at odds with other public polls that show the general election contest a virtual dead heat. The difference between this poll and others, as well as the unusual makeup of Trump’s and Biden’s coalitions in this survey, suggest it is probably an outlier.
If you were alarmed by the headlines about the WaPo/ABC poll, the most important thing you can do is read Simon Rosenberg’s post in Hopium Chronicles, The WaPo-ABC Poll Is A Clear Outlier. Dems Are Having A Very Good 2023. As Simon explains, the results are so wacky (my word, not his), the Post should have tossed the poll. But the Post spent the money on the poll, so it published a poll it did not believe. That makes perfect sense because . . . .?
It doesn’t make sense. If there is anything good to come out of the WaPo/ABC poll, it seals the case that presidential “horse-race” polling is irretrievably broken, counterproductive, and misleading. And yet in the dozen articles I read about the poll on Sunday, all of them treated the poll as a legitimate exercise in polling. It is not. Indeed, the notion that multiple news organizations are conducting presidential horse-race polls more than a year before the election is a sign that they view politics as entertainment—just like sports scores, the daily horoscope, and advice columns. Pathetic.
Folks, they are trying to mess with our heads. Don’t let them. Reject their infotaintmentization of politics. Ignore the polls. If you can’t ignore the polls, tell irresponsible media outlets what you think by posting comments on offending articles, write letters to the editor, and send emails to the journalists. Ignoring the polls is a reasonable approach to preserving your sanity. But ignoring the polls may give outlets a “free pass” on their irresponsible journalism. The Post’s poll is going to be added to Five-Thirty-Eight.com’s aggregation of polls and will affect the narrative of Biden’s prospects for winning. That is why it is irresponsible and dangerous for news outlets to conduct meaningless and misleading polls.
The 2024 presidential election features two candidates who are surrogates for different visions of America: Democracy versus autocracy; liberty versus tyranny; dignity versus bigotry; science versus disinformation; personal autonomy versus subservience to Christian nationalism; sustainability versus ecological disaster; safety versus gun violence; global stability versus confrontational isolationism. All of that—and much more—is on the ballot in 2024. The WaPo/ABC “horse-race” poll captures none of that.
Turning to the real story that should be the only thing any media outlet is discussing is Trump's not-so-veiled threat to execute General Mark Milley. As usual, Trump made the threat on his vanity social media platform and used oblique references to provide deniability that he made the threat. Trump's use of Mafia-style threats is so common that the comparison is becoming stale, but it is the equivalent of mobsters telling a small business owner, “Nice place you got here; it would be a shame if it burned down.”
In the waning days of the Trump administration, the US intercepted intelligence indicating that the Chinese government believed the US might attack China. In military-to-military talks that are commonplace to avoid accidental conflicts, General Milley assured his counterpart in the Chinese military that the US was not planning to attack China.
Per the book Peril by Bob Woodward and Bob Costa, Milley said the following during the call with his counterpart:
General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable, and everything is going to be okay. We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you. General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise . . . If there was a war or some kind of kinetic action between the United States and China, there’s going to be a buildup, just like there has been always in history.
That call was approved in advance by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. Trump now claims that effort at “deconfliction amounted to treason. Trump wrote:
This guy turned out to be a Woke train wreck who, if the Fake News reporting is correct, was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States. This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!
See The Independent, Trump suggests Mark Milley should be executed in possible breach of pre-trial release conditions.
There are two problems with Trump's statement: It is a veiled threat on the life of General Milley and it violates his pretrial release in the two felony prosecutions in DC and Florida.
For those who believe I am engaging in hyperbole regarding Trump's threat against the life of General Milley, recall what happened in response to this Tweet:
Big protest in D.C. on January 6th! Be there, will be wild!
Trump has a feral instinct for urging his followers to action without directly telling them to do so. As his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, testified to Congress,
[H]e doesn’t give you orders. He speaks in a code.
The response of the media—thus far—has been a collective yawn. Their listless response is due in part to Trump's exhaustive, daily threats against foes (real and imagined) that normalize his incendiary rhetoric to the point of background noise. It is not—as his January 6 incitement reminds us. The political press should be talking of nothing else until Republicans condemn and disavow the first major party presidential candidate to threaten a senior military officer with death.
Recognizing that the media would rather cover a botched poll than a death threat, another avenue of accountability is for either Judge Chutkan or Cannon to revoke Trump's pretrial release or impose a gag order on him. Yes, a gag order. Trump is already the subject of a motion by the prosecution in the January 6 prosecution to refrain from intimidating witnesses. As the government said in its brief:
“The defendant continues these attacks on individuals precisely because he knows that in doing so, he is able to roil the public and marshal and prompt his supporters.”
Trump obviously doesn’t care; he never has. He has crossed a line—another one. It is time for federal judges charged with the responsibility of protecting witnesses and jurors to act. Before it is too late.
#TFG#Robert B. Hubbell#Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter#Mark Milley#polls#false polling data#election 2024
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Donald Trump is a very violent man. He is the leader of an increasingly violent political movement.
Last week, Trump threatened Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley with death. Trump's death threat is part of a much larger pattern where he has made similar threats, directly or implied, against President Biden, Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Special Counsel Jack Smith, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and his other "enemies."
Trump's MAGA cultists have been radicalized by him. Several MAGA people have gone so far as to have attempted or publicly threatened to assassinate President Obama and President Biden, respectively. And of course, Trump's followers launched a lethal attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 as part of the ex-president and dictator in waiting's coup attempt.
Trump and his allies and other spokespeople and influentials in the Republican fascist party and larger neofascist movement and white right are at the epicenter of a social environment in America were hate crimes and other political violence against Black and brown people, the LGBTQI community, Muslims, Jews, and other targeted groups is at historic levels.
New research by Rachel Kleinfeld, who is Senior Fellow, Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, provides much-needed insight(s) into the growing danger(s) that political violence and polarization poses to American democracy and the future of the country. In this conversation, Kleinfeld provides context for the relationship between extremism, polarization and violence in America. She also explains why right-wing political violence is a much greater threat to the country than political violence by "the left". Kleinfeld highlights the news media's continued failure(s) to understand the realities of the country's democracy crisis in the Age of Trump.
At the end of this conversation, Kleinfeld warns that whatever the outcome of the 2024 Election, that America's democracy crisis is likely to get worse not better.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
How are you feeling given the state of American politics and society and the country's democracy crisis and other great troubles?
I'm feeling sad. I want to give my daughters – and other kids – a better country than the one I grew up in. I don't feel like we are doing that, and I want all of us adults to start acting like adults and to do better.
What are you "seeing" as you survey American politics and society right now? What gives you the most concern?
Americans remain rhetorically attached to democracy, but when you ask them what they mean, large majorities are quick to give up basic rights, oversight, and even non-violence when their side holds power. And the idea of a loyal opposition is disintegrating. I'm deeply concerned by that impulse towards unchecked majoritarianism, and also worried about hypocritical alterations of those feelings when the other side is in power.
What are some of the blind spots, misconceptions, and outright ignorance that the mainstream media, the political class, and everyday Americans have about the realities of political violence in this country?
People seem to underestimate how much political violence has risen, and how lopsided it is. There are vastly more incidents on the right, and they are targeting people. That is the major political violence problem faced by the country. That said, on the left, too many partisans are loathe to acknowledge that their side's violence, though largely against property, has also doubled since 2016. It has just grown from a much lower point.
I get constant calls from reporters asking if Donald Trump is going to start another January 6 style riot – and when I speak about political violence, my mail fills with people asking why I don't speak more about the overwhelmingly (but not entirely) peaceful Black Lives Matter protests.
But Trump is not currently able to draw out large crowds – his followers are afraid of the FBI and believe people who goad them to violence on list serves are false flag operations. Instead, we are seeing people kill neighbors over politics or murder business owners who display a pride flag. In other countries, when someone runs a car into a peaceful crowd, it's almost always a rare international terrorist event. In America, that has happened over 150 times since Heather Heyer was killed at the Unite the Right rally. Political violence and credible threats have become small scale, hyperlocal, across the nation, and extremely frequent
Premeditated political violence against people has skyrocketed on the right, and premeditated political violence on the left has also grown - though from a much lower point, and more often targeting property. Hate crimes are at their highest point in the 21st century, even higher than the spike after 9/11. Local officials who were barely targeted before are now receiving significant numbers of threats – in San Diego, 75% of county officials report threats or harassment, for instance. Threats against Members of Congress rose tenfold from 2016 to 2021, though they fell slightly last year. In the 1960s and 1970s we faced high levels of political violence, but it was largely against property, or involved foreign terrorists. We haven't seen Americans targeting other Americans politically like this since Confederates reversed Reconstruction and used violence and threats to return to power after the Civil War.
The news media and the political class tend to have a crisis frame that is very immediate and focused on the now. What would the news media – and by extension the political class and public — better understand and see in terms of political polarization and violence if they had a longer view and more time to digest what is happening or not?
America has faced political violence at many points in its history. It is usually used as a method alongside elections to try to win power by intimidating people. That is how it was used by the Know Nothing Party in the early 1800s, by Confederates after Reconstruction, and by Southern Democrats under Jim Crow to maintain single party dominance in eleven Southern States.
Right now, the threat of violence is being used to destroy pro-democracy Republicans and allow a non-majority faction to take over the Republican Party. While there are more threats overall against Democratic constituencies, women, and minorities, those threats are a spill-over from attempts to build Republican base intensity through highlighting a white Christian male dominant identity. The targeted threats are occurring largely to win power and are often targeted very intentionally – against certain election officials who will matter in swing states, or against the judges and DAs involved in cases against former President Trump.
The spike in violence is helping an anti-democratic faction of the Republican Party overcome a pro-democratic faction. The media framing violence as largely about Republicans versus Democrats misses that crucial part of the story.
What does the actual data tell us about political violence and extremism in the Age of Trump and where we are potentially going as a country?
Political violence and criminal violence are highly connected.
The best study of murder in America back to our Revolution found that the strongest variables predicting a rise in the murder rate was trust in fellow Americans and trust in government – especially among young men (the demographic that commits most violence everywhere). In the 1960s when political violence rose, America also saw a doubling of the murder rate, and homicide kept rising until the 1990s. When people normalize violence and lesser forms of anti-social behavior, such as Lauren Boebert's obnoxious vaping and groping at a theater, oafishness on airplanes, or "rolling coal" – blowing car exhaust in the faces of bicyclists – it reduces the sense of social propriety and impulse control. Society and civilization are actually very fragile things – as anti-social behavior gets normalized and people "let it all hang out", as it were, all forms of violence tend to rise. We are probably on the verge of that again, and this MAGA political faction and left-wing illiberalism pushing people towards it will be to blame for the deaths and dystopian cities we are going to have for the next few decades.
When I write articles or interview experts who are trying to sound the alarm about right-wing political violence by Trump followers and other such malign actors, one of the common responses in emails and comments is that this is all so much hysterics. The MAGA movement threat is exaggerated. These right-wing extremists and others who are violent are being put in jail. The danger is also so much talk as there won't be a second civil war, etc. How would you intervene and push back?
I just provide the numbers. It's not that these levels of political violence are unprecedented – America is an unusually violent democracy compared to countries with similar levels of wealth and democratic history. The United States has seen violence at these levels before. But New York in the 1970s, or the post-Reconstruction South which had a lynching every 36 hours at its height, would not be the periods of our past I most want our country to revisit.
Is the American public "polarized" or are they "sorted"? That distinction is very important.
American politicians are highly ideologically polarized – members of Congress now hold virtually no policy beliefs in common across the aisle. Regular Americans, on the other hand, are not very ideologically polarized – they hold a lot of policy beliefs in common, although Republicans and Democrats care more intensely about different issues. But regular Americans do really dislike partisans from the other party – which is known as affective, or emotional, polarization. That level of affective polarization is likely to be caused, at least partially, because we are highly sorted as a country. When multiple identity characteristics, such as religiosity, geography, gender, and race, are the same for members of the same party, it is easier to feel that any of one's many identities are threatened by members of the other party, and when people are geographically separated so that they don't socialize, those misunderstandings get even larger. However, sorting alone just sets the kindling - politicians are lighting the flames by using that latent affective polarization to further inflame sentiment, in order to use that voter intensity to win power. So, it is unlikely to be possible to reduce Americans' polarization until we change the incentives that are allowing politicians to win seats by furthering polarization.
Most journalists and reporters assume that the public follows politics closely, is ideological, and has a real understanding of the details and facts. Decades of political science research shows that mostly to not be true. Unfortunately, the mainstream media, for a variety of reasons including intellectual laziness and careerism, is clinging desperately onto those fictions of folk democracy even when the evidence is abundant and obvious to the contrary. This translates into a news media that still does not fully appreciate — and is in willful denial about — the realities and the depths of the country's democracy crisis in this moment of ascendant neofascism and illiberalism.
Americans share a large number of policy beliefs in common. But they also, by and large, really, really don't care about politics. They don't want to think about politics, they don't want to talk about politics, they want it all to go away. That means that Americans also hold a very tenuous understanding of the basics of what it takes to maintain a democracy – such as the importance of a free press, or the role of a civil service. In America, as in many countries where democracy has slipped away in recent years, we see significant pluralities willing to support anti-democratic behavior when their party is in power. Fear of the other side doing just that is one of the main forces that empowers a party to act first to undermine democracy in order to, in their minds, prevent the other side from doing it first.
Is "consensus" and "bipartisanship" across lines of political difference just a type of fetish for the political class and news media? The public generally does not care.
I have my own strong policy beliefs – but I understand that as a country, we have about half the voting population who are conservative, and about half who are more liberal. Both sides need politicians who can represent them in a pro-democratic way, where we disagree on policy, not on whether we will allow the system of peacefully settling our disputes to disintegrate. Liberals need to give some support to pro-democracy Republicans or both will be overrun by the anti-democracy faction that is gaining control over that party. Liberals should also pay more attention to how their own illiberal wing in cultural and academic institutions is driving more conservatives, independents, and minorities to support their own anti-democratic faction. The problem in the political realm is clearly a faction of the Republican Party – but it has not grown on its own, there is a call and response with cultural forces on the left.
What are some interventions that can be made to make the country's political institutions and culture more durable and healthier in the face of the type of extreme polarization – which is asymmetrical and more on the right— that we are now seeing in the Age of Trump and the decades that got us to this crisis?
America should give serious thought to voting reforms that would allow the anti-democratic faction to have representation without letting them take over one of our two major parties. Proportional representation is the best way to achieve that, though ranked choice voting and primary reform might be less radical and cause fewer governing headaches. Both would likely allow MAGA Republicans to have control in some states and localities (which, of course, they do now), while still allowing the majority of Republicans to support a pro-democracy party. Campaign finance reforms that empower small dollar donors also empower extremists, who are better at raising anger that gets those small dollar donations flowing. Big money in politics is also problematic, of course, but the problem of small dollar donors pushing our politics towards extremes has not been recognized or discussed. Finally, we need better anti-trust enforcement to break business monopolies. Part of the distrust in America since 2008 has as much to do with the way elites keep making money, and is economic as much as political in origin. There is a reason Aristotle and Jefferson both recognized the dangers to democracy of large concentrations of wealth.
As Trump's criminal trials and the 2024 Election approach, how do you think that will impact the dynamics of violence and polarization?
There is no good way out of the 2024 Election. No matter how the election turns out, it will harm faith in democracy – but the worst future damage is likely to be inflicted if Trump wins and takes power, given the signals he has already given about how he will misuse his department of justice against his enemies, attack the civil service, and otherwise damage the institutions that keep our democracy tethered to the rule of law.
#“Highly connected”: How the right's political violence relates to a rise in criminal violence#white nationalism#white supremacy#white hate#american hate#homegrown terrorism#maga#trumpers
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