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samarajournal · 7 years

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Okay last time...

The thing that really bothers me with LP YouTubers rushing to defend Felix in poorly worded and misinformed responses is that they, along with a majority of their young fan base, do not know how successful activism really works. They do not know how social change is actually enacted, how civil rights has and is currently being fought for. But they are all quick to quote non violence, and everyone should love each other. Or that we should be nice to our oppressors and have a dialogue with them.

Let’s unpack that last notion right now. You see just from my personal experience, from my baby years of activism, if I talk to let’s say ten Trump supporters or KKK members, homophobic, or even biphobic individuals even if I talk calmly, politely providing specific examples with scholarly sources, I’ll be lucky if I get one individual to maybe sorta see my side of things. And even then there is no guarantee that they will actively work to dismantle that specific oppression system in the future. Why? Because ultimately, there is no incentive for the group at top of society (AKA white people, especially white straight cisgender males) to destroy a systems that supports and favors their survival and supremacy. If anything, dismantling this systems puts them at a disadvantage. To quote Jane Elloit:

“I was taught how to be racist at birth. I know how to be racist. I hate it.... I’m a racist. I was infected with racism at birth. I want to get over it. It us going to take me rest of my life to get over it, but I can do it, but I have to choose to do it.”

-Jane Elloit, Oprah Winfrey Show, 1992

The United States of America is a racist country. It was built, maintained, and thrived on racists actions and the oppression of a large portion of the population. And people that this country and the society was built for, white people, are taught and socialized to be racist. Racism, prejudice, and discrimination did not disappear with the Civil Right’s Act of 1965, the Stonewall Riots, or the election of former president Barack Obama. It hasn’t even really lessened, if anything hate crime has been on the rise since the 60s, it has only changed. I probably lost a lot of you in those last three sentences. You might feel angry, uncomfortable. Your probably writing sentences in your head to defend yourself. Good. Because confronting your inherent prejudice is not an easy task. Everyone is raised to develop biases, and we all have to fight every day of our lives to overcome them. You do that through your actions, constantly changing your mindsets, and constantly questioning every preconceived thought about people, society, cultures, ect. You will find fault in almost everything you see, you will begin to see stereotypes used in everything especially in the media, and in a lot of ways you won’t be able to guitlessly enjoy many of the things you use to.

Combating internal prejudices is a long, hard, and life long process. It is emotionally and mentally taxing, and you will be uncomfortable a number of times. Now back to my original point, acknowledging your privilege and prejudices is hard, and not everyone is frankly cut out for it. We as humans have evolved to actively avoid discomfort. So no matter how the message is delivered, people of a privileged class who have not have to think about their position and identity have absolutely no incentive or evolutionary drive to actually listen.

An even just on a logical basis, if a majority of people are so willing to listen and for their minds to be changed. If Nazis, Neo-Nazis, and KKKs (all of which have been on the rise let me remind you) were so open minded, then why haven’t they. Why wasn’t Trevor Noah able to convince Tomi Lahren that BLM is not a terrorist group? Or why Yassmin Abdel-Mageid wasn’t able to persuade Jacqui Lambie away from her support of DJT’s muslim ban or enlighten her on what sharia law actually is? Or why does the comment section of this MTV Decoded video looks like this? If it’s like being in a class with a teacher you don’t like. You might hate them or the way they teach, but you better learn and pay attention if you want to pass the class. It shouldn’t matter how the message is delivered if the message is true. You should want to be a better, decent human, and me or others yelling at your shouldn’t really dissuade you if that were the case.

And quite simply there is a PLETHORA of resources: literature, scholarly research, speeches, think pieces, books, poems, you name it; some of which I listed in this post and can be easily found with a google search. Activists travel to college campuses all the time. They is literally no reason for anyone to go up to any marginalized person and ask them to educate them. NONE. So by that logic, a majority of people should be enlighten. They should understand the ins and outs of systematic oppression. They should be ‘woke’. But they’re not. I wonder why? No I don’t, because they don’t want to listen. And quite frankly I don’t care.

I don’t care what you think of me. I don’t care if you think if I’m abomination, call me a n*gger, think I’m inferior, ratchet, ghetto. All I care about if you are in a position of power to enact policy to enforce your prejudices, how to remove you from that place of power, and how fast you can run cause you will be catching these hands if you say this to my face.

So this brings me, finally, to my main point. What works. What causes change. Well children, there are a number of strategies that you can partake in to enact social change. One of the most popular forms is non violent protest. Is the best method? That’s debatable and quite honestly I don’t think so in certian instances but I digress. Non violent process can be effective when use correctly and without stop. The main power, which even Gandhi, utilized is a concept known as backfire, which is pretty succinctly described in Justice Ignited by Brian Martin. He describes it as “ an action that recoils against its originators. In a backfire, the outcome is not just worse than anticipated — it is negative, namely worse than having done nothing” . In his book he cites both the Rodney King Beatings and the Dili masscare, the latter of which is described in that same page.

“Although Indonesian troops occupying East Timor had committed many massacres in the 15 years before 1991, they received limited attention due to censorship. The Dili massacre, unlike earlier killings, was witnessed by western journalists and recorded in photos and video, and later broadcast internationally... The Dili massacre, rather than discouraging opposition to Indonesian rule over East Timor, instead triggered a massive expansion in international support for East Timor’s independence.”

Corporations, groups, businesses, and governments all have one thing in common: their image is everything and when backfire happens that image in irrevocably damaged. When this happens they trust, capitol, support, MONEY, ect. The is the goal of protest, it is put people of power in positions where they are damned if the do and damned if they don’t. In this case the best case scenario is to give into the prostestors demand or risk looking and brutal. That is what Ganhdi did with is Salt March, which you can find detailed here.

It is what Martin Luther King Jr. did. Although for a time he try to change the hearts and minds of his oppressors, his main focus was uplifting his people, changing laws and policy, and making those laws were enforced. The Civil Rights Movements was the first instance of national civil unrest that was intentionally televised. The images of young Americans being hosed down, attacked by downs, killed, maimed, lynched seriously challenged America’s image as this morally superior, civilized country. And politicians knew it. And it was one of the majors factors that led to so many laws being changed during that era, and many of those unwillingly.

At the end of the day that is all we want. Minorities do not have time to worry about if our oppressors like us or see us as human. We know that answer. We know it all too well. We have bills to pay. Mouths to feed. And making sure our loved ones come home safe. ALL WE WANT IS EQUAL PROTECTION UNDER THE LAW AND THE DISMANTLE OF OPPRESSIVE SYSTEMS THROUGH POLICY CHANGE. That’s it. It would be nice if people saw me as a human being not in-spite of our differences but because of them. But at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. If at the end of day the person changing/writing the law is doing so begrudgingly and only because he doesn't want to seem racist, he is still doing it. And quite honestly, policy and law change is better done when the marganilazed are in power. History shows after law and policy in enacted the culture changes, for good or for worst.

Another strategy for social change is what ‘Punch a Nazi in the Face’basically does. It doesn’t have to be physical, but what this method entails is embarassing, blocking, and preventing problematic people from popularizing and enacting on their beliefs. I mentioned this before. But it is removing racists from political offices. It is making sure horrible people don’t have a platform to voice their opinions and gain support (looking at you CNN, Trevor Noah, and Bill Maher!). It is not fucking engaging them in debate! Basic human rights is not a topic up for debate. Inviting these prejudice ideologies to discourse is giving them the win. It grants them legitimacy. It tells them that you can disagree if people deserve to live or not. It is me saying ‘Climate change exists and their is a mountain of evidence to prove it’ and you saying ‘Well this person said that it was pretty cold last summer so....’. No! Sit down at the kids table and only come back when you have a substantial argument.

Basically this method is barring prejudicial people are not unafraid to voice their beliefs. It is dragging them on the internet. It is getting racists fired for racist Facebook posts. It is completely and utterly ignoring them when they scream at the top of their lungs for attention. It making sure that they suffer social consequences for voicing their problematic beliefs, jokes, supporting stereotypes. And yes, it is punching Nazis in the face. For now this strategm in conjunctions with others seems to be working.

This is far from a comprehensive review on how to enact social change. But at least it points anyone of interested in the right directions. And I hope that it convinces others that talking, peace, love, and happinees are techiniques for a perfect world, rarely works, and are naive. I hope people stop wasting their time on trying to convince people that are never going to listen or change. I hope you uplift and empower those or are marginalized and vulnerable, instead to trying to convince the powerful that we deserve rights. We know we deserve rights, and we are going to get them when-either you agree or not.

#activism #youtube #markiplier #jacksepticeye #pewdiepie #this will be the last time I talk about this #but I saw a lot of young misinformed fans and I thought I clear things up about social chnage #this concept is not simple and even in this it is over simplified #we do not fix social inequity by simply being nice to each other #Respect and civility are two different things #one is earned #the other should be given but it is not #especially to the marganalized

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trendingnewsb · 6 years

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Lessons from Montecito: Science’s Credibility Is At Stake

For applied scientists—that intrepid cadre who get their hands dirty in the sometimes dangerous world beyond the ivory tower, participating in difficult decisions with little time and major consequences—getting the right answer is only half the battle. The other half is successfully explaining what they’ve found, and what it means. This winter’s debris flows in the posh community of Montecito, California, which led to more than 20 deaths, provided examples of success and failure on both counts. And those successes and failures have ramifications far beyond managing geophysical risks.

WIRED OPINION

ABOUT

Sean W. Fleming is a geophysicist by training and author of Where the River Flows: Scientific Reflections on Earth’s Waterways. He runs a data analytics consultancy and holds positions at Oregon State University, the University of British Columbia, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Predicting debris flows—you might know them better as mudslides— is literally more difficult than rocket science, involving deep concepts in complexity theory like nonlinear feedbacks, fractal dynamics, and self-organized criticality.

A flood-landslide hybrid, debris flows are the most dangerous natural hazard you’ve probably never heard of. Yet they’re common in mountain regions worldwide, and the associated destruction can be spectacular: One night in 1999, debris flows on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast left 30,000 dead. And some landscape alterations, including wildfires, can increase their likelihood or severity. This is where Montecito's problems began. Spanning coastal mountains to the Pacific shore, and having endured the Thomas fire—the largest wildfire in California history—only one month earlier, experts saw a recipe for disaster.

Scientists and emergency managers accurately predicted the Montecito disaster and told folks living there to get out of the way. The experts absolutely nailed it, issuing evacuation notices for the precise locations where the debris flows later happened. This represented a huge success for applied scientists, getting the right answer to a very hard question and effectively communicating it to community leaders. In other ways, though, it all went horribly wrong: Many did not evacuate, increasing the death toll. Why?

It will take years to disentangle the complex web of cause and effect that culminated in this disturbing tragedy. Early media reports pointed (as they often do) to simple explanations: For example, mandatory evacuation apparently was only undertaken in steep headwater areas, with less compelling voluntary evacuation notices issued for flatter downstream locations where the debris flows, running out from the mountains, ultimately took their heaviest toll. This seems likely to have played some role in enlarging the scale of the disaster.

But an evacuation notice is an evacuation notice, and few instincts top survival. I suspect that if residents believed they were at mortal risk, they would have run. It then follows that they doubted the predictions of disaster, perhaps without even fully realizing it. To phrase this in the language of risk management and disaster psychology the decisions of individuals to comply with calls for evacuation are multifaceted and depend on the perceived credibility of the source of risk information. The choice by some Montecito residents in the voluntary evacuation zone to decline science-based advice may point to a more fundamental issue, with implications far beyond southern California.

To see these connections, consider that the credibility of scientists as a source of relevant information has always ebbed and flowed. Despite what prevailing views might indicate, skepticism of science isn't limited to some working-class folks who may not have embraced university-bred ideas on evolution and climate change. Rather, profound ambivalence about the intellectual and moral reliability of scientists has an old and refined pedigree—one that extends even to the residents of wealthy and highly educated places like, for instance, Montecito, and that could have played a quiet but powerful role in some of the decisions people made there.

Literature and film often record the promise offered by science (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, Jurassic Park). But a parallel, often highbrow, strand of literary and cinematic expression is deeply skeptical of the scientific enterprise and its impacts (Frankenstein, Dr. Strangelove, Neuromancer). The common thread is that science can be exciting, beautiful, and helpful, but also irresponsible, perverse, and destructive.

The artistic elite is not unique in the long-standing worry about what some scientists do behind closed doors without seeking the permission of society as a whole. Even giants of science and technology like Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking have raised the alarm about particular directions in artificial intelligence research, for example, and public suspicion of GMO foods remains as acute as ever.

This persistent image problem is exacerbated by public relations gaffes. For instance, exaggerated research claims and visible political affiliations compromise scientists' credibility as objective sources of accurate technical expertise.

Worse still, even the most earnest communication efforts often demonstrate, to paraphrase The Big Bang Theory, how dumb smart people can be. At a recent physics conference, I heard an outreach expert tell us how as scientists we need to “teach people how to think” (a classist and anti-democratic notion), that only science allows us to “process complex issues” (evidently, Hemingway, Rachmaninoff, and Picasso brought nothing to the table), and that a society’s degree of spirituality gauges its collective level of ignorance (effectively demanding that traditional peoples from Haida Gwaii to Tibet choose between indigenous culture and Western science).

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The WIRED Guide to Climate Change

Such prejudiced, tone-deaf, and increasingly strident megaphoning is echoed by some of the best-known STEM communicators. Even the recent and well-intentioned March for Science, wasn’t immune, where the sloganeering included t-shirts reading, “We are scientists. Ask us anything!” The organizers presumably thought this would be cute, and it sort of is, but it also reinforces the stereotype of scientists as obnoxious know-it-alls. That’s precisely the kind of image we shouldn’t put on public display—least of all when populism, a worldview that’s inherently skeptical of the integrity of experts, is taking hold across the entire political spectrum.

The lesson? The extent to which expert scientific advice is something on which the public is willing to base their lives is proportional to how positively scientists are viewed. People may not understand what’s happening in a particle accelerator, genetics lab, or climate supercomputing center, but they understand other people, and scientists are just other people. No one likes being told what to do by arrogant and prejudicial experts, and when people are treated this way they are likely to reject the messenger and our message. Conversely, everyone loves high achievers—in sports, business, and even science and engineering—who balance their confidence with demonstrations of humility and respect toward others. Put simply, it’s a popularity contest, and scientists aren't winning it right now.

Failure to understand this lesson, and to act thoughtfully and proactively on it, will incur incalculable costs. Our world faces a dark constellation of threats: overcrowding, dwindling resources, and collapsing ecosystem function, to name a few. The American tradition of profound scientific discovery, undertaken in a context of deeply individualistic liberal democracy, is our best hope. But the most brilliant technical performance is socially useless if the public doesn’t have enough faith in us to act on our recommendations. Credibility is a valuable and fragile thing. The penalty for losing it, as Montecito may help remind us, can be death.

WIRED Opinion publishes pieces written by outside contributors and represents a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here.

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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MUCH OF THE COUNTRY has spent the better part of the past year and a half trying to understand disenfranchised white America: its grudges, its prejudices, its feelings of having been wronged. The insularity of small-town life has always held a certain fascination for novelists, but these days novelistic attempts to understand, deconstruct, and empathize with the citizens of such a town also promise to shed light on the massive divide in our country between the urban and the rural, between those constantly seeking reinvention and those resolutely plodding along without change for generations. Who are the “white people” out there who feel so devastatingly left behind, who have become so susceptible to hating the Other? Nonfiction books such as J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy attempt to answer such questions directly, while other works of art, such as Susan Henderson’s second novel, The Flicker of Old Dreams, attempt to get inside such a world without the loaded controversy of contemporary politics. She takes the town and its residents on their own terms but leaves the reader with lingering questions that burn.

Set in the fictional town of Petroleum, and based on Winnett, Montana, where Henderson’s grandparents lived and where she spent a month alone doing research for the novel, The Flicker of Old Dreams is about, among other things, the improbability of finding hope amid decay. After the town “hero” (a teenage athlete, as is often the case in such towns) is killed in a grain elevator accident, the grain mill shuts down and a vast number of Petroleum’s residents lose their livelihoods overnight. Naturally, the town needs a villain on whom to blame their misfortune, a role that falls to Robert Golden, the 14-year-old brother of the deceased who inadvertently caused the accident. Petroleum’s cruelty to Robert, both at the time he loses his brother and decades later, when he returns to see his dying mother in the present-day frame of the novel, would be shocking if it weren’t so eerily familiar. Robert is the scapegoat for everything the town has lost, for everything that has passed it by. That he escaped and lives in Seattle (Seattle!) only confirms, in the locals’ eyes, every nefarious thing they’ve attributed to his character.

It is only Mary, the embalmer daughter of the town mortician and the story’s narrator, who sees Robert in a different light. Mary, who in a more urbane environment would likely have been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, was a small child when the accident occurred, and she was weaned on its mythologies like the rest of Petroleum. But in part because of her odd profession, Mary serves a role that every small town bestows upon someone: she is the weirdo, the freak, the girl whose affect is too “off” to allow her to fit in with either friends or suitors. So she relies mainly on her aging father for companionship before Robert’s return to town.

Instantly upon meeting him, Mary is drawn to Robert in ways she has not felt in her limited circle, but what is most skillful and interesting about Henderson’s portrayal of Mary’s blooming infatuation is that it is ultimately more about Mary than about the object of her affection. She once held artistic aspirations and planned to leave Petroleum for a different kind of life but ended up trapped, entrenched, and lonely by the age of 30. It is only Robert’s return that allows her to imagine that other possible scenarios might still exist for her beyond her father’s true but oppressive love and her safe but claustrophobic town.

It’s worth noting that The Flicker of Old Dreams does not concern itself much with pacing or the building of suspense. Though it has a romantic attraction at its center, the story is all about desire and not at all about consummation. As such, it may not be for those who want page-turning or edgy reading material. Henderson is a master stylist whose sentences are cut with razor-sharp precision, and what she is crafting here is an old-fashioned literary novel of longing versus obligations in the mold of writers such as Edith Wharton. She builds a world driven by character, by place, by the why more than by the what. She is also unafraid to put death center stage, exploring both its permanence (Mary’s mother died giving birth to her) and the private rebellions with which people attempt to outwit it.

Mary’s long-widowed father, for example, is having an affair with a married waitress. He’s trying to find some pockets of joy in his life now that he has traded the slick TV-commercial stardom of a decade prior for “oily hair, what’s left of it, the stained undershirt, the checkered pajama bottoms with rice stuck to them.” Yet it’s never occurred to him to push beyond his clandestine mutinies, and when he sees his daughter striking up a friendship with Robert he is protective and alarmed, not only because of Robert’s despised status but also, it becomes clear, because he is afraid Mary may also leave Petroleum — and him — behind.

The beauty of what Henderson pulls off here is how little the novel actually hinges on what happens to Mary. A novel of character and process rather than punch lines and clean resolutions, The Flicker of Old Dreams finds the revelatory in individual moments. “I don’t pretend to have any illusions,” Mary tells the reader early in the novel. “I know we’ll get along easiest when I see them on the embalming table.” The lovingly intimate details of Mary’s work are all the more captivating because every body that crosses her table is a person she has known all her life yet been set wholly apart from in her oddity. This mix of intimacy and distance is at the heart of the novel. Also at its heart, interestingly, is the supposition that fulfillment is less about “true love” with one person and more about the ability to dream, to move, to grow.

It has become virtually impossible to think of poor, rural whites in the United States without thinking of racial issues and the manifestation of these issues on the political stage. Yet Henderson has not written a novel to help anyone understand a Trump victory, and it is not about race. The Flicker of Old Dreams is a deep exploration of the way difference is treated in places with a conformist mentality and why scapegoats are essential in the face of devastating mass losses. That this town blames a 14-year-old boy for its misfortunes and essentially drives him into exile in the manner of some old-fashioned banishment is as revealing as it is cruel. These are ordinary people, “salt-of-the-earth” as the media likes to say, people with whom Mary’s well-intentioned father wishes she would fit in. And yet their mistreatment of a kid — a kid who has just lost his brother, no less — brutally illustrates how heartless the insular collective can be when seeking a target for their resentments.

Robert is white, and The Flicker of Old Dreams is a work of realism not allegory, but it’s hard to read this novel without hearing in it the constant echo of how downtrodden white Americans have come to blame immigrants and others they have never met for their troubles. Their troubles are real. They are not sociopaths or killers or “bad people.” Yet the way they treat Robert makes it impossible for the reader to want anything other than Mary’s escape. Do the townspeople have other options? Would it be possible to live in Petroleum and not lash out at Robert? Is it possible to lose everything, to feel oneself disappearing from the modern world, and blame no one? Of course. But is it common? Here, Henderson presents one of the hardest truths of human nature: we all tend to look for someone just a little lower in the power structure to kick.

Robert is the most intriguing and charismatic character in The Flicker of Old Dreams, and it can be a letdown to see him only through Mary’s sheltered and repressed lens, which is flattering but limited. A novel of Robert’s life and perspective would be a more sprawling, rollicking thing, just as Henderson’s debut novel Up from the Blue is a wilder kind of animal, full of arson and mental illness. Henderson’s achievement here is quieter but formidably deep. Though Mary is a memorable narrator and the reader cheers her on, in the end Henderson has crafted a novel that is as much about all the things not said as it is about the things on the page. The Flicker of Old Dreams is not only about art, family loyalty, infatuation, and the demons of the past, it’s also, intractably, unspokenly, about the United States’s horrible divide and the impossibility of healing some old wounds.

In Petroleum, a town left behind, there is kindness, there is forbidden love, there is community, but there is also a stubborn, proud cruelty in a loop of perpetual self-reinforcement: the only people around to bear witness to it are those who initiated it and feel justified in sustaining it. Mary can, ultimately, flee Petroleum if she chooses, and because she is not Robert, because her ostracism is more subtle, she may remember it fondly for all its broken beauty. For the Roberts of the world, however — for those on whom such ordinary, “good” people pin their shattered dreams — the town evokes an ugliness that echoes where we are as a country. Is the problem that the people of Petroleum are inherently prejudicial and mean? Or is it how similar towns all over the United States have become vulnerable enough to allow the spirit of the collective to hinge on a single grain elevator tragedy or one star high school athlete? Henderson does not answer such questions for the reader, but she presents them nakedly, subtly, there on the embalming table where, despite Mary’s clinical clarity, intimacy ultimately overrides our reductive binaries and easy judgments.

Chicago-based writer-editor Gina Frangello is the author of four books, and her work has been published in The Chicago Tribune, Best of the Midwest, Prairie Schooner, and others. She is faculty editor of The Coachella Review.

The post Small-Town Tragedy, Big-Time Resentments appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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duaneodavila · 6 years

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Florida Bar: Intimidate All You Want

The blind squirrel is alive and well in Florida, as the Bar Association gets one right.

A well-meaning attempt to strengthen protections against bullying in the legal profession may have gone too far, at least according to the Board of Governors.

This fall, the Rules Committee voted 7-0 to add guidance that subdivision (d)’s prohibition applies to “bullying and intimidating other lawyers,” in the comment to the Misconduct Rule (4-8.4). The proposal grew out of a recommendation by the Florida Bar Special Committee on Gender Bias.

Of course they have a special committee on gender bias, and what would you expect such a special committee to do? The rule they sought to change is 4-8.4(d), which makes it misconduct to:

(d) engage in conduct in connection with the practice of law that is prejudicial to the administration of justice, including to knowingly, or through callous indifference, disparage, humiliate, or discriminate against litigants, jurors, witnesses, court personnel, or other lawyers on any basis, including, but not limited to, on account of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, national origin, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, age, socioeconomic status, employment, or physical characteristic;

After all, what sort of horrible lawyer would discriminate against a litigant on the basis of socioeconomic status, like, oh, paying legal fees? Or disparaging litigants by calling them, you know, rapists or murderers? So horrifying. But hey, what about “bullying and intimidation”?

Banning “bullying” and “intimidation” in that context would put any lawyer who conducts an aggressive deposition or writes a strongly worded letter on behalf of a client at risk of formal disciplinary action, Tanner said.

“How many of you have defended a deposition and had your witness systematically dismembered by a very forceful, but very professional, deposition-taker on the other side? Is that intimidating? You bet it is,” Tanner said. “As sure as we sit here, somebody later will say, ‘Well I got that letter, I’m feeling very intimidated by it.’ And off we go.”

Intimidation, Tanner said, is often in the eye of the beholder.

Some might even say that intimidation is a valuable part of the lawyer’s arsenal, the ability to scare the living crap out of a witness, or a kid attorney, in order to achieve a client’s ends. Remember clients? Those are the people for whom we serve, whose lives and fortunes are placed in a lawyer’s hands and who depend on our using every lawful means available to zealously represent them.

If a witness can be intimidated into admitting a lie, that’s what we do. If our adversary can be intimidated into offering a better settlement, a better plea, that’s what we do. But what about bullying?

Board member Wayne Helsby, whose Winter Park firm specializes in labor and employment law, said “bullying” defies a clear-cut legal definition.

“I represent a number of school districts, and school districts have been grappling with this issue,” Helsby said. “It’s an ambiguous term.”

Board member Wayne Robinson said no attorney should be subject to disciplinary action for a conduct that “can’t be clearly defined.”

Bullies are bad. Everybody says so. Surely, no frail lawyer wants to be manhandled into the courthouse restroom and given a swirly, right? Except that’s not really the problem. While people use the word “bullying” all the time to refer to other people’s actions that make them feel badly, coerced, pushed into an uncomfortable position, is that bullying or is that just a lawyer using the word as a substitute for being weaker than his adversary?

Beverly Hills, Calif. attorney Richard Friedman, an out-of-state Bar member, sent the only written response to the board’s formal notice of the proposed rule change. Friedman urged the board not to adopt “Nanny rules to protect attorneys.”

“First, it is commonplace for good lawyers to assess the deficiencies of their legal opponent and to use that for the benefit of their clients,” Friedman wrote. “Secondly, any attorney who can be bullied or intimidated by another attorney should resign from the legal profession.”

And Friedman nails it, despite whatever the sad sacks of the bar claim between sobs and moans. If a lawyer can’t manage to handle an adversary who tries to “bully and intimidate” them, they have no business being a lawyer. Somebody was mean to you? Awww. You can either kick their butts across the room or ball up in the corner and cry about the mean lawyer.

Lawyers are fighters. Not necessarily as a personality type, but as a professional duty. If you’re not up to the fight, then there’s always that assistant manager job at Dairy Queen where your biggest issue will be whether a customer complains that you under-sprinkled his cone.

While the American Bar Association has been overtaken by the unduly emotional forces of social justice, the Florida Bar Association has refused to succumb to the current flavors available from Mr. Softie. For once, they got it right. At least for now.

H/T Skink

Copyright © 2007-2017 Simple Justice NY, LLC This feed is for personal, non-commercial and Newstex use only. The use of this feed anywhere else violates copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it means the page you are viewing infringes copyright. (Digital Fingerprint: 51981395c77d7762065ca2c084b63e47) Florida Bar: Intimidate All You Want republished via Simple Justice

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makingscipub · 7 years

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Digging for the roots of the deficit model

According to my twitter feed, the deficit model (also known as the knowledge or information deficit model of science communication or of public understanding of science) has been discussed yet again, this time during the 2017 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in the midst of current soul searching about facts, knowledge, expertise and communication.

Here is an example: “That notion, referred to as the ‘knowledge deficit hypothesis’ in academic circles, is problematic, Dr. Scheufele said. It bestows a sort of responsibility and expertise on those in the know to impart knowledge on those who are not, and ignores the fact that the lay public has anything to contribute to the conversation.” This covers one basic tenet of the deficit model; that focusing on imparting knowledge from A to B overlooks the fact that B may have some knowledge too.

Another tenet of the deficit model was summarised by “Asheley Landrum, a cognitive scientist at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania”. She “explained in a talk at the AAAS meeting… that ‘any public skepticism or negative attitudes toward science is due to the fact that people just don’t know enough and that if they only knew more, that they would accept it.’” This is the second tenet: that scientists assume that giving people knowledge makes them accept or support science and that providing more facts about science creates more positive attitudes to science.

This echoes an older, slightly more harshly worded definition (one of many I could quote since the model first appeared on the social science scene in the 1980s): “This model has emphasized the public’s inability to understand and appreciate the achievements of science—owing to prejudicial public hostility as well as to misrepresentation by the mass media—and adopted a linear, pedagogical and paternalistic view of communication to argue that the quantity and quality of the public communication of science should be improved.” (2008, Handbook of Science and Technology Studies)

A question of evidence

Since entering the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in around 2001, I have often heard about the deficit model and, in a sense, taken its tenets for granted. However, when reading yet again about it, I suddenly asked myself: Where does this ‘model’ actually come from? On what empirical basis was it ‘built’? Who is supposed to have held the views summarised by the model? How was this attribution made? There are now some empirical studies that seem to show that such views can be attributed to some scientists, but where are the studies on which the original deficit model was based 40 years ago?

When I first heard about the model, I remember a lot of finger-pointing and finger-wagging at the 1985 Royal Society Bodmer report and the year 2000 House of Lords report on public understanding of science and on science communication. So I assumed that somebody might have done an analysis of such reports and found that they contained or implied the main tenets of the deficit model, including ‘the public’s inability to understand and appreciate the achievements of science’, for example.

The Bodmer report

For this blog I have not done a comprehensive textual analysis of reports advocating that scientists talk more about what they do, but I had a quick look at the Bodmer report, as it appeared to be the ‘original sin’ of public understanding of science. To my surprise I couldn’t really find any explicit or implicit endorsement of the deficit model. Here are some quotes:

“More than ever, people need some understanding of science, whether they are involved in decision-making at a national or local level, in managing industrial companies, in skilled or semi-skilled employment, in voting as private citizens or in making a wide range of personal decisions. In publishing this report the Council hopes that it will highlight this need for an overall awareness of the nature of science and, more particularly, of the way that science and technology pervade modern life, and that it will generate both debate and decisions on how best they can be fostered.” (Italics added; it doesn’t say ‘content’ of science)

“Many personal decisions, for example about diet, vaccination, personal hygiene or safety at home and at work, would be helped by some understanding of the underlying science. Understanding includes not just the facts of science, but also the method and its limitations as well as an appreciation of the practical and social implications. A basic understanding of statistics including the nature of risks, uncertainty and variability, and an ability to assimilate numerical data are also an essential part of understanding science.” (italics added)

Importantly: “Better overall understanding of science would, in our view, significantly improve the quality of public decision-making, not because the ‘right’ decisions would then be made, but because decisions made in the light of an adequate understanding of the issues are likely to be better than decisions made in the absence of such understanding.” (bold in original)

What does that mean for scientists? The main gist of the report was that scientists have a moral (or civic) duty to communicate: “Given the importance of public understanding of science… scientists as a whole must recognize that they have a serious responsibility to speak to the lay public. Scientists are also democratically accountable to those who support scientific training and research through public taxation. If the public is not told about the scientific research it supports, it is unlikely to worry if the level of support is reduced. It is clearly a part of each scientist’s professional responsibility to promote the public understanding of science.”

So, one could say that engaging with people and enhancing people’s understanding of the nature and the methods of science is part of responsible research (and innovation) and integral to a functioning democracy. So where is the deficit model? As far as I can make out, there was no talk yet in 1985 of dialogue and engagement, but there was also no denigration of ‘the public’.

Postulating the deficit model

This made me curious and I started to read some of the old social science articles (again), in which the deficit model was discussed (some of which I couldn’t access, so I am grateful to twitter friends for sending them to me).

Let’s start with one of the earliest articles on the matter from 1988. It’s by Robin Millar and Brian Wynne and entitled Public understanding of science: From contents to processes. The authors briefly refer to the Bodmer report, but nothing is quoted from the report. Instead a passage from an unrelated book is quoted which provides a convenient bridge to then postulating a ‘deficit model’. The book is by J. H. Fremlin: Power Production: What are the Risks? (1985).

This is what Millar and Wynne say at the start of their article: “A conventional approach to the ‘public understanding’ problem (reflected, for example, in the Royal Society’s Report on The Public Understanding of Science (1985), and in much of the literature of risk perception) is that it is a problem of getting the public to understand the contents of science.” (italics added) As we have seen, this is not quite right.

The authors go on to say: “Fremlin (1985), for example, has lamented that: ‘It is an extraordinary feature of the long and healthy lives that we now enjoy, that we are worrying more about the dangers of the abundant energy supplies that have made their advantages possible, than we do about the enormously greater and potentially controllable hazards such as those arising from the ordinary things that we eat and drink and breathe. This is not due to public stupidity, but to ignorance fed with well-meant misinformation by ill-informed media avid for the frightening and the horrible. (Preface, p. x)’.” Interestingly, the Bodmer report had pointed out that scientists should interact more with the media in order to counteract such hype and that a change in culture was needed within the media.

Following on from this strategically chosen quote taken from Fremlin, the authors then posit the ‘deficit model’: “Thus, if only the public was properly informed and ‘understood’ science better people would have a more positive view of what scientists say and do, and this would be reflected in wider popular support (and more generous public funding).” I still hadn’t found the empirical foundations of the model though. Then I stumbled across some footnotes…

PUS meets STS

There is a footnote in a 1993 article by Wynne in which he points out that “[t]he deficit model was a name first given to the conventional approach by Wynne in a draft paper criticizing it, for a workshop in Lancaster in May 1988 of the Economic and Social Research Council- Science Policy Support Group research groups under the phase I Public Understanding of Science Research Initiative.” This was the origin of the STS movement, which saw as its main task the critical evaluation of the meaning and purpose of science communication and the public understanding of science (PUS) movement. Still I had not found the empirical foundations for this critique based on rejecting the ‘deficit model’.

This is when I saw a footnote in a 2008 chapter by Martin Bauer in which he said: “In the UK, the ESRC funded a research programme ‘public understanding of science’ from 1987-1990 … with 11 different projects. … I … recall how some members of the research programme were hardly on speaking terms. Curiously, the fault line fell on whether a team would use a numerical or a qualitative protocol for their observations. The later publication (Irwin & Wynne, 1996), that became the summary of this programme, ‘excluded’ the three projects with numerical data: the survey of the British adult population …, the survey of British children …, and the analysis of mass media reportage of science …”. Surprisingly, an overview of the quantitative survey research published in Nature in 1989 stated (tentatively) that informants who were better informed about science tended to have more positive attitudes.

John Ziman (physicist and humanist) spoke about the ESRC research programme at the launch of a new journal called Public Understanding of Science in 1990 – a journal that became the major outlet for social science research into public understanding of science and science communication. The article was published in 1991.

Ziman talks fondly of the Bodmer report, but then goes on to say that “it was surprising to us how very little serious research had been done on the subject. We did not even have reliable estimates of scale factors, such as what proportion of the public know how much about what sort of science, let alone an understanding of personal factors such as attitudes or of social influences such as education or the media. Thus the plan for a major program of research to follow upon the Bodmer Report was widely welcomed.”

He echoes the Bodmer report when he says: “It is quite clearly the responsibility of every scientifically literate person to combat the extreme ignorance of the most elementary scientific facts and theories that we find even among the best educated of our friends and colleagues. Every possible means should be taken to improve the transfer process in the science museum, in the schools, in the media, or wherever.” That sounds a bit ‘deficit model’ to me!

However, he meets up with STS concerns when he points out that “a simple deficit model, which tries to interpret the situation solely in terms of public ignorance or scientific illiteracy, does not provide an adequate analytical framework for many of the results of our research.” This probably means that in all that qualitative and quantitative research undertaken between 1987 and 1990, some results indicated that people have rather complex attitudes to science, or as Ziman said: “scientific knowledge is not received impersonally, as the product of disembodied expertise, but comes as part of life, among real people, with real interests, in a real world.” Still, I wondered where the deficit model fits into this, as it is not about people per se but only about particular people, namely scientists having rather paternalistic attitudes to people and to communication.

Nevertheless, members of the STS community set out to devise new analytical frameworks that challenged the postulated deficit model (here is some history and reflection by Alan Irwin). As pointed out by Maureen McNeill in 2013: “STS dissatisfactions with the PUS movement consolidated around the characterisation and critique of the deficit model of public understanding of science … [I]nformed by a few celebrated empirical studies, STS scholars articulated their dissatisfactions with the PUS movement by identifying the deficit model of public understanding of science as its conceptual/political core.”

One of the celebrated empirical studies was research carried out by Wynne with Cumbrian sheep farmers after the Chernobyl incident in 1986 and published in 1996. And yet, this still did not provide me with any indication of the empirical foundations for postulating the basic tenets of the deficit model at the end of the 1980s. So the search goes on! I might of course have overlooked something. So I would be grateful for guidance, advice and information by people who know much more about this than I do!

Bodmer revisited

I always believed that the Bodmer report was the trigger for people postulating the deficit model. As we have seen, this might not be the case. While I don’t doubt that an increasingly small number of scientists might see providing information from A to B as all there is to discharging what Bodmer called their public duty to communicate science, and while some might still believe that providing facts might lead to public acceptance of science, these two tenets of the deficit model where not integral to the original reports on public understanding of science and science communication. And while I don’t doubt that a critique of the postulated deficit model has brought about a useful rethinking of what public engagement with science and public communication about science are and should be, it should not be forgotten that some of this thinking is already contained in the original but often belittled reports.

It should also not be overlooked that, as Bodmer himself pointed out in a 2010 article defending his 1985 report, the social science research funded by the ESRC would never have got off the ground, if it hadn’t been for the Bodmer report calling for more engagement with the public on the part of scientists.

And finally, while overcoming the deficit model, wherever it came from, has led to new thinking about science communication and public understanding of science, it has also side-lined one (currently very) important function of science writing, science journalism and science communication, namely to provide access to information, knowledge, expertise and facts. As David Dickson has so memorably pointed out in his defence of the deficit model: “When engaging in an issue of science-related public controversy, both the science communicator and the science journalist in particular have a responsibility to ensure that any publicly-stated position is well grounded in the current state of scientific knowledge.” We should not forget that.

Image: Digging in the Dark, Wessex archaeology, Flickr

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