Category Archives: Uncategorized

articles on women legislators

Posted on by

women-113-congress
How Women Leg­is­la­tors Help States Become More Sup­port­ive Of Older Cit­i­zens by Joanne Con­nor Green and Charles Lock­hart at The Soci­ety Pages

A stronger pres­ence of women in state leg­is­la­tures turns out to be good for older men and women. Just as female leg­is­la­tors weigh in on behalf of meet­ing the needs of fam­i­lies with chil­dren, they also appear more likely than male leg­is­la­tors to fur­ther poli­cies that make a real dif­fer­ence in med­ical care and com­mu­nity sup­port for senior res­i­dents. As the United States moves deeper into an era where sup­port and care for older peo­ple will be an ever more cen­tral con­cern in soci­ety and pub­lic pol­icy, the grow­ing pres­ence of elected female leg­is­la­tors will almost cer­tainly help the United States face these issues and find family-​friendly solu­tions. Toward the end of life as well as at its begin­ning and dur­ing the mid­dle, women in office seem sen­si­tive to the prac­ti­cal con­cerns of fam­i­lies and indi­vid­u­als in need of sup­port. Across Amer­ica, the states whose vot­ers more often send women to serve in their leg­is­la­tures are there­fore likely to be the states best pre­pared to meet the grow­ing chal­lenges of an aging population.

We Need More Women in Leg­is­la­tures World­wide, Period by Rose­marie Clous­ton at the George­town Pub­lic Pol­icy Review

… Ester Duflo and her col­leagues have shown that in a ran­dom­ized sit­u­a­tion in India where women were put in charge of local gov­ern­ing coun­cils, these bod­ies invested more in pub­lic ser­vices pri­or­i­tized by women (e.g., drink­ing water) than when men were in charge. They also found that in areas with female coun­cil heads, teenage girls had greater career aspi­ra­tions for them­selves than girls liv­ing in areas with coun­cils headed by men. Not only does it appear that women deliver poli­cies for women but they may also polit­i­cally empower their gen­der, par­tic­u­larly in future gen­er­a­tions, so the impact may not be imme­di­ately evi­dent in many stud­ies. Researchers at the Uni­ver­sity of Notre Dame have stud­ied this rela­tion­ship between female leg­is­la­tors and polit­i­cal activ­ity across devel­oped democ­ra­cies and found that women and girls are “more likely to dis­cuss pol­i­tics, and younger women [antic­i­pate becom­ing] more polit­i­cally active [in adult­hood] when there are more women in parliament.”

Facts about women leg­is­la­tors in the U.S. at The National Foun­da­tion for Women Legislators

free download: the debunking handbook

Posted on by

From Skep­ti­cal Sci­ence

The Debunk­ing Hand­book: now freely avail­able for download

Posted on 27 Novem­ber 2011 by John Cook, Stephan Lewandowsky
The Debunk­ing Hand­book, a guide to debunk­ing mis­in­for­ma­tion, is now freely avail­able to down­load. Although there is a great deal of psy­cho­log­i­cal research on mis­in­for­ma­tion, there’s no sum­mary of the lit­er­a­ture that offers prac­ti­cal guide­lines on the most effec­tive ways of reduc­ing the influ­ence of myths. The Debunk­ing Hand­book boils the research down into a short, sim­ple sum­mary, intended as a guide for com­mu­ni­ca­tors in all areas (not just cli­mate) who encounter misinformation.

authors

John Cook is the Cli­mate Change Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Fel­low for the Global Change Insti­tute at the Uni­ver­sity of Queens­land. He cre­ated and runs Skep­ti­cal Sci­ence and co-​authored the book Cli­mate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand with envi­ron­men­tal sci­en­tist Haydn Wash­ing­ton. In 2011, Skep­ti­cal Sci­ence won the Aus­tralian Museum Eureka Prize for the Advance­ment of Cli­mate Change Knowledge.

Pro­fes­sor Lewandowsky is an Aus­tralian Pro­fes­so­r­ial Fel­low and a cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­sity of West­ern Aus­tralia. He received a Dis­cov­ery Out­stand­ing Researcher Award from the Aus­tralian Research Coun­cil in 2011. His research exam­ines people’s mem­ory, deci­sion mak­ing, and knowl­edge struc­tures, with a par­tic­u­lar empha­sis on how peo­ple update infor­ma­tion in mem­ory. He has pub­lished over 120 schol­arly arti­cles, chap­ters, and books, includ­ing numer­ous papers on how peo­ple respond to misinformation.

tumblr post: So You Want to Be a Straight Ally…

Posted on by

Yuta_Onoda_illustrated_a_first_person_article_for_The_Progressive_by_a_woman_married_to_a_transgender_manillus­tra­tion by Yuta Onoda
So You Want to Be a Straight Ally… at Twisted Strings of Cyn­i­cism and Ide­al­ism

Are you a cis­gen­der het­ero­sex­ual per­son that detests the influ­ence het­ero­sex­ism and cis­sex­ism have on the world, and you want to do some­thing about it? Excel­lent – in that case, you should strive to become an ally.

On the whole, good allies are very help­ful aids in the fight against oppression.

Empha­sis, how­ever, on good allies. Unfor­tu­nately, too many allies out there are not very good allies at all (hence why many peo­ple within the queer com­mu­nity express resent­ment towards allies). These are often known as ‘faux allies’, and they come in sev­eral dif­fer­ent forms.

video and transcript: Disfluency by Adam Alter

Posted on by

unknown unknowns hell

DISFLUENCY
A Con­ver­sa­tion with Adam Alter at edge.org

…on the illu­sion of explana­tory depth, one of the appli­ca­tions there is in pol­i­tics. When you ask peo­ple how well they under­stand what dis­tin­guishes two can­di­dates, this par­tic­u­larly hap­pens when you’re deal­ing at the pri­mary level before the main elec­tion, you’ll find that peo­ple say, “I under­stand the dif­fer­ence between the can­di­dates pretty well.” They have this sense that they know the can­di­dates, they know a lit­tle bit about them, and when you ask, “Okay. Can you explain the dif­fer­ences between the can­di­dates to me,” that leads them to a point where they can’t do that. They’re sur­prised by how lit­tle they actu­ally know, and how lit­tle they know that will dis­tin­guish the can­di­dates. That’s inter­est­ing and I think quite impor­tant, because democ­racy rests on the idea that we’re able to express our pref­er­ences. If your pref­er­ences that you’re express­ing aren’t well grounded, and they don’t actu­ally rep­re­sent what you truly want, then the whole thing breaks down.

That’s true with a lot of polit­i­cal deci­sion mak­ing. Peo­ple get to the point where they’re absolutely sure about one can­di­date. The can­di­date rep­re­sents exactly what they want and what they hoped for, but when you press them, they actu­ally have no idea, and they end up mak­ing the deci­sion because the can­di­date looks more com­pe­tent — there’s a lot of research show­ing that — or the can­di­date looks more intel­li­gent, or he’s just more like­able, but those fea­tures don’t pre­dict pol­icy deci­sions nec­es­sar­ily, and so they end up mak­ing deci­sions based on the wrong sorts of information.

Socially, this is very impor­tant as well. When you feel dis­flu­ency, it makes you feel a dis­tance from the tar­get. We’ve shown this effect with lawyers, that lawyers are just judged more harshly. We’ve shown the effect with politi­cians as well. If you say to some­one, “Here are two politi­cians. How would you judge these two,” you often find that you get more votes for hav­ing the sim­pler name. This might explain, to a large extent, prej­u­dice and stereo­typ­ing. A lot of what you find there is grounded in dis­flu­ency, that there’s a form of social dis­flu­ency when you feel that some­thing is for­eign, or dif­fer­ent, or unfa­mil­iar. When it’s harder to process or make sense of that per­son or that tar­get, you end up feel­ing more neg­a­tive about them, and that pre­dicts quite a few social dilem­mas, and some of the prej­u­dice could be grounded in the sense of dis­flu­ency, because it leads to a lower evaluation.

prison labor as slavery

Posted on by

14

Prison Labor as Mod­ern Day Slav­ery by Lisa Wade, PhD at Soci­o­log­i­cal Images

Grad­u­ate stu­dent Christo­pher Petrella, cur­rently writ­ing a book called The Color of Cor­po­rate Cor­rec­tions, describes this as “mod­ern day slav­ery.” In short, the U.S. dis­pro­por­tion­ately impris­ons the same demo­graphic pop­u­la­tion that élite whites once enslaved. That pop­u­la­tion did work to enrich the elites. Today, in cor­rec­tional facil­i­ties, they con­tinue to enrich white elites. Their labor is low paid and invol­un­tary, by any mean­ing­ful def­i­n­i­tion of the word.

Trac­ing the racial­iz­ing logic of pri­vate pris­ons and the prison labor indus­try, Petrella finds that these prac­tices are dis­pro­por­tion­ately found in for­merly Con­fed­er­ate states…

When pris­on­ers are in state and fed­eral pris­ons, the U.S. tax­payer is sub­si­diz­ing low wages and cor­po­rate prof­its, since they are pay­ing for pris­on­ers’ room, board, and health care. When pris­on­ers are in pri­vate pris­ons, prison labor is a way to make more money off of the human beings caught in the cor­rec­tions indus­try. In other words, prison labor is an effi­cient way for cor­po­ra­tions to con­tinue to increase their prof­its with­out shar­ing those gains with their employees.

for a list of com­pa­nies that rely on prison labor see Prison Labor Exposed at the Prison Movement’s Weblog

Congress refuses to address White Supremist terrorist threat

Posted on by

SPLC-PATRIOT-MILITIA-_GRAPH

Con­gress Obsessed with Amer­i­can Mus­lims, Neglects real threat of White Suprema­cists by Juan Cole at Informed Consent

The shoot­ing of Kauf­man, Texas dis­trict attor­ney Mike McLel­land and his wife Cyn­thia remains a mys­tery. But inves­ti­ga­tors are increas­ingly look­ing into a cell of extrem­ist white ter­ror­ists as the sus­pects. Two months ago, a county assis­tant dis­trict attor­ney, Mark Hasse, was mur­dered not far from his office at the court. (I used the term extrem­ist white ter­ror­ists because that is what they are, but usu­ally the Amer­i­can press only describes for­eign­ers and Mus­lims as ter­ror­ists, while call­ing whites “extremists.”)…

…In the mean­time, Con­gress not only has held few or no hear­ings on the dan­ger of white ter­ror­ism, it has actu­ally pres­sured the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity not to pro­duce stud­ies on the phenomenon.