Some Preliminary Thoughts on Conscience and Biophilia

By Michael Bryan

Humans arguably have a genetically determined capacity to empathize to some degree, to consider themselves from the viewpoint of another, and to imaginatively place themselves in the viewpoint of another. Together with our prosocial nature, these capacities are called conscience and underpin ethics, much of religion’s moral precepts, politics, law, and human social life.

While we have a psychological basis in the brain for such feelings and intuitions, our culture develops, refines and conditions our actual ethical/moral behavior by building upon that biological bedrock. For instance, the circle of a human’s ethical concern might naturally be constrained to those just like them, i.e. their own tribe, with outsiders falling into a category of “other” not requiring or eliciting the same level, or any, ethical obligations.

Some have theorized that the cultural phenomenon of religion has hijacked, or built upon our natural capacity for conscience to widen the circle of ethical concern to co-religionists, and even to the universe of all humans. Thus does culture reinforce, reify and widen the reach of our natural capacity for conscience, and turns it into the basis for ethics, religion, morality, philosophy, politics, law and hence into large-scale cooperative behavior. In recognizing that a fallow, culturally-undeveloped conscience is limited in its application to the complex social constructs and questions of a modern society, we might consider the innate capacity for love of the natural world that E.O. Wilson has termed “biophilia”.

Read more

All that glitters is not gold in the new Gilded Age

On Friday the government said that the economy grew at a 4.1 percent annual rate last quarter.

Naturally our egomaniacal Twitter-troll-in-chief, who always speaks in exaggerated superlatives, tried to claim that this was the biggest, bestest, greatest economic achievement by any president ever in the history of the world!

Not even close, dumbass. Fact check: Mr. Trump cited a long list of indicators of how well the economy has performed on his watch, some lacking context or foundation. Barack Obama had three quarters besting Trump’s best quarter.

Screen Shot 2018-07-30 at 6.09.01 AM

Economists caution that the latest acceleration, while good news for American businesses and households in the short term, is unsustainable in the long term and could raise the risk that the recovery will flame out in the years ahead.

The quarter’s figures were pumped up by a range of one-time factors — including a surge in exports tied, at least in part, to Mr. Trump’s trade policies, as foreign buyers rushed to stock up on American goods before tariffs took effect — that are unlikely to recur. Most forecasters expect growth to cool in the second half of the year — even without factoring in the possibility of a trade war, which corporate executives in recent weeks have cited as a source of uncertainty that could force them to pare hiring and investment plans.

Read more

Russian attacks on the 2018 midterm election are underway

Earlier this year when Gov. Ducey kicked off his reelection campaign, it appears to have unleashed a horde of Twitter bots, similar to the Russian intelligence influence campaign in 2016. “A flurry of these kind of fake Twitter accounts have followed influencers and journalists in the Valley, all promoting Ducey’s re-election campaign.” We spoke to real people being used as pro-Ducey Twitter bots. Here’s what they said. “Regarding this recent rash of Twitter bots supporting Ducey, his campaign spokesperson Patrick Ptak told 12 News, “we saw it too. Not us.””

So the Ruskies love them some Doug Ducey, do they?

The local media quickly dismissed this incident and disappeared it down the memory hole.

But not so fast.

Facebook today announced it Has Identified Ongoing Political Influence Campaign:

Facebook announced on Tuesday that it has identified a coordinated political influence campaign, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages that are believed to be engaging in political activity around divisive social issues ahead of November’s midterm elections.

In a series of briefings on Capitol Hill this week and a public post on Tuesday, the company told lawmakers that it had detected and removed 32 pages and accounts connected to the influence campaign on Facebook and Instagram as part of its investigations into election interference. It publicly said it had been unable to tie the accounts to Russia, whose Internet Research Agency was at the center of an indictment earlier this year for interfering in the 2016 election, but company officials told Capitol Hill that Russia was possibly involved, according to two officials briefed on the matter.

Read more

Birthright Citizenship is an Original American Tradition

By Michael Bryan

I created this rather silly (but legally accurate) video several years ago as a poke at then-State Senator Russell Pearce (remember that sack of crap?). I viewed it again recently and while I would cut out some of the more Socratic moments, it really does hold up very well now that the GOP and Trump are picking on birthright citizenship again (See herehere, here, here, here, and here). Just replace Pearce with Trump and the video becomes quite timely.

Listen all the way through and you will be more than ready to destroy anyone who advocates that we can, or should, abrogate birthright citizenship.