Edge: What Makes People Vote Republican?

Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.

But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is. [...]

This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like "it's wrong because… um…eating dog meat would make you sick" or "it's wrong to use the flag because… um… the rags might clog the toilet." These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume's dictum that reason is "the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them." This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion. [...]

In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.

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The New York Times: Judges Who Are Elected Like Politicians Tend to Act Like Them

One released last week, for instance, found that elected judges are less likely to support gay rights than are appointed ones. The effect was most pronounced in cases decided by judges who ran in partisan elections.

That seemed the case on Friday, when Roy S. Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was suspended for the rest of his term for ordering the state’s probate judges to defy federal court orders on same-sex marriage.

Appointed judges who must face retention elections also have reason to be sensitive to public opinion. In 2010, voters in Iowa removed three State Supreme Court justices who had joined a unanimous opinion allowing same-sex marriages.

Earlier studies have shown that judges facing re-election are more likely to impose harsh criminal sentences, including death sentences.“Proximity to re-election makes judges more punitive — more likely to impose longer sentences, affirm death sentences and even override life sentences to impose death,” a report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law concluded last year.

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FiveThirtyEight: How Big Is Hillary Clinton’s Lead?

Here’s what we know: Hillary Clinton is leading in the race for president, and she’s made meaningful gains since last week’s presidential debate. Clinton is currently a 72 percent favorite in our polls-only forecast, up from 55 percent just before the debate. That corresponds to a roughly 4-percentage-point national lead for Clinton, about where the race was as of Labor Day — before a series of mishaps for her in mid-September. Our polls-plus model, which blends polls with an economic index and generally produces a more conservative forecast, has Clinton with a 69 percent chance instead. [...]

This makes for a pretty darned clear difference. In the set of pre-debate polls, Clinton was barely ahead. Out of 67 polls, she led in 34, trailed in 29 and was tied with Trump in four. That’s why our model had Trump drawing the Electoral College almost — but not quite — to a tie before the debate. We had a lot of data, much of it from high-quality pollsters. Clinton’s leads in potentially must-win states, such as Pennsylvania and Colorado, were tenuous. And she wasn’t clearly ahead anywhere else, although Florida and North Carolina were tossups. It wasn’t quite enough to make Clinton an underdog, but it was getting close. [...]

Speaking of trend lines, I’d remind you to be careful when examining them. Our model’s hypothesis is that Clinton has gained 2 to 3 percentage points since just before the debate, possibly with some upside on top of that based on events since the debate. Coming late in a close race, those 2 or 3 points are enough to improve Clinton’s odds quite a bit. (Think of an NBA team that sinks a clutch basket to go from a 2-point lead to a 4-point lead late in the game; its win probability improves a lot.) But Clinton’s post-debate gains are also not on the order of her convention bounce, which was something like 8 points instead — large enough to show up in almost every poll. Thus, you can find some polls where Clinton has gained as many as 7 points since the debate, but others where she hasn’t moved up at all — and even one or two where she’s lost ground. All of this is pretty normal.

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VICE: Photos from the Latest Protest in Poland Against the Crackdown on Women's Rights

On Saturday, October 1, thousands of protesters dressed in black came together in front of the Polish parliament. For the second week in a row, they were collectively mourning the demise of women's rights in Poland and protesting the proposed near-total ban on abortion in the country. Among the protesters were women and men of all ages, representatives of political parties from the far left to the political center, and quite a few feminist organizations.

A little over a week ago, the initiative behind the protest—the pro-choice coalition Save Women—proposed a draft bill that would give women in Poland the right to abort a pregnancy that hasn't surpassed 12 weeks. But on Friday, September 23, MPs voted against it. Instead, they voted in favor of further banning and criminalizing abortion—with this other proposed bill, women who terminate their pregnancy can face up to five years in prison. Polish prime minister Beata Szydło has said in an interview that the street isn't the appropriate place to discuss abortion—which led Save Women to ask during Saturday's protest: "So, what is the appropriate place to discuss it, if you threw out our draft bill in parliament?"

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Deutsche Welle: Germany allows MS patient to grow cannabis in unprecedented case

Germany's Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices (BfArM) confirmed on Sunday that the patient from Mannheim, southwestern Germany, will be allowed to grow a maximum of 130 cannabis plants a year in his bathroom. The cannabis is strictly for personal use, a spokesperson said.

BfArM had previously rejected requests to home-grow cannabis. There are currently more than 900 patients in Germany who are permitted to use the drug for medicinal purposes. However, the cannabis must be purchased from the pharmacy and financial costs covered by the patient. One gram currently costs around 15 euros ($16.85).

Prior to receiving his permit, the Mannheimer had filed multiple lawsuits, arguing that he could not afford the monthly costs of around 1,500 euros. In spring, Germany's Federal Administrative Court ruled that BfArM must "allow the claimant to grow cannabis, harvest the drug, and use it for the medical purpose of his treatment."

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Independent: The cultural differences between East and West in one series of illustrations

Artist Yang Liu was born in Beijing and has been living in Germany for over 20 years. This gives her an insight into the way Chinese and German culture differs, and Liu created an exhibition which was later made into a book, called ‘East Meets West’.

Part tongue – in – cheek, part insightful observation, the series picks a variety of subjects and illustrates the way Germans (in blue) and Chinese people (in red) react to them.

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Salon: The U.S. government has used a section of the Patriot Act after 9/11 to criminalize people of color

“Do you have any prejudice against Muslims?” We heard the judge ask a set of questions to each potential juror. To this inquiry, one middle aged white woman said, “Yes.” Judge William Duffey Jr. asked her to elaborate. “I’m afraid of them. They want to hurt us.” A former law enforcement agent also answered yes to that question. Both were chosen to sit on the jury at Ehsanul “Shifa” Sadequee’s trial in August 2009.

Sadequee was convicted of four counts of conspiring and attempting to support terrorists and a foreign terrorist organization. He did not provide material support to terrorist groups. He did not commit any acts of violence. A few online conversations, translations of Islamic texts, a video recording of Washington, D.C., landmarks, and paintball trips in the Georgia woods were presented as evidence to prove the potential of intent to provide support to a terrorist-identified group. The maximum sentence was 60 years in federal prison. The jury took less than seven hours to find him guilty. The judge sentenced him to 17 years in federal prison and 30 years surveillance, once released. [...]

Sadequee is just one victim of preemptive prosecution, in which loose application of conspiracy or material support laws, or other, similar tactics, are used to target individuals before any real harm has been committed. After 9/11, preemptive prosecution has been used to prosecute individuals whose beliefs, ideologies or religious affiliations raise concerns for the government. In the 15 years since the 9/11 attacks, the government has used preemptive prosecution liberally to root out domestic, “homegrown” terrorism. [...]

The threat of terrorism has justified detention, incarceration and mass surveillance. Post-9/11, hundreds of Muslims, South Asians and Arab community members were detained and investigated in connection with the attacks. Eight men arrested on immigration charges, who were then detained as suspected terrorists, filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of themselves and their fellow detainees alleging they were held based solely on their religion, race, ethnicity and immigration status. These individuals were beaten and suffered verbal abuse whilst in detention and were deprived of sleep and contact with the outside world. Their right to practice their religion was also violated. Not one of them was charged with terrorism. Their lawsuit against Bush administration officials was reinstated by the Second Circuit in June 2015. [...]

The Attorney General guidelines in 2008 also authorized “domain management assessments” which allow the FBI to map out communities across America by race and ethnicity, using crude stereotypes to hypothesize about the crimes they are believed to be likely to commit.

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Associated Press: Memorial to confront South's troubled history of lynchings

Southern states have long welcomed tourists retracing the footsteps of the late Martin Luther King Jr. and others who opposed segregation. Now the Alabama city that was the first capital of the Confederacy is set to become home to a privately funded museum and monument that could make some visitors wince: a memorial to black lynching victims.

The nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative has announced it is building a memorial in the state capital of Montgomery devoted to 4,075 blacks its research shows were killed by lynching in the U.S. from 1877 to 1950. [...]

Equal Justice Initiative said the monument and museum also would help counter glorification, in some quarters, of the Confederacy across the South while telling the painful story of race in America. The law firm and its founder, Stevenson, represent death row inmates and advocates for racial justice.

The group already has erected bronze plaques around Montgomery to denote bygone slave markets; another group has built a memorial honoring civil rights martyrs, mostly African-Americans. Elsewhere in Montgomery, a marker explains the history of the church parsonage bombed while King lived there in 1956. [...]

Alabama tourism director Lee Sentell said the project has the potential to be important. But he said his agency will need to find out more about the new project before deciding whether to promote it alongside civil rights attractions such as the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute or the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where marchers for voting rights were beaten by state police in 1965.

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Business Insider: Bolivia ended its drug war by kicking out the DEA and legalizing coca

Coca, a mild stimulant, has been used for millennia by people in the Andes in tea and food, though it is most often chewed raw to give energy and treat ailments ranging from altitude sickness to menstruation pain. The plant is also the source material for cocaine and the target of anti-narcotics efforts across South America driven in part by the United States. From 1997 to 2004, a US-funded program seeking to eradicate coca in Bolivia by force plunged the Chapare into traumatic conflict. [...]

Even though his crop has been fully legal since 2004, when the Bolivian government took the unprecedented step of legalizing production for domestic consumption, these dark memories still prompt the farmer to insist his name does not appear in print.

Wherever you go in the Chapare — one of Bolivia's two coca-growing regions — you hear similar stories of life in the 1990s and early 2000s: narco-slayings, police violence and rapes, and coca-grower protests ending in violence and death. [...]

The system — later dubbed by Morales as "coca yes, cocaine no" — allows each family to cultivate up to 1,600 square meters, known as a "cato," of coca plants. Farmers are obliged to sell their leaves at authorized markets, and if they cannot produce a receipt, they must justify why their harvest was lost (for example, because of blight) with a certificate from their local growers' association.

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