Salon: Are Americans nicer in Spanish? How morality changes in a foreign language

Psychologists who study moral judgments have become very interested in this question. Several recent studies have focused on how people think about ethics in a non-native language — as might take place, for example, among a group of delegates at the United Nations using a lingua franca to hash out a resolution. The findings suggest that when people are confronted with moral dilemmas, they do indeed respond differently when considering them in a foreign language than when using their native tongue. [...]

Using a very different experimental setup, Janet Geipel and her colleagues also found that using a foreign language shifted their participants’ moral verdicts. In their study, volunteers read descriptions of acts that appeared to harm no one, but that many people find morally reprehensible — for example, stories in which siblings enjoyed entirely consensual and safe sex, or someone cooked and ate his dog after it had been killed by a car. Those who read the stories in a foreign language (either English or Italian) judged these actions to be less wrong than those who read them in their native tongue.

Why does it matter whether we judge morality in our native language or a foreign one? According to one explanation, such judgments involve two separate and competing modes of thinking — one of these, a quick, gut-level “feeling,” and the other, careful deliberation about the greatest good for the greatest number. When we use a foreign language, we unconsciously sink into the more deliberate mode simply because the effort of operating in our non-native language cues our cognitive system to prepare for strenuous activity. This may seem paradoxical, but is in line with findings that reading math problems in a hard-to-read font makes people less likely to make careless mistakes (although these results have proven difficult to replicate).

An alternative explanation is that differences arise between native and foreign tongues because our childhood languages vibrate with greater emotional intensity than do those learned in more academic settings. As a result, moral judgments made in a foreign language are less laden with the emotional reactions that surface when we use a language learned in childhood. 

read the article 

Jacobin Magazine: Between Rojava and Washington

However, since his imprisonment, Öcalan appears to have mellowed and, in his writings, has reoriented the PKK away from Soviet-style Marxism towards an ideology that blends elements of feminism, environmentalism, and anarchism, inspired by the anarchist philosopher Murray Bookchin. [...]

These observations are not meant to idealize the Rojava revolution. Like all revolutionary movements, the PYD has often failed to live up to its ideals. It has yet to shake off the authoritarian impulses inherited from the PKK, and has frequently been accused of suppressing other Kurdish political parties in Syria, including the Kurdish National Council (KNC), an organization with close links to the Iraqi Kurdish political leadership. It also faces allegations of ethnic cleansing in Arab villages and has, at times, used child soldiers. The organization also continues to promote the cult of Öcalan through its control of the education system and media. [...]

The roots of this contradiction lie in the fact that the United States has long regarded the PKK — the organization from which the PYD sprung — as a terrorist organization, and has provided both military and political support for Turkey’s fight against the PKK for decades. With the decision to support the Syrian Kurds US officials have thus been thrust into the comical position of pretending that the PYD and PKK are entirely separate organizations, a fiction that is almost impossible to sustain.

This state of affairs has been exacerbated by the fact that, while the United States is prioritizing the fight against the Islamic State, Ankara views the PKK-PYD axis and the Assad regime as the main enemy. Indeed, Turkey has been more than willing to tolerate the flow of fighters and weapons into Syria in order to undermine its enemies — a policy that has bolstered the position of the Islamic State.

On the morning of August 24, Turkish forces backed by local Islamist militias associated with the Free Syrian Army crossed the frontier, taking control of the ISIS stronghold of Jarabulus. Significantly, ISIS offered almost no resistance to the Turkish advance, sparking accusations that the entire operation had been staged for Western eyes and that ISIS forces had been informed of the operation beforehand. While Turkey entered under the banner of the anti-ISIS coalition, the true target of the action was the PYD which had been slowly advancing towards the city.

read the article 

FiveThirtyEight: Independent Voters Are Overrated

Although the results differ from poll to poll, a clear pattern emerges: Trump does better with independents than he does with the electorate at large. Clinton is still winning overall because she is doing better with Democrats than Trump is with Republicans.

Clinton leads among Democrats by an average of 81 percentage points, while Trump is ahead among Republicans by 76 points. That’s not a huge difference, but it’s meaningful. Trump has had problems with the GOP base since the primary season. Meanwhile, Clinton was cleaning up with self-identified Democratsduring the Democratic primaries, even as Bernie Sanders was doing well with independent voters. It’s also possible that Trump’s association with the Republican Party has caused some traditional Republican voters to call themselves independents, which makes the pool of independent voters more conservative leaning.

Indeed, many self-identified independents are not the moderate, persuadable swing voters they are often portrayed to be. As Amy Walter from the Cook Political Report has pointed out, independents usually lean towards one party or the other, even as they claim a nonpartisan label. Some lean Democratic or GOP. As Walter discussed, true independents only make up about 10 percent of all voters. Further, voters who typically favor the GOP make up a larger percentage of self-identified independents than they do of voters overall, which can make independents a Republican-leaning group relative to the electorate. In fact, the self-identified independents who consistently favor one party are often more ideologically extreme than those who identify with either party. That is, there is no reason to believe that independents should necessarily reflect the will of the overall electorate. [...]

In fact, here’s an interesting historical tidbit: In the four elections decided by less than 5 points since 1976, the candidate who won independents lost the national popular vote every time. That includes Mitt Romney in 2012, who many Republicans argued would win because he was leading with independents. Less remembered is John Kerry’s loss in 2004; he had less support among self-identified Democrats than Bush did among self-identified Republicans and so lost the election despite edging out Bush among independents.

read the article 

Bloomberg: The Anger Won’t End on Nov. 8

Anger is different. Scans of angry brains show activity in the left frontal cortex, the part associated with approach emotions. That makes sense. When you’re angry, you don’t want to run away; you want to get in someone’s face. And unlike disgust or fear, anger feels good—you don’t nurse disgust. “Looking ahead to how you’re going to avenge a perceived harm feels exhilarating,” says Jennifer Lerner, a psychologist and professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Her research, with Dacher Keltner of the University of California at Berkeley, has found that angry people are much more optimistic than fearful people. The angrier you are, the safer you feel from future terrorist attacks, the better you rate your health, the more attractive you believe you are to marital prospects. Indeed, angry people see the future as rosily as happy people do. That’s not true with fear. [...]

This is the through line in Trump’s otherwise erratic presidential campaign. For all the talk of the blue-collar economic fears driving Trump’s campaign, it has run largely on spleen. Trump’s public pronouncements are heavy on threats, challenges, and insults; his supporters have blasted perceived enemies on social media with furious invective; and his rallies have been punctuated by brawls. (As in ice hockey, the fighting seems to be what many fans come for.) The parable Trump tells—about bad leaders who have weakened America and the artful dealmaker who, alone, can fix it—matches the angry mind’s simplified universe of personal blame. His repeated invocation of a “silent majority” parallels anger’s empowerment: His supporters aren’t weak, he tells them, they’re strong. They’re just not loud enough.

There isn’t anything inherently wrong with anger in public life. All political movements depend on it. Civil rights protesters were propelled by moral rage, and the original Revolution-era Tea Partiers were good and steamed. But politics does feel particularly angry at the moment. Poll after poll shows a more ideologically segregated country whose inhabitants view their opponents as aliens and their disagreements as irreconcilable. In a world of self-curated Facebook news feeds, everyone is like the subjects in the MacKuen study, reading manifestoes and rants that buttress their worldview and keep the indignation at a titillating simmer.

read the article 

Salon: Is Trump an aberration? The dark history of the ‘nation of immigrants’

Donald Trump may differ from other contemporary politicians in so openly stating his antipathy to immigrants of a certain sort. (He’s actually urged the opening of the country to more European immigrants.) Democrats like Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton sound so much less hateful and so much more tolerant. But the policies Trump is advocating, including that well-publicized wall and mass deportations, are really nothing new. They are the very policies initiated by Bill Clinton in the 1990s and — from border militarization to mass deportations — enthusiastically promoted by Barack Obama. The president is, in fact, responsible for raising such deportations to levels previously unknown in American history. [...]

A closer look at American history makes the notion that “we are a nation of immigrants” instantly darker than its proponents imagine. As a start, what could the very idea of a “nation of immigrants” mean in a land that was already home to a large native population when European immigrants started to colonize it? From its first moments, American history has, in fact, been a history of deportation. The initial deportees from the British colonies and the American nation were, of course, Native Americans, removed from their villages, farms and hunting grounds through legalized and extra-legal force everywhere that white immigrants wanted to settle. [...]

It was not until 1868, three years after the Civil War ended, that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution created the right to citizenship by birth, making it possible for the first time for non-whites to become citizens. But when Congress passed that amendment, it had in mind only some non-whites: previously enslaved Africans and their descendants. Here’s the crucial line in which Congress made sure of that: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Since Native Americans were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, they were excluded from citizenship by birth. [...]

Once citizenship by birth had been established, Congress moved to preserve the white racial character of the country by restricting the entry of non-whites — first with the Page Act of 1875, prohibiting Chinese women from entering the country, then with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. That ban was, in turn, gradually expanded until, in 1917, the “Asiatic Barred Zone” was put in place. It would span significant parts of the globe, from Afghanistan to the islands of the Pacific, and encompass about half of the world’s population. Its purpose was to ensure that, all “Asians” being “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” none of them would enter the United States, and so their racially ineligible children would never be born here and obtain citizenship by birth.

read the article