Steps to reduce violence

Steps to reduce violence.

This goes back to communication, socialization and a really, really poor educational system.  At the core, social violence is an income/power/communication issue.

How successful people are generally depends on how well they communicate with others.  Poverty level people tend to be predominantly Kinesthetic in their learning and communication styles.  Typical "talk and chalk" education doesn't address kinesthetic learners, so, students in poverty level communities tend to feel that being "schooled" is to suffer a humiliating defeat.  (Listen to M.C. Hammer's "can't touch this" for an example of the popular use of the word "schooled").

We actually train each other to ridicule and dismiss learners who are predominantly kinesthetic.

Properly educating and socializing people improves their employment possibilities, which helps stabilize society more than almost anything else.

In addition, Pavlovian behavior modification, "punishment/reward", works only when it is rigidly consistent.  Typically values change from teacher to teacher,  and teacher to parent.  Normally students learn to adapt to the current authority figures values.  This doesn't work well if the parents and teachers have different value systems.  The adaptive authority process often teaches disrespect for parents, typically becoming "critical" around teen age years.  Students often learn their parents are not the predominant authority figures in their lives and feel no obligation to listen to them.

To address the problem we need to address kinesthetic learning styles and be more adaptive to individual students learning styles.

Standardized tests are helpful in this regard because they identify students that are not responding to standard educational processes.  Rather than use them for identification of non-standard students, teachers and school administrators often use them to humiliate students and then complain about being forced to humiliate students rather than implement expensive alternative or individual education.

Once we address learning styles, we need to stop using "punishment/reward", Pavlovian behavior modification.  We need to replace it with positive reinforcement and pretty much eliminate punishment, except for violent situations that result in bodily harm.  Pavlovian punishment/reward creates a dependence on authority structure.

Third, we need socialized medicine with comprehensive mental health care so that people with issues can receive help when they need it.

Fourth, as income inequality increases society destabilizes.  IRS SOI Tax Stats for 2013 publish the Adjusted Gross Income for 2013 collected from 1040s.  The range, 99.7%, is $1M to $0.  That makes the middle $500,000.00.  85% of returns report an income of less than $100K.  There is no middle class in the United States.

Compensation should be limited to 100 times the compensation of the lowest paid worker, including temps and contractors.  Minimum wage should be increased to a living wage.  Henry Ford overpaid auto workers and the results of that action are historic and non-intuitive.

Disposable income is critical to social stability and economic growth. Personally, I'd make a flat tax of 50% of all income over the previous years 75% range.  In 2013 about 75% of people made less than $75K.  I'd tax the upper 25% at 50%.  Someone making $100K would pay $12.5K in taxes and someone making $1M would pay $462,500.00 in taxes.

This places the tax burden on those who are less likely to spend all their discretionary income.

These are sweeping changes, and the resistance will be extreme, but, it's pretty much change or die.  There might be alternative solutions capable of achieving the same results, but, I have not heard them.

At the core, social violence is an income/power/communication issue.

If we keep doing the same things, we'll get the same results.  If we oppress people more, they will rebel more.  To battle social violence we need to improve our community socialization institutions, schools, provide free mental health care and reduce income inequality.

Why mass murders occur

Why are Middle Eastern terrorists attacking us? No, it isn't to destroy our way of life, it is to maintain their own way of life.

Western Industrialized multinationals seek out resources and markets that they can use to expand their for-profit business interests. Incidentally to this process we export Western culture and value systems, which we hold up as standards even while we violate them ourselves.

For example, sexual equality, we (Western Industrial nations) treat women as less than men and then demand equal rights for women in other nations.

As these people see their traditional values being destroyed by "do as I say, not as I do" hypocrites they get angry, just as we would.

Now, most people don't go around killing other people when they get angry, so our hypocrisy does not excuse their behavior. Generally, what happens is that some individuals, a very, very small percentage, who have been treated unfairly, "experienced excessive punitive action", act out against their oppressors.

This is true of most mass murders, from high school shooters to terrorists. The percentage might be 1 in 1 million, or 1 in 100,000. Our population is growing and so the number of individuals who will react violently when confronted with "excessive punitive action" will increase, not matter how small the percentage is.

Most cultures have a concept of "fair". When an individual experiences "excessive punitive action" by other individuals who ignore the rules they are supposed to be enforcing, or who enforce rules unequally, they act out.

If we are going to use Pavlovian conditioning, punishment/reward behavior modification, it must be consistent and equally applied. The less consistent and the more unequally applied the more of these mass murders will be created.

I believe that as our population grows the less consistently and more unequally we are applying our Pavlovian standards.

This begins in our education system and our education system must change if we want to reduce the potential for future mass murders.

Gun control

I don't hate the idea of gun control.  I think gun control is stupid.  There is no evidence it reduces violence.  1934, 1968, violence increased.  Correlation isn't causation and to even infer causation, correlation must be consistent.  Gun control legislation is not consistent when correlated with reductions in violence.  People doing silly things doesn't upset me.  I expect silly, self destructive behavior.

I do hate the idea of a deadly black market where submachine guns that are similar in quality to crack or meth, which is cooked by people who flunked chemistry, are produced by people who flunked metal shop and are just as easy to buy as crack.

For over 30 years I've warned people about the danger of a black market in guns.  I watched as people started building guns during the "assault weapon" ban and I built an AR15 myself.

I've watched as we went from guys like me who enjoyed home gunsmithing fabricating guns to people having "build parties" where people who have never learned anything about metal work fabricate their own assault rifles.

Every time a market is restricted, the black market in that commodity increases.  As long as there is a demand, there will be a supply.

There isn't anyway to put the cat that we let out by passing the stupid assault weapon ban back in the bag.  We can hope it doesn't get worse, but, it looks like it is going to get a lot worse.

And when I say a lot worse, I mean low quality Saturday Night special submachine guns as easy to buy as a crack rock, and the deaths that go with that kind of market.

Nina Jablonski and "Skin"

There are some videos of lectures by an anthropologist named Nina Jablonski on the web.  Ted talks, etc.  Essentially she argues that skin pigmentation is a result of evolutionary pressures based on ultraviolet radiation.  Total bullshit of course, but, people eat that shit up without thinking about it.

"survival of the fittest"!  In reality, evolution is determined by reproductive fitness.

Survival of the fittest is defined as:- a nineteenth century concept that the strongest survive. Often called "Social Darwinism." "Survival of the fittest" misrepresents the process of natural selection. The mechanism of natural selection is reproductive fitness, those who produce offspring. Social Darwinism refers to being the most powerful, which is not the mechanism for natural selection.

Natural selection is the evolution works.  Mutations in species which contribute to the ability of an individual to survive and reproduce become predominant in a species.  The key here is surviving to reproduce.

The age of reproduction is about 13 in human beings.  If skin pigmentation offered an evolutionary advantage based on geographic location we would see children living in the wrong geographic location die.  Black children would die in Europe.  White children would die in Africa.  Both would die where evolution selected brown people, places like the Middle East and the Arctic circle.

What amazes me is that a so obviously flawed hypothesis is so eagerly accepted by academics who are supposed to understand the theory of reproductive fitness.

What a bunch of ignorant bullshit.  Dr. Jablonski tells us, in one of her video lectures, that her team worked for 15 years on this "theory" and no one ever explained reproductive fitness and natural selection to her.

Un frickin believable.

Thinking about propaganda

The problem with propaganda is that it generally fails to last historically. There are notable exceptions which are recognized to be B.S. by advanced scholars and which are still commonly held to be "true" by the general population. The idea that people believed the Earth was flat before Columbus for example.

More recently, people ignore the fact that the Democrats are politically responsible for multiple genocides. Andrew Jackson the first President elected as a Democrat after the Democrats changed their name from Democratic Republicans, committed genocidal atrocities against both African Americans and First peoples. More recently, most democrats in Congress voted against the 1964 Civil Rights act.

If we go further back, we can examine the propagandistic concept that the Church was responsible for the Aristotelean theory of the Geocentric Universe when the conflict between the Church and Galileo/Copernicus was really an academic conflict between the prominent educational institution and some researchers challenging academic cannon. At the time of the Renaissance the Catholic Church was the primary publishing house, the primary provider of education and the primary religion of Europe.

Or we could examine the idea of the "Dark Ages" where people claim "the entire world was plunged into intellectual darkness by religious fanatics" when in actually it was only Europe. Priests in Europe have always been Scholars and many priests have been responsible for educating researchers (like Copernicus and Galileo) and/or researching new ideas. The biggest problem after the fall of the Roman Empire was that Rome sucked at technical documentation and excelled at religious and political documentation. Technical information was passed along by word of mouth through apprenticeships. As the technical experts responsible for amazing achievements like the aqueducts, the Colosseum and Roman roads died off the technical lessons learned by those experts died with them. The practice of maintaining technical secrets (closed source technology, ala Microsoft) creates a potential for a similar collapse. Fortunately Open Source addresses that and minimizes the potential for a "dark ages" should a cultural collapse occur.

So, while many of these issues are understood by various advanced scholars, these propagandistic ideas still permeate our education and academic circles.

It would be cool to see what people believe about the worlds political leaders of today in a thousand years, the differences between what is taught at lower and more advanced academic levels.