Politics & Stuff

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

Snipers routinely shooting babies and children in the head

 

[Vesper 30,234]

No Europe for young men

Jan Zielonka 21st October 2024

Europe’s democracies are failing their youth, as short-sighted policies prioritise the needs of older generations, leaving young people without a voice or a future.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/no-europe-for-young-men

 

In the famous 2007 neo-western crime thriller directed by the Coen brothers, the not-so-young sheriff, magnificently played by Tommy Lee Jones, is warned by his cousin: “This country’s hard on people. You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you.” The Cohens’ film is No Country for Old Men, so why have I paraphrased this title to write about the situation of young people in Europe’s democracies? After all, contemporary Europe does not resemble the wild desert of West Texas, where the Coens’ movie takes place. Yes, some elderly people struggle to make their lives dignified in Europe, but I will argue that young people are worse off than old ones. The reason points to democracy’s major shortcoming or, should I say, short-sightedness. 

Democracy is hostage to the present-day voters, who are seldom young in today’s Europe. During the recent European elections, the shares of first-time voters (persons who have reached voting age since the last European elections in 2019) were well below 10%. No wonder they complain that their vote does not imply a voice in public affairs. There are simply too few young voters to impress any government. The generations younger than those allowed to vote and those who are not yet born are treated by democracy even worse, even though their number is open-ended. Lowering the voting age will only benefit a tiny fraction of future generations, so we’ve got a problem. 

To be fair, politicians express plenty of concern about the future generations. How many photos featuring our leaders with babies and children have you seen during successive electoral campaigns? How many environmental pledges have been made to make the lives of future generations bearable on this earth? How often have we heard about the importance of education in generating sustainable prosperity? I am not even talking about promises to keep public finances under control so that future generations are not faced with the bill left by the older. 

Unfortunately, most of these promises and pledges have been broken repeatedly, even by seemingly responsible democratic leaders. This is because politicians cannot ignore the electoral arithmetic. When faced with difficult choices, those who have votes prevail. This is how democracy works; it gives the majority of the day what they want – and those are likely not-so-young people. Whether you call this rational choice, selfishness or short-sightedness does not matter. What counts are the practical outcomes of policies hurting the youth. So much about the famous democratic saying “no taxation without representation”. The future generations are continuously “taxed” with no representation or voice. No wonder that in a relatively prosperous country such as Germany, just 21 per cent of Generation Z and millennials said they consistently support democracy compared to 66 per cent of those aged 70 and up. In France, young people’s support for democracy was even lower at 14%. The global standing of democracy is also worrisome. The 2022 Bertelsmann Foundation Index established that for the first time in many years, we now have more autocracies in the world than democracies.

We tend to blame populists for this sorry state of affairs, but we should also consider the impact of other factors. The “flat” digitalised world is running at an ever-higher pace with enormous implications for democracy and young people. Climate change has accelerated tremendously, making the younger generation vulnerable in ways their parents have not experienced. The speed of economic transactions has affected chiefly young people who virtually “sleep in their office” (next to a smartphone) and work around the clock 24/7. Or think about the gig economy in which pensions and workers’ rights are progressively diluted. Democracy’s temporal myopia could be tolerated in the pre-digital era, but now it is profoundly hitting the young and future generations in various shapes and forms. 

Democracy’s response to this epochal acceleration is disappointing by any measure. The European Green Deal is now in tatters, as is the global process resulting from the 2016 Paris Agreement on Climate Change. “There is already almost nothing left of the green deal”, Julia Christian of the forest conservation group Fern told the Guardian. Have those who dismantled the Green Deal on financial or ideological grounds explained to the youngsters how they would prosper when hit by the projected 2.7°C of warming – nearly double the Paris Agreement goal of holding climate change to 1.5°C? The last COP28 agreement to cut global fossil fuel production was described as “grossly insufficient” and “incoherent.” 

Are governments surprised that young people cannot reconcile themselves with such disappointing results and rebel? Governments’ response is not a dialogue with but repression of environmental protests . For instance, the Metropolitan Police in the UK, responding to a Freedom of Information request, revealed that in 2021-2022 members of the following climate change and education groups have been arrested: Extinction Rebellion, Ocean Rebellion, Coal Action Network, Right to Roam, Earth First, Youth Strike 4 Climate, Rising Tide, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), Burning Pink, Tree Defenders, Fossil Free, Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain, HS2 Rebellion (or anti-HS2 protestors).

Equally telling are cuts to European budgets on science and higher education. How will the future generations cope with pandemics, floods or cyberwarfare without adequate education? How will they face the international competition in high-tech and modern armaments? Do our leaders believe that vaccines grow on trees? Do they think that courts can do their job without lawyers and that microchips will grow like mushrooms without semiconductor engineers? If not, why did the European Council representing 27 EU member states propose to slash €1.52 billion from flagship projects, including the Horizon Europe research and innovation programme and the Erasmus+ student mobility initiative?

In its budget proposal, Poland’s new (pro-European) government envisages the lowest funds for science and higher education this century. The new Dutch (Eurosceptic) government proposed cutting the research and science budget by €1.1 billion and abolishing the National Growth Fund, which finances research and development. Higher education funding will be cut by €215 million annually in Holland. It looks like pro- and anti-European politicians have something in common when it comes to the interests of younger generations.

Instead of fulfilling our youngsters’ basic expectations, politicians create phantom institutions to mimic pro-youth policies. Finland created a special body with a mandate to oversee the long-term applications of adopted policies and enhance sustainable thinking among policy-makers. Hungary has had, for some years, an Ombudsman for Future Generations. There will be a new EU Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness, Youth, Culture and Sport. There is no need to dismiss the potential virtues of these initiatives, but institutional engineering can hardly break the iron rules of democracy.

If governments propose raising taxes to reduce the public debt, voters will get rid of them. Politicians trying to ban diesel fuels fear lorry, taxi or tractor drivers and not children who are not yet born. Investments in long-term projects to improve public housing or education imply cuts in other sectors benefiting the present-day electorates, such as wages or pensions. The alternative is ever-greater debt, and so we go around in circles. Can you imagine that the new EU Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness, Youth, Culture and Sport can change the rules of this game? I bet he will be more successful in promoting sports events than in enhancing the cause of intergenerational justice.

Therefore, I expect conflicts between younger and older generations to intensify in the coming years, and they will manifest themselves not in parliaments but on Europe’s streets. This does not need to be bad news because real political change requires a high degree of public mobilisation. The student protests of 1968 did not achieve their revolutionary objectives, but they certainly gave a shock to the system. It is difficult to imagine that many of the reforms introduced in the 1970s (from family law to education) would have been pushed forward had young people not taken to the streets. However, if protests are destructive with little positive agenda for change, the result may be chaos with many casualties, democracy one of them. In cases of democratic vacuum, the title of the Coen brothers’ famous film may indeed apply, and so, I urge my not-so-young generation to stop being selfish.

[Vesper 30,234]

Can Universal Basic Income really improve mental health?

Olivier De Schutter and Philippe van Parijs 21st October 2024

Recent UBI trials reveal that guaranteed income provides immediate mental health relief, but sustaining long-term benefits may depend on lasting economic security.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/can-universal-basic-income-really-improve-mental-health-the-surprising-results-are-in

 

Interest is surging in the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) – a regular income paid by the government to each adult member of society, regardless of their personal or financial circumstances. But can it achieve its stated goals of reducing poverty, improving working conditions and increasing well-being? Thanks to a global flurry of pilot programmes putting these claims to the test, answers to this question are starting to trickle in.

In 2020, 1,000 low-income individuals in the US states of Texas and Illinois began receiving $1,000 per month for three years as part of America’s largest-ever study on UBI. No conditions were attached – participants could use the money as they wished. The results of this large-scale and meticulously conducted randomised control trial offer a fascinating insight into how people might spend their time and money if they were guaranteed a no-strings basic income.

Spending increased, going mainly to food, rent and housing, as did savings. Time spent in employment decreased (by 1.3 hours per week) – not a bad thing in the eyes of UBI advocates, who insist that the goal of UBI is not to increase overall employment but to put pressure on employers to improve job quality and to allow people to devote more time to lifelong learning and to unpaid, often more socially valuable work, such as caregiving. Among those looking for work, participants were more selective about the jobs they applied for and more likely to state “interesting or meaningful work” as a requirement.

On health, the increased income had insignificant effects on most indicators – not too surprising, given that the study took place over three years, while health problems develop over lifetimes. However, mental health was one clear exception consistent with other studies on basic income-like interventions. The study found “large improvements… in mental health measures like stress and psychological distress.” This could be observed, however, only during the first year of the experiment. Why was this improvement so short-lived?

A new UN report being presented to the General Assembly in New York this month offers some answers. The report lays bare how living in poverty significantly increases the risk of mental health problems. While 970 million people – 11% of the world’s population – experience a mental health condition, those on lower incomes are up to three times more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and other common mental illnesses than those with higher incomes.

The report finds that economic insecurity is a major source of stress, particularly in today’s “burnout economy”, in which people on low incomes increasingly find themselves in dehumanising, low-paid jobs that don’t pay enough to support their families or in precarious, casual contracts with wildly unpredictable work schedules. Economic shocks – or even the mere anticipation of such shocks and the impact they will have on income – are found to be a major cause of depression.

Given the permanent state of economic insecurity experienced by those living in poverty, it makes sense that participants in the US experiment reported lower levels of stress and psychological distress once they started to receive their monthly payments. At its most basic, a guaranteed income provides breathing room for those in poverty to not worry about how to put food on the table. Given the multiple other challenges people on low incomes face, a year’s relief from the psychological impacts of economic uncertainty is not to be sniffed at.

Importantly, the income came with no conditions – to find work, undergo training, attend appointments, and fill out complex forms – which, in a world of welfare sanctions and petty conditionality, is increasingly rare. This is despite evidence showing these conditions are ineffective and can even be mentally damaging to beneficiaries.

By the second year of the experiment, the effects of UBI on mental health had faded. Detractors gleefully point to this fact as evidence that the promises of UBI are unfounded. Yet, surely, it supports the view that economic insecurity has a significant impact on mental health and that this sense of security will inevitably diminish as the end of cash transfers approaches.

The value of UBI is not just in the income it offers, but in the security and predictability it provides. What would a lifetime of certainty mean for people in poverty? With their mental health crisis deepening by the day, it’s a question worth asking.

[Vesper 30,234]

For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment

No major party presidential candidate, much less president, in American history has been accused of wrongdoing so many times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/20/us/politics/trump-scandals.html

When the history of the 2024 election is written, one of the iconic images illustrating it will surely be the mug shot taken of Donald J. Trump after one of his four indictments, staring into the camera with his signature glare. It is an image not of shame but of defiance, the image of a man who would be a convicted felon before Election Day and yet possibly president of the United States again afterward.

Sometimes lost amid all the shouting of a high-octane campaign heading into its final couple of weeks is that simple if mind-bending fact. America for the first time in its history may send a criminal to the Oval Office and entrust him with the nuclear codes. What would once have been automatically disqualifying barely seems to slow Mr. Trump down in his comeback march for a second term that he says will be devoted to “retribution.”

In all the different ways that Mr. Trump has upended the traditional rules of American politics, that may be one of the most striking. He has survived more scandals than any major party presidential candidate, much less president, in the life of the republic. Not only survived but thrived. He has turned them on their head, making allegations against him into an argument for him by casting himself as a serial victim rather than a serial violator.

His persecution defense, the notion that he gets in so much trouble only because everyone is out to get him, resonates at his rallies where he says “they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in the way.” But that of course belies a record of scandal stretching across his 78 years starting long before politics. Whether in his personal life or his public life, he has been accused of so many acts of wrongdoing, investigated by so many prosecutors and agencies, sued by so many plaintiffs and claimants that it requires a scorecard just to remember them all.

His businesses went bankrupt repeatedly and multiple others failed. He was taken to court for stiffing his vendors, stiffing his bankers and even stiffing his own family. He avoided the draft during the Vietnam War and avoided paying any income taxes for years. He was forced to shell out tens of millions of dollars to students who accused him of scamming them, found liable for wide-scale business fraud and had his real estate firm convicted in criminal court of tax crimes.

He has boasted of grabbing women by their private parts, been reported to have cheated on all three of his wives and been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women, including one whose account was validated by a jury that found him liable for sexual abuse after a civil trial.

He is the only president in American history impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, the only president ever indicted on criminal charges and the only president to be convicted of a felony (34, in fact). He used the authority of his office to punish his adversaries and tried to hold onto power on the basis of a brazen lie.

Mr. Trump beat some of the investigations and lawsuits against him and some proved unfounded, but the sheer volume is remarkable. Any one of those scandals by itself would typically have been enough to derail another politician. Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s first bid for the presidency collapsed when he lifted some words from another politician’s speech. George W. Bush came close to losing after the last-minute revelation of a long-ago drunken-driving arrest. Hillary Rodham Clinton fell short at least in part because of an F.B.I. investigation into emails that led to no charges.

Not Mr. Trump. He has moved from one furor to the next without any of them sinking into the body politic enough to end his career. The unrelenting pace of scandals may in its own way help him by keeping any single one of them from dominating the national conversation and eroding his standing with his base of supporters.

He even turned that mug shot into a marketing tool, selling T-shirts, posters, bumper stickers, coffee mugs and even beverage coolers with the image and the slogan “NEVER SURRENDER.” And victory next month may yet help him escape the biggest threat of all — potentially prison.

Nonetheless, the full record stands out.

Making and Losing Money

Mr. Trump and his father, Fred Trump, at a construction project in Brooklyn in 1973.Credit...Barton Silverman/The New York Times

Mr. Trump got an early start learning how to cut corners. As a high school student at New York Military Academy, he knowingly borrowed a friend’s dress jacket with a dozen medals attached to wear for his yearbook photo, in effect appropriating medals that he did not win himself, according to a new book, “Lucky Loser,” by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig of The New York Times.

He likewise cheated to get into college, according to his estranged niece, Mary L. Trump. The future president paid a friend to take the SAT for him, Ms. Trump asserted in her own book, earning a score that later helped him transfer to Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania, a credential he has boasted about ever since. (A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump has denied this, and the widow of a man with the name cited by Ms. Trump as the test-taking friend said that she was confident the assertion was false.)

After graduating from Pennsylvania in 1968, however, the former military academy cadet had no interest in serving in the real military and risked being sent to fight in Vietnam. He managed to avoid the draft with a diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels — a diagnosis that evidently was obtained as a favor from a podiatrist in Queens who rented his office from Mr. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump. Two daughters of the podiatrist, who died in 2007, have said that he often told them about saving the younger Mr. Trump from Vietnam as a courtesy to his landlord.

Freed from military obligations, Mr. Trump went into the family business, helping run his father’s empire of rental apartment buildings in the outer boroughs. Even in those early days, he came under suspicion of misconduct. In 1973, the Justice Department sued the Trump family company for racial discrimination in renting apartments. Applications from Black applicants were marked C for “colored.” Mr. Trump fought the matter in court but ultimately agreed to a settlement that the Justice Department at the time called “one of the most far-reaching ever negotiated.”

His business career vaulted him to fame, and he had notable successes, perhaps most prominently the rehabilitation of the Commodore Hotel and the construction of Trump Tower. But he often reached further than he was able to deliver. His record in business was pockmarked with plenty of failures.

The Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, N.J., was just one of Mr. Trump’s many business failures.Credit...Mark Makela for The New York Times

The Trump Shuttle airline? Failure. His dreams of building a Television City in Manhattan? Failure. A United States Football League franchise? Failure. The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, Trump Taj Mahal, Trump’s Castle Casino Resort, Trump Mortgage, Trump Vodka, Trump University, Trump Steaks, GoTrump.com? All failures.

His most spectacular flameouts came in the gambling mecca of Atlantic City, where he overextended himself building or buying three casinos that ultimately cannibalized each other’s clientele as he failed to keep up with enormous debt payments. He filed bankruptcy for the Taj Mahal in 1991 and then for the other two casinos in 1992. He also filed bankruptcy in 1992 for the Plaza Hotel.

Even after recovering from that debacle, Mr. Trump failed again. His casino company filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and then again in 2009, for his sixth trip into that process. In his various bankruptcies, he was compelled to sell assets, and creditors were forced to write off some of his debt. But Mr. Trump has boasted that he still made money in Atlantic City even after leaving a trail of losses for nearly everyone else involved, including workers who lost jobs.

Mr. Trump played the game along the edge, and sometimes over the line, of propriety. To grease his path, he would hire a governor’s son or a federal prosecutor’s brother. Along the way, he was investigated time and time again. Federal, state and local authorities looked into his ties with the Mafia, found violations of money laundering laws and penalized him for skirting stock trade rules.

At one point when Mr. Trump was strapped for cash to make an interest payment, his father sent a lawyer to one of the son’s casinos to buy $3.5 million in chips without placing a bet. New Jersey’s casino regulators imposed a $65,000 fine for what amounted to an illegal loan.

But Mr. Trump makes a point of not admitting misdeeds or mistakes. Even his failures he portrays as triumphs. “I made a lot of money in Atlantic City,” he once said, “and I’m very proud of it.”

‘When You’re a Star’

Mr. Trump in the control room of “The Apprentice” in New York in 2003.Credit...Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

For years, Mr. Trump’s personal life was full of scandal, too, enough to make him a frequent topic of the gossip columns of the era. He did not mind. There was almost no headline too scandalous for him. “There’s no bad press unless you’re a pedophile,” he said in front of his campaign manager later in life.

After marrying the Czech model Ivana Zelnickova in 1977 and fathering three children, Mr. Trump began carrying on an affair with a younger model, Marla Maples. He and Ivana fought out their divorce battle in the news media, at one point making the tabloid front pages 11 days running. He even maneuvered The New York Post into running a banner headline “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had” supposedly describing Ms. Maples’s assessment of their bedroom life.

While living with Ms. Maples, he boasted of infidelity to a reporter during a call when, bizarrely, he impersonated a spokesman for himself and insisted that Mr. Trump had “three other girlfriends” in addition to the woman sharing his home. He and Ms. Maples later married anyway and had a daughter before divorcing, too.

He met Melania Knauss, a Slovenian model, and married her in 2005. But he was not always faithful to her either, according to other women. Stephanie Clifford, a porn film actor who goes by the name Stormy Daniels, claimed to have had a tryst with Mr. Trump in 2006, four months after Melania Trump gave birth to his fifth child.

Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate of the Year, said she had a 10-month fling with Mr. Trump around the same time. Michael D. Cohen, then Mr. Trump’s lawyer and self-described fixer, arranged for six-figure payments to be made to both Ms. Clifford and Ms. McDougal in 2016 to ensure their silence before the presidential election, hush-money that would later come back to haunt Mr. Trump.

Hush-money payments made to Stephanie Clifford, a porn film actor known as Stormy Daniels, were at the center of the first indictment of Mr. Trump.Credit...T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

His view of women and his belief in his right to pursue them with impunity ultimately was put on display before that election anyway. The now-famous “Access Hollywood” tape posted by The Washington Post weeks before the final balloting revealed his belief that he could “do anything” with women because he was famous. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

While he later dismissed that as mere “locker room banter,” Mr. Trump has been a one-man #MeToo magnet, accused by two dozen or so women of sexual misconduct that goes well beyond banter. One said he grabbed her breasts and tried to run his hand up her skirt on an airplane. Another said he kissed her while she worked for him, and at least two others said he groped them at the U.S. Open. Perhaps most famously, E. Jean Carroll, a writer, said he raped her in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the 1990s.

He has consistently denied all charges, suggesting that all of these women, one after the other, simply made it up. “Every woman lied,” he said in 2016. In a couple of instances, he has dismissed the allegations, not by saying that he would never do such a thing but by saying that he would never do such a thing with those particular accusers because of their looks. “She would not have been the chosen one,” he said last month about one of them.

In the only time one of these allegations made it to a verdict in court, a New York jury last year did not establish that he raped Ms. Carroll but did unanimously find that he sexually abused and defamed her and ordered him to pay her $5 million. Another jury earlier this year found that he continued to defame her and ordered Mr. Trump to pay Ms. Carroll $83.3 million. He is appealing both judgments.

Avoiding Taxes

The Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago.Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

No president in American history has been wealthier than Mr. Trump. And no president in the modern era, at least, paid less in federal income taxes in their first year living in the White House.

Tax documents obtained by The Times in 2020 showed that Mr. Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he originally ran for president, and only $750 again in 2017, the first year of his presidency. In fact, in 11 of the 18 years examined by The Times, Mr. Trump paid no income taxes to the federal government whatsoever.

Mr. Trump and his accountants have proved to be master manipulators of the tax code, bending it to benefit him in ways that would usually be damaging to a politician. The self-proclaimed billionaire, currently estimated to be worth $5.5 billion by Forbes magazine, managed year after year to pay less in income taxes than at least half of American taxpayers through creative bookkeeping if not more questionable tactics.

According to a Times investigation in 2018, Mr. Trump and his siblings took a real estate empire from his father that banks a few years later would value at nearly $900 million and, through favorable appraisals, paid taxes on it as if it were worth just $57 million. Buildings given by Fred Trump to his children were valued low by the Trump family for tax purposes and high for other purposes, turning a potential $10 million tax bill into a charge of just over $700,000, The Times reported.

He has even gotten the Internal Revenue Service to send him large amounts of cash. By declaring large losses on paper at least, he collected more than $90 million in local, state and federal refunds. Even Mr. Trump was astonished. “He could not believe how stupid the government was for giving ‘someone like him’ that much money back,” Mr. Cohen, his former lawyer, recalled in congressional testimony.

A congressional staff member wheeling boxes of what were believed to be Mr. Trump’s tax returns to a House Ways and Means Committee meeting in 2022.Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

Mr. Trump constantly found ways of getting around paying taxes. At one point, an invoice padding scheme allowed Mr. Trump’s family to sell supplies to itself to get out of gift taxes. At another point, he shifted ownership of a failed Chicago tower to another partnership that he also owned to try to claim additional losses for tax purposes, according to an I.R.S. inquiry, a double-dipping scheme that effectively allowed him to claim the same losses twice.

Unlike every other modern president, Mr. Trump refused to voluntarily release his tax forms, going all the way to the Supreme Court in an ultimately futile effort to shield them from public view. But he has made no apology for avoiding taxes where he can. “That makes me smart,” he famously said in 2016.

The tax forms that did eventually become public highlighted the disparity between his public claims of business conquests and his private claims of business setbacks. In the same year that he published “The Art of the Deal,” his iconic best seller promoting himself as a masterful business mogul, his core businesses reported $45 million in losses on his tax returns.

Mr. Trump relied heavily on his father’s fortune to assemble his own. While he likes to say that he parlayed a $1 million loan from his father into his own empire, the Times investigation in 2018 found that his father had begun giving him $200,000 a year in inflation-adjusted dollars starting at age 3 and that over the course of his career he received $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate business. (Mr. Trump disputes this.)

The future president was not content to exploit his own inheritance. He got into a legal battle with his own niece and nephew, who accused him of cheating them out of their share of Fred Trump’s estate. Mary Trump and her brother Fred Trump III, the children of Donald’s late brother, Fred Trump Jr., argued that they were originally supposed to split a 20 percent share of their grandfather’s estate, worth millions, upon his death. Instead, under a revised will, the two were each offered a one-time payment of $200,000.

Fred Trump in 1983. Donald Trump’s niece and nephew accused him of largely cutting them out of his father Fred’s will. Credit...Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times

When they sued, the future president retaliated by cutting his niece and nephew out of the family’s medical insurance fund at a time when the younger Fred Trump was using it to pay for care for his severely ill infant son. “I was angry because they sued,” Donald Trump later explained to The Times. Fred and Mary eventually settled, but were embittered that their uncle would betray them in what seemed like a bid to find cash to pay his debts.

“He was willing to squeeze his own niece and nephew and manipulate his father’s wishes, all to try and stop his own creditors from collecting the money he legally owed them,” Fred Trump wrote in “All in the Family,” a memoir published in July. “If that meant screwing his late brother — well, so be it. If it meant raiding the inheritance of his brother’s two children — well, OK.”

Mr. Trump’s relatives were not the only ones who considered themselves bilked. Over the years, so did contractors, bankers, business partners, customers and competitors, among others. By the time he first ran for president in 2016, he had been involved in 4,095 lawsuits, according to a count by USA Today, although in many of them he was the plaintiff.

Not counting personal injury lawsuits, which are common for many businesses, Mr. Trump or his firms were the defendants in at least 1,026 of those cases, accused of not paying taxes, not paying overtime, not paying companies he had hired, not paying back golf club fees that were to be refunded and not abiding by contracts. He won many of those fights but lost or settled others.

His educational and philanthropic enterprises were also seen as shams. Just after he was elected president in 2016, Mr. Trump agreed to pay $25 million to students of his defunct Trump University who accused him of defrauding them. Two years later, New York state authorities found “a shocking pattern of illegality” at the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which functioned “as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests.”

And in 2022, one of his tax schemes came unraveled when the Trump Organization, a family-owned business that he controlled, was convicted in criminal court of 17 counts of tax fraud, a scheme to defraud, conspiracy and falsifying business records for doling out off-the-books perks to some of its top executives. The company was given the maximum fine of $1.6 million.

Pursuit and Punishment

James B. Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2017.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Scandal followed him to the White House, so much so that he called it “the cloud” and complained that it was getting in the way of governing.

The most consuming scandal of his time in office stemmed from the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. While U.S. intelligence agencies determined that Russia sought to tip the contest to Mr. Trump, the newly sworn-in president refused to believe that and took any inquiry into the matter as an attack on his legitimacy.

Along the way, he escalated the matter by firing James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director leading the investigation into whether his campaign had any ties with the Russians, and then told visiting Russian officials the very next day that doing so had “taken off” what he called “great pressure.” Actually, it did not. Instead, it led to the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel.

After nearly two years of investigating, Mr. Mueller concluded that the Russians did interfere on Mr. Trump’s behalf, and he uncovered a stunning array of contacts between people in the president’s orbit and Russian figures. But Mr. Mueller reported that he did not establish any illegal coordination between Russia and the campaign and that “the evidence was not sufficient to charge” anyone with criminal conspiracy.

At the same time, he outlined more than 10 instances where Mr. Trump might have committed obstruction of justice by trying to thwart the investigation — including the dismissal of Mr. Comey. Mr. Mueller said he did not decide if charges were warranted because Justice Department policy precluded prosecution of a sitting president. Mr. Trump insisted this amounted to “total exoneration,” although Mr. Mueller explicitly said he was not exonerating the president.

The investigation and media attention on what he called “the Russia hoax” embittered Mr. Trump, and during his four years in the White House he expanded the use of government power to target perceived enemies in ways not seen since Watergate. While other presidents shied away from giving the impression that they were wielding the authority of their office for political vengeance, Mr. Trump was open about going after his adversaries.

Mr. Trump with President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018. Mr. Trump refused to believe U.S. intelligence agencies when they said Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Time and again, he publicly pressed his attorneys general — first Jeff Sessions and then William P. Barr — to prosecute Democrats or government officials who angered him. At various times, he called for the prosecution of Mr. Biden, Ms. Clinton and former President Barack Obama and lashed out when advisers resisted.

He grew particularly obsessed with prosecuting certain people, like former Secretary of State John Kerry. Mr. Trump was fixated on the former top diplomat for talking with the Iranians with whom Mr. Kerry had negotiated a nuclear agreement from which Mr. Trump withdrew the United States. In meeting after meeting, Mr. Trump repeatedly badgered Mr. Barr to charge Mr. Kerry, according to a memoir by John R. Bolton, his former national security adviser.

Mr. Bolton’s memoir was another example of Mr. Trump pushing the bounds of the presidency to punish someone. Angered that Mr. Bolton had criticized him, Mr. Trump pressured the Justice Department to block his former aide from publishing his book. The decision to go to court to squelch a memoir prior to publication after it had been initially cleared for classified information by a career official was seen as so beyond the pale that the assistant attorney general who filed the suit on White House orders, Jody Hunt, immediately resigned.

Mr. Trump tried to put so many people who irritated him in the cross hairs of the legal system that it is hard to maintain a thorough list. He wanted prosecutors to investigate Mr. Comey as well as Andrew G. McCabe, his acting successor, and other F.B.I. officials who participated in the Russia investigation, including Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

The president was so determined to revoke security clearances for John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, and James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, who both criticized him on television, that his chief of staff John F. Kelly estimated that Mr. Trump raised the matter between 50 and 75 times.

He also sought to use his power to help specific companies he favored and penalize those that angered him. He told aides to instruct the Justice Department to block the merger of Time Warner with AT&T, which would include the CNN network, one of the biggest thorns in his side. The Justice Department unsuccessfully sought to stop the merger in court, although officials insisted they acted on their own initiative, not at the behest of the White House.

John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and John F. Kelly, his former chief of staff, in 2018. Mr. Trump asked Mr. Kelly, second from left, to revoke the security clearances of certain critics.Credit...Tom Brenner/The New York Times

Mr. Trump also tried to penalize Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, another media irritant, by pressing for increases in U.S. postal rates for the company and by blocking a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract.

But he monetized the presidency for himself, as his Trump International Hotel in Washington and other properties became magnets for money from people and institutions currying favor, including the governments of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines. Critics took him to court charging him with violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution barring the acceptance of gifts from “any king, prince, or foreign state,” although the Supreme Court threw out legal challenges.

Most notably, Mr. Trump sought to use his office to strong-arm another country to deliver dirt on Mr. Biden, a political rival. The president suspended military aid to Ukraine and leaned on its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to “do us a favor” by announcing an investigation into supposed corruption involving Mr. Biden and other Democrats.

For that, the House ultimately impeached Mr. Trump for abuse of power on a largely party-line vote, making him only the third president ever to be charged with high crimes, although the Senate failed to reach the two-thirds vote necessary for conviction.

Mr. Trump made prolific use of his presidential pardon power to help friends and political allies — and particularly figures who he might have had reason to fear would turn against him by talking with prosecutors if faced with prison time. Critics argued that dangling pardons amounted to an attempt to obstruct investigators.

Among others, Mr. Trump gave pardons or commutations to Paul Manafort, his onetime campaign chairman; Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist; Roger J. Stone Jr., his friend and political adviser, all of whom had been in the cross hairs of prosecutors looking at Mr. Trump. In the final weeks of his presidency, he also used his clemency power to help convicted felons who paid people close to him to lobby for them.

Mr. Trump’s presidency ended in violence as a result of his concerted effort to overturn the 2020 election that he lost so that he could hold onto power despite the will of the voters. He filed dozens of lawsuits and pressured state officials, members of Congress, the Justice Department and his own vice president to help reverse his defeat, something no president has ever done before. And when the crowd of supporters he told to march on Congress stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to stop the finalization of Mr. Trump’s defeat, he sat in the White House watching on television without trying to stop it for 187 minutes.

The House impeached him again as a result, accusing him of inciting the riot, with 10 Republicans joining Democrats. Never before had a president been impeached a second time. The Senate ultimately acquitted him again, but this time seven Republicans voted for conviction and several others said they voted no only because he was already out of office by the time of the trial.

‘The Real Verdict’

Mr. Trump outside the New York State Supreme Court during his criminal trial in May.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

The explosive finale of the Trump presidency did not bring an end to the Trump scandals. On the contrary, it opened a new and unprecedented chapter in the epic and still-unresolved struggles between the 45th president and the American law enforcement system.

In the months after he departed the White House, authorities in Washington, New York, Georgia, Florida and Michigan opened investigations that ultimately led them to Mr. Trump. Civil lawsuits also mounted. Mr. Trump became a target or defendant in so many courthouses that his post-presidency has become a full-employment act for defense attorneys.

One after another, judges and juries found against Mr. Trump, branding him a fraudster, a sexual abuser and, through his real estate firm, a tax cheat. The two verdicts on behalf of E. Jean Carroll have left him on the hook for nearly $100 million including interest. The tax fraud conviction of the Trump Organization made him the first president to head a criminal company.

A separate civil lawsuit brought by the New York State attorney general, Letitia James, went to the heart of Mr. Trump’s self-image as a tycoon of Olympian proportions. Mr. Trump’s practice of valuing properties according to his needs came back to bite him when a judge found him liable for sweeping business fraud, ruling that he illegally inflated his net worth in securing loans. The judge not only hit him with penalties that could top $450 million, he also barred Mr. Trump from leading any business in his original home state for three years. Mr. Trump is appealing.

While that judgment in itself was a first in presidential history, it barely seemed to register compared with the criminal cases brought against Mr. Trump. In what was then a stunning move, the F.B.I. conducted a search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to find classified documents that Mr. Trump took with him when he left the White House and then refused to give back even when subpoenaed. That, too, was a first.

A photo provided by the Justice Department showing boxes of documents stored in a bathroom at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property.Credit...Department of Justice

And then came what might have once been unthinkable — criminal charges against a former president. Mr. Trump was indicted not once, not twice, not three times but four times. While other presidents like Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton were not without their own scandals, none of them were ever charged with felonies.

The first indictment centered on those hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. Alvin L. Bragg, the district attorney for Manhattan, charged Mr. Trump with falsifying business records to cover up the affair and the payments. The second indictment came in federal court in Florida where the special counsel Jack Smith charged Mr. Trump with mishandling classified documents and obstructing authorities trying to retrieve them.

The third and fourth indictments both stemmed from Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election that he lost. Mr. Smith brought an election interference case against him in federal court in Washington, while Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., brought a racketeering case against Mr. Trump for trying to switch Georgia’s electoral votes. The Michigan attorney general, for her part, named Mr. Trump an unindicted co-conspirator in her own election case. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges and blamed Democrats for coming after him for partisan reasons.

The drumbeat of hearings and appeals and procedural fights that have followed may have numbed the shock value, but these cases will stand out in those future history books. He has gone to trial on only one of the four indictments so far, Mr. Bragg’s hush-money case, and the jury unanimously found him guilty of 34 felony counts. Sentencing has been pushed off until after the election.

The other three cases are in various states of limbo in part because of aggressive and successful defense moves by Mr. Trump’s lawyers aimed at delaying or undercutting the charges against him. The Georgia case was sidetracked by revelations that Ms. Willis had a personal relationship with the prosecutor she chose to manage the case.

The Florida case was thrown out in July by U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee, not because she found Mr. Trump innocent but because she considered Mr. Smith’s appointment as special counsel to be procedurally improper, a decision that stunned legal experts. Mr. Smith is appealing, and the charges could be reinstated.

The federal election case was thrown off track for months by Mr. Trump’s assertion that he had immunity as president. The Supreme Court largely accepted the argument, ruling for the first time in history that presidents have substantial immunity for crimes related to official acts. Now Judge Tanya S. Chutkan must determine whether Mr. Trump’s actions in trying to overturn the election to hold onto power constituted official acts, a process that could stretch out for months.

In the end, she may not get a chance. If Mr. Trump is elected next month, he could pull the plug on the federal prosecutions, and even the state cases in New York and Georgia may be frozen while he is in office again. He knows that, and he is counting on it. As he said earlier this year, “The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5, by the people.”

[cosmicway 1,333]

13 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Can Universal Basic Income really improve mental health?

Olivier De Schutter and Philippe van Parijs 21st October 2024

Recent UBI trials reveal that guaranteed income provides immediate mental health relief, but sustaining long-term benefits may depend on lasting economic security.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/can-universal-basic-income-really-improve-mental-health-the-surprising-results-are-in

 

Interest is surging in the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) – a regular income paid by the government to each adult member of society, regardless of their personal or financial circumstances. But can it achieve its stated goals of reducing poverty, improving working conditions and increasing well-being? Thanks to a global flurry of pilot programmes putting these claims to the test, answers to this question are starting to trickle in.

In 2020, 1,000 low-income individuals in the US states of Texas and Illinois began receiving $1,000 per month for three years as part of America’s largest-ever study on UBI. No conditions were attached – participants could use the money as they wished. The results of this large-scale and meticulously conducted randomised control trial offer a fascinating insight into how people might spend their time and money if they were guaranteed a no-strings basic income.

Spending increased, going mainly to food, rent and housing, as did savings. Time spent in employment decreased (by 1.3 hours per week) – not a bad thing in the eyes of UBI advocates, who insist that the goal of UBI is not to increase overall employment but to put pressure on employers to improve job quality and to allow people to devote more time to lifelong learning and to unpaid, often more socially valuable work, such as caregiving. Among those looking for work, participants were more selective about the jobs they applied for and more likely to state “interesting or meaningful work” as a requirement.

On health, the increased income had insignificant effects on most indicators – not too surprising, given that the study took place over three years, while health problems develop over lifetimes. However, mental health was one clear exception consistent with other studies on basic income-like interventions. The study found “large improvements… in mental health measures like stress and psychological distress.” This could be observed, however, only during the first year of the experiment. Why was this improvement so short-lived?

A new UN report being presented to the General Assembly in New York this month offers some answers. The report lays bare how living in poverty significantly increases the risk of mental health problems. While 970 million people – 11% of the world’s population – experience a mental health condition, those on lower incomes are up to three times more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and other common mental illnesses than those with higher incomes.

The report finds that economic insecurity is a major source of stress, particularly in today’s “burnout economy”, in which people on low incomes increasingly find themselves in dehumanising, low-paid jobs that don’t pay enough to support their families or in precarious, casual contracts with wildly unpredictable work schedules. Economic shocks – or even the mere anticipation of such shocks and the impact they will have on income – are found to be a major cause of depression.

Given the permanent state of economic insecurity experienced by those living in poverty, it makes sense that participants in the US experiment reported lower levels of stress and psychological distress once they started to receive their monthly payments. At its most basic, a guaranteed income provides breathing room for those in poverty to not worry about how to put food on the table. Given the multiple other challenges people on low incomes face, a year’s relief from the psychological impacts of economic uncertainty is not to be sniffed at.

Importantly, the income came with no conditions – to find work, undergo training, attend appointments, and fill out complex forms – which, in a world of welfare sanctions and petty conditionality, is increasingly rare. This is despite evidence showing these conditions are ineffective and can even be mentally damaging to beneficiaries.

By the second year of the experiment, the effects of UBI on mental health had faded. Detractors gleefully point to this fact as evidence that the promises of UBI are unfounded. Yet, surely, it supports the view that economic insecurity has a significant impact on mental health and that this sense of security will inevitably diminish as the end of cash transfers approaches.

The value of UBI is not just in the income it offers, but in the security and predictability it provides. What would a lifetime of certainty mean for people in poverty? With their mental health crisis deepening by the day, it’s a question worth asking.

One trend is to limit freedom of movement - and not only for dangerous elements but for everyody.
Another trend is to control the flow of money - so no right to work unless the citizen has the ability to pay a sizeable threshold tax to the state.
The marxist lefties like both as it <<may>> turn the tide to their favour.
For example the night of brexit (23 June 2016) the left in Greece were celebrating, opening champagnes.
 

[Vesper 30,234]

3 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

The marxist lefties like both as it <<may>> turn the tide to their favour.

Name me one nation in the EU that is controlled by 'Marxist lefties'.

For instance we here in Sweden (who moronic RW yanks love to stupidly call a socialist or even communist state) have never once, in history, had the actual socialist and or commie parties, even in a coalition, in a single government of ours. At best they sometimes were in a semi 'supply and confidence' scheme, but never were in an official coaltion agreement.

 

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

We cannot label people terrorists and savages on the demands of colonizing empires.

There is a history of black, Hawaiian, Africans, Vietnamese, Palestinians, Irish, South Americans and countless other being labeled as savages and terrorists by these same people. It is the colonizers the real terrorists. 

[cosmicway 1,333]

1 minute ago, Vesper said:

Name me one nation in the EU that is controlled by 'Marxist lefties'.

For instance we here in Sweden (who moronic RW yanks love to stupidly call a socialist or even communist state) have never once, in history, had the actual socialist and or commie parties, even in a coalition, in a single government of ours. At best they sometimes were in a semi 'supply and confidence' scheme, but never were in an official coaltion agreement.

 

Greece was ruled from 2015 to 2019.
Also the early Papandreou governments of the eighties.
Greek radio and tv company are silly people because BBC have a shop in which they are selling all their old goodies in cassetes, cds and they have nothing.
So we don't have those priceless Pasok gems and the various youtube nerds show us after 2000 only - very very few from before.
In the other countries they have strong opposition parties. In 2006 for example allied themselves with Lepen to vote against the euro-constitution.
I never considered Sweden commie.

[cosmicway 1,333]

8 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

We cannot label people terrorists and savages on the demands of colonizing empires.

There is a history of black, Hawaiian, Africans, Vietnamese, Palestinians, Irish, South Americans and countless other being labeled as savages and terrorists by these same people. It is the colonizers the real terrorists. 

A terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist.
In Greece the nazis (westerners) were terrorists and killed many innocent people but the commies (non westerners) who followed on their footsteps were also terrorists performing mass executions - burning villages.

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

18 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

A terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist.
In Greece the nazis (westerners) were terrorists and killed many innocent people but the commies (non westerners) who followed on their footsteps were also terrorists performing mass executions - burning villages.

So States are terrorists then. It was the Apartheid South African government not the ANC and not Nelson Mandela

[cosmicway 1,333]

3 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

So States are terrorists then. It was the Apartheid South African government not the ANC and not Nelson Mandela

Some states.
Today's most known terrorist sates are Hamash who rule Gaza, Iran, Taliban, North Korea. There may be some others.

[Fulham Broadway 17,335]

7 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Some states.
Today's most known terrorist sates are Hamash who rule Gaza, Iran, Taliban, North Korea. There may be some others.

The problem with that is Hamas neither Palestinians have a State, so your statement is wrong.

The Occupying States are the Terrorists, the ones that run apartheid regimes in their occupied land, then they get their legislature to label the Resistors as 'Terrorists'. 

[Vesper 30,234]

Flames and smoke rose over southern Beirut after Israeli airstrikes forced thousands of civilian residents from their homes HUSSEIN MALLA/AP

[Vesper 30,234]

1 hour ago, cosmicway said:

Greece was ruled from 2015 to 2019.

Greece was not run under an actual Marxist system. That is just flat out false.

The whole term 'Marxist' has been widened so much by the right to include anything remotely leftish/centre left that they disagree with.

The right wing usage of 'Marxist' has rendered the whole term basically meaningless via their expansionistic definitions.

Edited October 21, 2024 by Vesper

[cosmicway 1,333]

5 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Greece was not run under an actual Marxist system. That is just flat out false.

The whole term 'Marxist' has been widened so much by the right to include anything remotely leftish/centre left that they disagree with.

The right wing usage of 'Marxist' has rendered the whole term basically meaningless via their expansionistic definitions.

That was certainly marxist as they come, but without the power to terminate elections.
About old Pasok you can argue what they were - several posts above I posted a video.

[Vesper 30,234]

Wisdom is a virtue, but how do we judge if someone has it?

Our team explored who is considered wise in cultures with contrasting philosophical traditions. The results surprised us.

https://psyche.co/ideas/wisdom-is-a-virtue-but-how-do-we-judge-if-someone-has-it

 

Imagine you’re facing a life-altering decision. You have been offered a once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity abroad, but it means leaving behind your partner who can’t relocate. Torn between your career aspirations and your commitment to the relationship, you start wondering what the wisest way would be to make such a decision. Should you approach the dilemma with a cold mind and weigh all the pros and cons in an analytical and logical manner, or would it be wiser to tune into your feelings and make a decision in line with your heart? Moreover, which one of these ways to handle the dilemma would your friends and family perceive as wise?

The age-old question of what constitutes wisdom has puzzled great minds for centuries. From ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle, who emphasised the value of logical reasoning, to Chinese sages like Confucius, who prioritised moral character and social harmony, the pursuit of wisdom has been a universal human endeavour. In today’s complex world, where many people face unprecedented environmental, economic or societal challenges and difficult decisions, the quest for wisdom remains as relevant as ever.

As social creatures, humans often look to others for guidance and inspiration. We listen to the leaders we admire, the mentors who guide us, and our partners who support us. Wise individuals serve as a contrast to the unwise; they are the ones we choose to follow, vote for, and strive to become. When faced with a difficult dilemma similar to the opening scenario, people will often turn to the role models they consider to be exemplars of wisdom. They might ask themselves, ‘What would Jesus do?’ or, jokingly, ‘What would Beyoncé say?’

But what exactly makes up wisdom? In other words, which characteristics do people perceive as central to a wise judgment – and does this vary around the world? To answer this question, we and a large group of colleagues from around the world conducted a study involving 2,707 participants from 16 cultural groups, including populations as diverse and far-flung as Morocco and Peru, Japan and Slovakia, India and Canada. We presented them with verbal portraits of 10 individuals – including a scientist, a politician and a teacher – and we asked them to compare these targets with each other, and with themselves, based on 19 ways of dealing with a complex situation where there were no right or wrong answers.

Our findings revealed a surprising commonality in how people around the world perceive wisdom

For example, participants compared ‘Dr Morgan, a scientist who gathers information about plants, animals, and people to make sense of the world’ with ‘Alexis, a schoolteacher who educates 12-year-olds about local history and literature’. They decided who was more likely to ‘think before acting or speaking’, ‘think logically’, ‘consider someone else’s perspective’ (and 16 other ways of dealing with complex situations) when trying to make a difficult choice; then, they rated the wisdom of each of these individuals and themselves. We analysed all these comparisons to work out the hidden dimensions that the participants relied upon to judge the actions and feelings of the 10 hypothetical characters; and then we calculated the weight they gave to these dimensions when inferring the wisdom of these characters.

Our findings revealed that, when people make judgments about wisdom, they are essentially linking wisdom to two key dimensions that we call reflective orientation and socio-emotional awareness. Reflective orientation is probably what first comes to mind when you think about a ‘smart’ person: it involves logic, rationality, control over emotions, and the application of past experiences. Imagine a brilliant scientist who spends all their time in the lab studying the mysteries of the Universe, carefully analysing data and drawing conclusions based on evidence. This individual exemplifies the reflective aspect of wisdom.

On the other hand, socio-emotional awareness involves caring for others, active listening, and the ability to navigate complex and uncertain social situations. Picture a compassionate teacher who not only imparts knowledge but also takes the time to understand each student’s unique needs and challenges, flexibly adapting to their needs. This teacher embodies the socio-emotional dimension of wisdom.

We found that the two dimensions are closely related, and people think about both of them when determining whether to label a character as wise. Our participants rated the hypothetical characters as most wise when they scored high on both dimensions.

We also wondered how people’s attitudes to these dimensions of wisdom might vary across cultures. Anthropological and cultural psychological studies have long suggested that wisdom is deeply embedded within specific cultural norms and values. Many researchers have emphasised the differences between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ conceptions of wisdom. The presumed collectivism of Chinese culture, for example, is often attributed to the Confucian and Taoist traditions, which place great importance on social and contextual awareness. In contrast, the individualism of Western cultures is frequently linked to a focus on analytical thinking coming from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, as well as the intellectual ideals of the Enlightenment. Consequently, it seemed straightforward to assume that the socio-emotional awareness dimension we identified would be more closely associated with wisdom by participants in the global East whereas the reflective orientation dimension would be prioritised by those in the West.

Instead, our findings revealed a surprising commonality in how people around the world perceive wisdom in themselves and others, with both the key dimensions receiving a similar weighting across all cultures. We think this commonality is likely rooted in the need to get ahead and the need to get along, which some scholars have referred to as fundamental human needs. Getting ahead involves recognising who is competent and has the agency to make things happen – qualities that align with the reflective orientation dimension of wisdom. Getting along requires abilities related to the socio-emotional awareness dimension of wisdom.

People are willing to acknowledge their cognitive imperfections but believe they excel in empathy

Part of our study also involved asking our participants to rate their own wisdom in comparison with the hypothetical characters. This revealed an interesting bias in self-perception that was also present across cultures. People generally acknowledged their own cognitive limitations, rating themselves lower in reflective orientation than the wisest individuals. However, they tended to see themselves as more socially and emotionally aware than most others. In other words, they were willing to acknowledge their cognitive imperfections but believed they excelled in empathy, communication and awareness of social context.

This degree of cross-cultural consistency surprised us again. Previous research had suggested an overly favourable view of one’s socio-emotional awareness is a characteristic of Western cultures, but in our data this self-perception bias was present across multiple cultures, including those typically depicted as non-Western, such as in China, India, Japan and Morocco. This again challenges some of the persistent stereotypes people hold about East vs West and South vs North.

We propose that this universal bias in self-perception stems from differences in the feedback we receive in everyday life about ourselves in relation to the two dimensions of wisdom. It is much harder to preserve an inflated sense of one’s reflective and analytic qualities because school grades and career outcomes constantly force us to calibrate our self-opinions. However, when it comes to our socio-emotional awareness, there are fewer forms of objective feedback that compel us to adjust an inflated opinion. Imagine an unpopular manager who believes he is caring and approachable because he has an ‘open-door policy’ – even if he hears a negative comment or two, it might be easier to ignore or downplay them than to ignore an exam failure or job rejection.

As we navigate our busy days, it is worth all of us taking a moment now and again to reflect on our own wisdom. Have we been acting with enough wisdom? How can we balance reason with empathy in our lives? In many ways, the path to wisdom is a deeply personal one, shaped by reflection on our individual experiences, cultural backgrounds, and the wise exemplars we choose to follow. But, at the same time, when it comes to judging where others are on this path, it seems that all of us, wherever we are in the world, are looking through a shared lens.

[Vesper 30,234]

Just now, cosmicway said:

That was certainly marxist as they come, but without the power to terminate elections.
About old Pasok you can argue what they were - several posts above I posted a video.

You clearly do not understand what actual Marxism and/or communism are, especially at an actual controlling political system level.

The basic tenets of Marxism are dialectical materialism, historical materialism, the theory of surplus value, class struggle, revolution, dictatorship of the proletariat and communism. Communism is an ideology based on common ownership in the absence of social classes, money, and states.

The government of Greece in 2015 to 2019 never remotely governed in such manner and fashion.

All you do is toss the terms about in some sort of nebulous attempt to inject a perjorative slant against anything remotely leftish/centre left.

[cosmicway 1,333]

11 minutes ago, Vesper said:

You clearly do not understand what actual Marxism and/or communism are, especially at an actual controlling political system level.

The basic tenets of Marxism are dialectical materialism, historical materialism, the theory of surplus value, class struggle, revolution, dictatorship of the proletariat and communism. Communism is an ideology based on common ownership in the absence of social classes, money, and states.

The government of Greece in 2015 to 2019 never remotely governed in such manner and fashion.

All you do is toss the terms about in some sort of nebulous attempt to inject a perjorative slant against anything remotely leftish/centre left.

There are phases of course.
Before sacking Varoufakis and caving in or after ?
Started life as 100% marxist - but always without the power of the gun necessary for communism and of course always at odds with the "original gate 21" who don't like anybody.
After their "sommersault dive" in July 2015 they were marxist for coffee house talk purposes only and -effectively- waiting for the time to come to pass the government to Mitsotakis.

 

Edited October 21, 2024 by cosmicway

[Vesper 30,234]

Sweden loses ground in global equality index

my add (hello RW government austerity ghoul government, a massively regressive tax structure, plus a further cementing of a permanent underclass here due to the massive immigration levels over the past 2+ decades, and the utter failure to integrate them)

https://www.thelocal.se/20241021/today-in-sweden-a-roundup-of-the-latest-news-on-monday-164/

Sweden has plummeted 14 places in four years in the Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index, a global ranking of 164 countries by Oxfam and Development Finance International. In the latest index, Sweden ends up in 24th place, below all its Nordic neighbours.

Sweden is ranked relatively highly in the labour category (sixth place) and somewhat less impressively in the public service category (16th place), but it's final score is dragged down by the tax category, in which the index puts it in 114th place. Norway places top of the table. 

The lowered marginal tax rate in combination with previous decisions from around a decade ago to scrap Sweden's inheritance tax and wealth tax are to blame for Sweden's poor equality ranking in terms of taxes. 

"Current tax policies benefit the wealthiest, whereas those in poverty carry the heaviest burden," Suzanne Standfast, secretary-general for Oxford's Swedish branch, said in a statement.

Swedish vocabulary: taxes – skatter

absolutely shameful for Sweden, we were always in the top 3 for decades, often number 1

Edited October 21, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,234]