Newsletter #142 — July 30, 2023
by Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess
Colleague Activities
Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.
- Conflict Advice
Conflict Hacks: A Summer Survival Kit from Amanda Ripley — Easy ideas everyone can use to defuse tension and create community. - System Thinking Strategies
Co-Intelligence Institute — The Institute develops innovations in individual and collective wisdom, choice-making, and co-creativity, developing tools that help people and communities design effective self-governance systems. - Saving Democracy
More than Red and Blue: Political Parties and American Democracy — A study done by the American Political Science Association and Protect Democracy that outlines the challenges and promise of political parties in the U.S. They are dangerous--but needed nevertheless. - Saving Democracy
Can We Transform Our Politics? Utah Governor Spencer Cox Addresses the Braver Angels Convention — Governor Cox talks about his new "Disagree Better" Initiative which he hopes will help revive healthy American politics because, he says "the alternative is unthinkable." - Domination and Oppression
The Resurgence of the ‘Oldest Hatred’: The Effort to Combat Antisemitism — A panel discussion held at the Aspen, Institute with Katie Couric, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Eric Ward and Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall talking about how to combat rising antisemitism. - Authoritarianism
Toward a People-Powered Democracy — Organizers of the 22nd Century Conference: Forging a People-Powered Democracy reflect on ways to repel the authoritarian tide and create a resilient, inclusive multiracial, feminist, and pluralistic democracy. - Conflict Advice
DIYcivity — Civity launches a new Do-It Yourself Page with tips for practicing civity, seeding civity, and resources for doing both.
Beyond Intractability in Context
From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better.
- Runaway Escalation
‘The Country’s Already Been Destroyed’ — An especially well-informed and thorough analysis of Israel's ongoing difficulties and look at how quickly complex societal conflicts can spin out of control. - Psychological Complexity
The A(braham) Bomb — A thought-provoking way of looking at the grand sweep of human history – one that focuses on the long shadow of the Abrahamic faiths and the belief we can somehow perfect society. - Effective Problem Assessment
The limits of our personal experience and the value of statistics — A clear and persuasive explanation of how statistical data provides a way of looking at the world that is different from and, in many ways, superior to more direct and personal sources of information. - Psychological Complexity
How Trumpism Differs From Fascism — An argument that, unlike the first Trump administration, a second Trump administration might actually constitute a new kind of fascism – one that favors isolationism over expansionism. - Suppressing Opponents
How to Know When a Prosecution Is Political — A practical guide for determining when political prosecutions arise from legitimate efforts to equitably enforce the rule of law and when they are disingenuous tactics used to weaken a political rival. - Psychological Complexity
Protest Porn -- The pleasure-seeking behind today’s righteous causes — An analysis of the complex psychological reasons why people become involved in mass protests and why those protests are often viewed in such apocalyptic terms. - Climate Change
Backlash to climate policies is growing. A new strategy is needed. — Growing reason to believe that many projects designed to reduce CO2 emissions are running into serious trouble because of a failure to anticipate and respond effectively to likely sources of conflict. - Race / Anti-Racism
Business Is Caught in a Diversity Trap — A story about what happens when Democratic and Republican-led states tell businesses that they have to approach questions of racial equity in different and incompatible ways. - Left / Right Conflict
Democrats and Republicans Are Living in Different Worlds — A big reason why our conflicts are so intense is that we have such different images of the world that we think we inhabit. - Interstate War
The Risks of One of the Most Severe Tools in America’s Foreign Policy Arsenal — We tend to think of economic sanctions as an effective and generally nonviolent way of confronting geopolitical rivals. Is that true? What are the upsides and the downsides? - Race / Anti-Racism
‘Antiracists’ vs. Academic Freedom — A look at the way in which California Community Colleges (with 1.8 million students) are assuring that all faculty members are unquestioningly supportive of the system's DEI policies. - Left / Right Conflict
The Damaged Brands of America’s Two Political Parties — A report on a new poll that documents the growing gap between the positions of the United States' two political parties and the general population. - Social Complexity
The Right's Plot for a Moral Transformation — The Left tends to think that social problems are caused by economic factors while the Right emphasizes the role of culture. In this context, an explanation of a culture-based theory of social change. - Social Complexity
The $1 billion gamble to ensure AI doesn’t destroy humanity — A description of an expensive and bold initiative designed to help assure us that the coming AI revolution will provide us with information we can trust.
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