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Yankee Micro Social Psychology Part I
Orientation Developing a Marxist social psychology is a very important aspect of explaining what is going on within the individual in relation to society as well as what is going on in small group interactions between themselves. What we find when we examine social psychology in Yankeedom is what you might suspect, and that is […]
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Crowds, Masses and Movements
Orientation Why study crowds, masses and movements? It is tempting to imagine that as socialists we must know a great deal about crowds, masses, and in medieval thought individual meant inseparable, that is indivisible. People were defined as individuals by reference to the groups of which they were members. Group membership defined their very identity […]
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Solitary Confinement
At least as one response to the perceived failures of the French Revolution, some of what became the Romantic movements in the 19th century turned away from social interaction, especially collective activity, and toward individual isolation. Such a reaction was not peculiar to this period. In fact, withdrawal from social contact was an established niche […]
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Commodifying the Life of the Mind
As a long-time leader in higher ed unionism, I was recently asked to comment on the transformative changes taking place in American higher education. To answer, I reflected on my nearly sixty years in higher education. I was a working-class kid from New York City who went to CCNY, where tuition was free. Yes, free. […]
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The Science of Superstition
Orientation Examples of Superstitious Behavior Stuart Vyse is a psychologist and the author of one of the books I’ll be referencing called Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition. In that book he used his students as guinea pigs for his research on superstition. Before taking one of his exams Vyse found the following superstitions […]
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The Priesthood of Expertise
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. — Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, 1935 In The Death of Expertise, national security expert Tom Nichols warns that knowledge is under attack by an ill-informed public determined to replace […]
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Resisting Genetically Mutilated Food and the Eco-Modern Nightmare: Together, “Just You and Me”
This image is symbolic of everything that is wrong with modern society. A gas leak from Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal in 1984 resulted in around 560,000 injured (respiratory problems, eye irritation, etc.), 4,000 severely disabled and 20,000 dead. Not only that, but the pesticides produced at the factory and the model of farming […]
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We’re rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic: don’t ask me to help out
A small section of my followers are excited that someone on Substack has written a “rebuttal” that supposedly “tears apart” my recent article on the climate crisis. Loathe as I am to promote climate scepticism, for those who are interested it can be read here. Its supporters seem to believe it outs me as a […]
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Heroic Skeptical Odysseys Into Parapsychology Part II
(Image is of young skeptics in action) Summary of Part I The purpose of this two-part article is to present an eight-step method that a self-organized community of scientific skeptics developed specifically to investigate the claims of the existence of paranormal phenomenon. I began Part I with a survey of what the Yankee population believes […]
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