Newsletter #132 — July 9, 2023
By Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess
Reader Suggested Links
Highlighting links suggested by our readers. Please send us links to things that you find useful.
- Large-Scale Violence
The Fury in France—and Across the West — An essay that helps explain large-scale civil unrest that has been sweeping France and how it is different from the United States' superficially similar George Floyd protests. - Improving Problem Assessment
Opinion: How Joe Rogan's vaccine-debate pitch undermines real science — A provocative look at the circumstances under which debate does and does not help audiences develop a more accurate and morally sound opinions about controversial issues. - Saving Democracy
The End of Democratic Capitalism? — A review of an important new contribution to efforts to understand and surmount the challenges facing democracy and its capitalist economic system. - Authoritarianism
The Corruption of Lindsey Graham — A lengthy and very detailed analysis of the incremental changes that led to Donald Trump's transformation of the Republican Party and its increasing embrace of authoritarianism.
Colleague Activities
Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.
- Effective Communication Strategies
AllSides Media Bias Chart™ Version 9: Updated Ratings for AP, IJR, TIME, TheBlaze, and More — An update on a systematic effort to assess the political bias of major news sources – an assessment that reveals that many publications are not as objective as their audience thinks. - Constructive Communication
Courageous Dialogues — A research project that aims to identify best strategies, tools, and practices for overcoming polarization in various contexts. - Developing a Unifying Vision
Our Relationship to The Future: Narratives, Imagination Skills and Futures Literacy — A discussion of and resources to help people envision positive futures while also engaging honestly with the past. - Constructive Communication
Narrative Competency — A short description of the meaning of narrative competency, together with annotated links to 15 documents on how to develop and use such competence. - Psychological Complexity
Trauma Healing — A short description of the costs of trauma, and approaches to trauma healing, together with annotated links to ten documents with more in-depth information. - Race / Anti-Racism
Rethinking Systems Design for Racial Justice & Equity — Recordings of a Spring 2022 symposium held by the Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution and the Divided Community Project, with the Harvard Negotiation Program, and the Stanford Center for Conflict Resolution - Theories of Change
Collective Impact — Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination, yet the social sector remains focused on the isolated intervention of individual organizations. - Theories of Change
The Dawn of System Leadership — The deep changes necessary to accelerate progress against society's most intractable problems require someone who catalyzes collective leadership.
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.
- Developing a Unifying Vision
Two visions of environmentalism — A thoughtful and important observation that the conflict is not between the pro-and anti-environmental movement but between two different visions for the environmental movement. - Interstate War
World War III Will Be Fought With Viruses — Yet another reason why we should not assume that catastrophic world wars are a thing of the past. The time has come to give war prevention the additional attention it deserves. - Countering Misinformation
The Rage and Joy of MAGA America — A thoughtful essay offering those on the progressive left new insights into the appeal of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. - Authoritarianism
What Makes Putin and the World’s Autocrats So Resilient? — As we think about ways of building more resilient democracies, it is worth paying attention to what makes autocracy resilient and why it is so important that we not let it get established. - Improving Problem Assessment
Google Isn’t Grad School — An exploration of the relationship between the ability to retrieve lots of facts relevant to a particular issue and real thinking. - Power Sharing
A Radical Idea for Fixing Congress: Proportional Representation — An idea for restructuring Congress in ways that replace the current, usually noncompetitive "winner take all" system with real choices that help assure that minority views are represented. - Race / Anti-Racism
10 Notes on the End of Affirmative Action — A series of provocative and controversial observations about affirmative action well worth considering. - Saving Democracy
Extremism In Defense of Moderation Is No Virtue — A review/summary of an important new book about why the U.S. Congress is so dysfunctional and what might be done about it. - Interstate War
What the U.S. Military Still Hasn’t Learned From Iraq — Key to not repeating the mistakes of the past is an ability to learn from those mistakes – something that the United States is not doing very well as it looks back on the war on terror. - Theories of Change
The Case For Effective Altruism — A supportive look at theories of change built around the notion of effective altruism and long-termism. - Theories of Change
The Case Against Longtermism — A contrarian look at long-termism for those thinking about embracing the concept. - Interstate War
Here’s why supplying Ukraine with cluster munitions would be a terrible mistake — In the context of Ukraine, an assessment of the complex issues surrounding attempts to ban weapons of war that cause death and destruction long after the fighting ends. - Saving Democracy
Biden faces renewed pressure to embrace Supreme Court overhaul — More evidence that the credibility of the United States' judicial system is collapsing and being replaced by partisan efforts to shape the courts in ways that deliver the politically desired judgements. - Climate Change
Climate Journalism is Broken — A look at the way in which the many problems afflicting contemporary journalism are impacting coverage of climate-related issues and, potentially, distorting our response to the crisis.
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About the MBI Newsletters
Once a week or so, we, the BI Directors, share some thoughts, along with new posts from the Hyper-polarization Blog and and useful links from other sources. We used to put this all together in one newsletter which went out once or twice a week. We are now experimenting with breaking the Newsletter up into several shorter newsletters. Each Newsletter will be posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
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