Newsletter #76 — January 29, 2023

Colleague Activities

Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.

• Crime / Policing / Guns
  What Does the Evidence Say About U.S. Gun Laws? — A Rand report reviewing the scientific evidence relating to the efficacy of various gun-related laws and policies for preventing gun deaths.
• Civic Education
  Educating for American Democracy (EAD) — EAD is a call to action to invest in strengthening history and civic learning in K-12, and to ensure that civic learning opportunities are delivered equitably throughout the country.
• Civic Education
  Serve America Together — A campaign to make national service part of growing up in America.
• Pursuing a Unifying Common Vision
  More Perfect — A a national campaign to align American citizens and institutions around a shared vision for our democracy – and to marshal all the energy and resources it will take to achieve that future together.
• Saving Democracy
  Mormon Women for Ethical Government — MWEG's mission is to inspire women of faith to be ambassadors of peace who transcend partisanship and courageously advocate for ethical government.

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.

• Left / Right Conflict
  How Moderate Republicans Became an Endangered Species — From a Republican perspective, a look at the potential power of political moderates, the difficulties that moderates have faced, and strategies for overcoming those difficulties.
• Psychological Complexity
  Vertical communities — A thoughtful look at how technology is changing the nature of the communities in which we live our lives.
• Crime / Policing / Guns
  We Profiled the ‘Signs of Crisis’ in 50 Years of Mass Shootings. This Is What We Found. — A report on the search for commonalities in the motives of mass shooters that documents the important role played by social alienation.
• Crime / Policing / Guns
  A Smarter Way to Reduce Gun Deaths — An exceptionally good compilation of reasonable ideas (and supporting evidence) for limiting the terrible toll associated with gun-related violence.
• Improving Problem Assessment
  Partisan ‘Fact Checkers’ Spread Climate-Change Misinformation — A pretty well-documented example of what can go wrong when supposedly objective fact-finders start favoring politically convenient facts over objective evidence.
• Race / Anti-Racism
  Reading, Writing, and … Black Studies? — Amid all of the sound and fury over Florida's proposed AP course in African-American studies, a thought-provoking report that tries to explain the nature of the conflict and the issues involved.
• Big Picture Thinking Projects
  Someone Else's Utopia — A report on a fascinating new compilation of mini-biographies telling the story of how life experiences have altered the views of those who have tried to make the world a better place.
• Escalation Limiting Projects
  We keep moving from one wrong fight to another. Here’s how to stop. — From Amanda Ripley, provocative essay that explores the inflammatory role being played by conflict entrepreneurs and the misconceptions that we spend so much time fighting about.
• Left / Right Conflict
  The Populist Independents — A look at a small, but potentially quite powerful, segment of the electorate -- populists dismayed about the current direction of society who see moderate politicians as the solution.
• Reliable Problem Assessments
  Wikipedia Quietly Shapes How We View the World — An "If it exists it must be possible" story. This one looks at Wikipedia's remarkable success in writing articles that are broadly seen as objective and reliable.

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 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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