Psychology for human rights
Contributions to the campaign war chests of Republican Party politicians who hold contemptuous views of democracy are unsurprising from mega-corporations and right-wing billionaires. The top priority for these donors is to have their self-aggrandizing agenda front-and-center in the halls of Congress. So even when democracy itself is under attack, they’re going to place profits over …
Continue reading “The American Psychological Association’s “Psychology PAC” Must Do Better”
Next month will mark the 20th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the years since January 11, 2002, nearly 800 “detainees”—few with any meaningful connections to international terrorism—have been imprisoned there, where they have been subjected to abuse and, in some cases, torture. From the outset, members …
Continue reading “The American Psychological Association Still Owes Guantanamo’s Victims an Apology”
As the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 nears, there will be many valuable reflections about that horrific day and about the subsequent “global war on terror” that devastated countless lives around the world. My own focus here is narrower: to briefly consider this disturbing two-decade period in relation to the American Psychological Association (APA) and professional …
Continue reading “U.S. Psychology’s Unfinished Journey from 9/11”
Given the horrific toll of the Iraq War, that disastrous misadventure hardly seems like a good template for combating COVID-19. Yet in key ways, recent pronouncements from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—whose state is experiencing an overwhelming surge in cases and hospitalizations amid his prohibition on mask requirements—should remind us of the propaganda we once …
Continue reading “Rumsfeld Then, DeSantis Now: The Lies That Bind”
Last week, Mansoor Adayfi, Moazzam Begg, Lakhdar Boumediane, Sami Al Hajj, Ahmed Errachidi, Mohammed Ould Slahi, and Moussa Zemmouri published an open letter in the New York Review of Books. Noting that many Guantánamo detainees had been abducted from their homes, sold to the United States for bounties, and subjected to physical and psychological torture, these …
Continue reading “Psychologists Should Now Lead the Call to Close Guantánamo”
Somewhere, deep in the bowels of our nation’s capital, today’s Democratic Party establishment keeps close guard over a hulking, fearsome, and often temperamental machine. With hundreds of moving parts, it’s surprising that the elaborate contraption has only one purpose: to take bold and popular policy proposals that could improve millions of lives, chew them up, …
Continue reading “With the Win-Win Machine, Most of Us Actually Lose”
First came the new names—Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and others—all added one by one to the long list of tragic, unjustifiable police killings of Black Americans. Then came the batons, the pepper spray, the tear gas, the flash-grenades, the helicopters, the armored vehicles, and the rubber bullets wielded against nonviolent Black Lives Matter …
Continue reading “Black Lives Matter: Resisting the Propaganda of Status Quo Defenders”
It’s hard to know exactly where the Trump Administration found the inspiration for its newest set of draconian asylum rules. Might it have been a National Geographic special where a giant anaconda encircles its prey, squeezes it to death, and then swallows it whole? Or perhaps a late-night, B-grade horror film in which some evil …
The following brief excerpt is from Political Mind Games: How the 1% Manipulate Our Understanding of What’s Happening, What’s Right, and What’s Possible by Roy Eidelson. A free PDF version of the book is available here. With the Change-Is-Dangerous vulnerability mind game, today’s plutocrats defend their agenda in a different way: by insisting that their …
Continue reading “Status Quo Bias and the “Change Is Dangerous” Mind Game”
In professional wrestling circles, the Legion of Doom is a name that conjures up the fearsome physiques and painted faces of one of the great tag teams of all time. In the political arena today, the same moniker aptly describes an even more daunting and dangerous duo: the profits-over-people corporate wing of the Democratic …
Continue reading “Beware the Bipartisan Legion of Doom: Corporate Democrats and Trump’s GOP”