Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Serious as the problem is of Americans being resistant to vaccinate their children, I haven’t previously asked the Erinyes to weigh in on it. That’s because, serious as it is, I found it somewhat amorphous – difficult to know what to do or how to approach. However, Timothy Callaghan and Matt Motta tie this issue to all other issues on a way that really got my attention, and will probably get yours too. More on that point after the article.
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Conspiracy theories and fear of needles contribute to vaccine hesitancy for many parents

Timothy Callaghan, Texas A&M University and Matt Motta, Oklahoma State University

Over 1,160 cases of measles have been confirmed in the U.S. in 2019. That is more measles cases in just seven months than any full year this decade, and, more problematically, more than all U.S. measles cases from 2010-2013 and 2015-2017 combined.

Lawmakers in some states, such as Washington and New York, are already stepping in to combat the outbreak by eliminating certain exemptions from vaccination. We will soon know whether these new policies produce higher vaccination rates.

However, a fundamental question remains: Why are some parents – despite the scientific community’s conclusions that childhood vaccines are safe – putting their children at risk by not vaccinating them in the first place? Public health experts and health behavior scholars like us have been trying to solve this mystery for years.

Why don’t some parents vaccinate?

Religious beliefs or barriers to accessing health services certainly explain the actions of some, but these factors do not explain the behavior of most parents who choose not to vaccinate. Instead, recent academic research
suggests that most parents who display vaccine hesitancy – by either refusing to vaccinate their children or delaying vaccination past recommended vaccine schedules – do so because of misinformation about vaccine safety, their political ideology, the influence of social media, and other factors like economic circumstances and trust.

As important as these factors are, we wondered if the behavior of vaccine-hesitant parents might also have deeper, psychological origins. For that reason, in a new paper published in Social Science and Medicine, we analyzed the possibility that parental decisions to delay vaccinating children could be driven by three underlying psychological factors: conspiratorial thinking, needle sensitivity and moral purity.

Facts don’t matter when people don’t trust them

People with conspiratorial styles of thinking tend to believe that the government, businesses and other powerful actors conspire to influence a wide range of social and political events in the world around us. They don’t necessarily believe any one particular conspiracy theory – such as the belief that NASA faked the Moon landing, or that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy. Still, because many conspiracy theories involve collusion between powerful actors, these people are more likely than the typical American to belief in conspiracy theories generally.

Given the variety of conspiracy theories surrounding vaccine safety, including disproven theories that vaccines cause autism or that pharmaceutical companies are hiding the dangers of vaccines, we wanted to test whether parents with tendencies toward conspiratorial styles of thought may be more likely to delay vaccinating their children because they have internalized these conspiracies.

Needle fear and vaccine behavior

In addition, we also wanted to see whether parents who are afraid of or are otherwise averse to needles themselves – what psychologists call “needle sensitivity” – are less likely to vaccinate their children when they are supposed to. Prior research suggests that as many as 24% of adults have a fear of needles and that up to 90% of 15-18 month old children and 45% of children aged 4 to 6 are seriously distressed by injections.

Given these statistics, we wanted to see whether some parental decisions not to vaccinate weren’t necessarily because they thought vaccines were dangerous, but because the parents were afraid of needles and didn’t want to put their children through something that causes them so much distress.

The role of bodily sanctity

Finally, we wanted to test whether a notion called moral purity – an aversion to actions that violate bodily sanctity – might also explain parental anti-vax behavior.

Individuals with high levels of moral purity try to avoid experiences that induce disgust, violate sanctity or corrupt the body. While vaccines are widely regarded as safe, we, like some other scholars studying related topics, hypothesized that some might see the injection of the disease antigens found in vaccines as a violation of the body’s purity that should be avoided in their children.

Psychological predictors of parental vaccine behavior

To test our hypotheses, we asked more than 4,000 American parents in a September 2018 survey about the vaccination decisions they made for their children and why they made those decisions. Specifically, we asked parents if they had ever delayed vaccinating their children, if they had only vaccinated their children because they had to for school, if they had chosen their child’s doctor based on their willingness to delay vaccinating, and if they would be willing to relocate their families so their child could attend a school that does not require vaccination.

Before asking these questions, we also gave survey respondents a series of questions designed to measure conspiratorial thinking, needle sensitivity and moral purity, as well as standard demographic questions.

In support of our expectations, we found that parents with high levels of conspiratorial thinking were 15% more likely to report delaying their children’s vaccinations. They were also 11% more likely to report having chosen their doctors based on their willingness to delay, 25% more likely to report only vaccinating their children so they can enroll in school, and 18% more likely to claim that they would be willing to relocate to a new school district.

We also found that parents’ psychological dispositions toward needles influenced reported anti-vaccination behavior. Parents in our study with high levels of sensitivity toward needles were between 14-16% more likely to engage in the each of the delay behaviors included in our study. This would suggest that if needle-free vaccine delivery mechanisms were more widespread, we might get many of these children their vaccines on time. Inconsistent with our predictions, we found no evidence that parents’ beliefs in moral purity altered their vaccine decision-making for their children, broadly speaking.

A difficult process

Our research suggests that anti-vaccine attitudes have deeply grounded psychological origins, which may be quite difficult to change. Consequently, our work identifies an important challenge for medical professionals, health departments and scientists: How can they convince vaccine hesitant parents to vaccinate their children, when it is unlikely that they’ll be able to make parents stop fearing needles, or to stop endorsing a conspiratorial way of thinking?

One possibility is to present information about vaccines to parents strategically, using the psychological factors identified here as important determinants of anti-vaccine behavior as a guide. For example, if we know that parents who are prone to thinking in conspiratorial ways are less likely to want to vaccinate their children, efforts to encourage childhood vaccination may be more successful if we avoid making mention of scientific studies, which parents might see as motivated by ulterior motives, or tying information to health departments (which these parents might find untrustworthy).

Figuring out which communication strategies are most effective for different audiences is something academics and science communicators still need to test. We hope, however, that our work offers a useful starting point for doing precisely this.

[ Like what you’ve read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter. ]

Timothy Callaghan, Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University School of Public Health, Texas A&M University and Matt Motta, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Oklahoma State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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This simple statement is so much bigger than just vaccinations – important though those are. It speaks to everything that is wrong with our nation, indeed with the world, particularly today.

Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, if you can come up with a solution, or even one or more partial solutions, to this, you will save the world. That’s the bottom line.

The Furies and I will be back.

Cross posted to Care2 HERE.

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

I have something else (partly) written, but it will keep. I fell into a story this morning which is important, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License, so it can be quoted.

Incidentally, I have been predicting since the 1980’s that the US would be seeing a dumbing down of citizens due in part to children being exposed to “stuff.” Of course there are many other contributors, such as exponentially increased home schooling for all the wrong reasons (yes, there are some good reasons, but that’s not what we’re seeing, and in any case, good reasons would not account for the numbers), and yes, there are many people who grew up in the eighties and since, and who are growing up now, who are pretty clearly not impaired, but with so many Americans, there is clearly something going on. Naturally, Republicans not only don’t mind the existing conditions, but want to worsen them (I assume to ensure a steady supply of Republican voters.)
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Published on
Friday, July 19, 2019
by Common Dreams

‘A Total Disgrace’: Outrage as Trump EPA Says It Won’t Ban Pesticide Linked to Brain Damage in Children

“The EPA is endangering the lives of children to protect pesticide industry profits.”

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

In a move environmentalists denounced as yet another case of the Trump administration putting industry profits over public health, the Environmental Protection Agency announced on Thursday that it will not ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to brain damage in children.

“By allowing chlorpyrifos to stay in our fruits and vegetables, Trump’s EPA is breaking the law and neglecting the overwhelming scientific evidence that this pesticide harms children’s brains,” Patti Goldman, attorney with Earthjustice said in a statement. “It is a tragedy that this administration sides with corporations instead of children’s health.”

EPA chief Andrew Wheeler’s decision to reject a petition by environmental groups calling for a ban on the neurotoxic chemical ignores the assessments of his agency’s own scientists, said Tiffany Finck-Haynes, pesticides and pollinators program manager for Friends of the Earth.

“The EPA’s refusal to ban chlorpyrifos ignores decades of science showing that this pesticide has irrevocable effects on human health and the environment,” said Finck-Haynes. “The EPA is endangering the lives of children to protect pesticide industry profits.”

Chlorpyrifos has been banned for household use since 2000, but the pesticide is still used by farmers on “more than 50 fruit, nut, cereal, and vegetable crops,” according to the New York Times.

“In 2016,” the Times reported, “more than 640,000 acres were treated with chlorpyrifos in California alone.”

The Obama administration in 2015 proposed banning use of the pesticide on food crops, but former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt authorized its continued use in 2017.

“This is a total disgrace,” Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) tweeted in response to the EPA’s decision on Thursday.

Finck-Haynes of Friends of the Earth said that as the federal government continues to work on behalf of chemical interests, states must take immediate action to protect the public and the environment.

“While the federal government refuses to act, we urge states to step in, ban chlorpyrifos, and demonstrate that they will safeguard public health and the environment,” said Finck-Haynes. “We call on [New York] Governor [Andrew] Cuomo to sign the chlorpyrifos ban bill sitting on his desk and protect New Yorkers from this toxic pesticide.”

In a statement on Thursday, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) highlighted the Trump administration’s ties to Dow Chemical, the largest producer of chlorpyrifos in the United States.

“The relationship between President Trump and Dow Chemical… has been called into question,” the group said. “Among other things, the chemical manufacturing giant reportedly donated $1 million for Trump’s inauguration, and its CEO previously played a chief advisory role to the president, heading up his now defunct American Manufacturing Council.”

Erik Olson, senior director of health and food at NRDC, said the effort to achieve a ban on chlorpyrifos will continue.

“Until EPA gets this stuff out of our fields and off our food,” said Olson, “this fight is not over.”
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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I despair of the current national regime. But maybe you could help the states pass legislation of their own. Some are already doing so, but more are needed.

The Furies and I will be back.

Cross posted to Care2 HERE.

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

With so much of our national attention focused on the concentration camps at our southern border, I thought the time might be right to look at a scholarly view on all kinds of civil rights issues faced by Mexicans in the United States. So I thought I’d share this report by David FitzGerald, Angela Y. McClain, and Gustavo López. I do want to point out that the study population comprised people who were born in Mexico and are now living in the United States. That includes documented immigrants, undocumented immigrants, citizens of the US, and non-citizens of the US, who were born in Mexico. It does not include anyone from Central or South America other than Mexico, though it may not be unreasonable to conclude that those persons may experience similar treatment.

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Mexicans in US routinely confront legal abuse, racial profiling, ICE targeting and other civil rights violations

David FitzGerald, University of California San Diego; Angela Y. McClean, University of California San Diego, and Gustavo López, University of California San Diego

Officially, the Constitution of the United States gives everyone on U.S. soil equal protection under the law – regardless of nationality or legal status.

But, as recent stories of the neglectful treatment of migrant children in government detention centers demonstrate, these civil rights are not always granted to immigrants.

We are scholars focused on U.S.-Mexico migration. Our report on the enforcement of U.S. immigration law under presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, presented in February to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, documented pervasive and systematic civil rights violations against Mexicans living in the United States.

Some of the abuses we documented – which include racial profiling, discriminatory treatment and due process violations – result from the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies. Others began much earlier, under Obama or well before.

All paint a troubling picture about the rule of law in the United States and the challenges facing America’s largest immigrant group.

Discrimination and deportation

An estimated 11.3 million people born in Mexico now live in the United States – 3% of the total U.S. population.

About 5 million of them are unauthorized immigrants, meaning Mexicans make up just under half of the 10.5 million undocumented immigrants in the country. The other 6.3 million Mexicans in the U.S. are either lawful permanent residents or dual nationals who are naturalized U.S. citizens.

Based on these figures, we found, Immigration and Customs Enforcement – or ICE, the agency that carries out the nation’s immigration laws – arrests Mexican immigrants at levels that are disproportionate to their share of the unauthorized immigrant population.

Roughly 70% of immigrants deported from the U.S. interior in 2015 were Mexican, the most recent year that such detailed deportation data are available.

Another 550,000 young Mexican American “Dreamers” – immigrants who were brought to the U.S. unlawfully as children – became subject to deportation when Trump in September 2017 rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which gave them temporary protection from deportation.

Not all deportations violate immigrants’ civil rights. The Immigration and Nationality Act says immigrants may be deported for violating a long list of criminal and administrative laws.

But evidence suggests that Mexicans and other Latinos are sometimes targeted for arrest based on their race or ethnicity.

In 2014, independent monitors at a Customs and Border Protection checkpoint in Arivaca, Arizona, just north of the U.S.-Mexico border, found that vehicle occupants who appeared to be Latino were 26 times more likely to be asked to show identification than white-looking vehicle occupants, who are frequently waved through the checkpoint.

And in 2012, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation in Alamance County, North Carolina, found that the sheriff had instructed deputies to “go out there and get me some of those taco eaters” by targeting Latinos in traffic stops and other law enforcement activities.

The DOJ concluded that the county demonstrated an “egregious pattern of racial profiling” – a violation of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees everyone equal protection under the law.

Family separation

Mexicans in the United States have seen their constitutional rights violated in other ways.

The most egregious example was the forced separation of families found to have crossed the border illegally.

Under this Trump administration policy, which began in April 2018, at least 2,654 migrant children – and perhaps thousands more – were taken from their parents and held in government custody while their parents were criminally prosecuted for crossing the border unlawfully.

Thirty of the children known to have been separated from their families were Mexican; the rest were from Central America. Poor record-keeping has made it difficult for all of them to be reunited with their families before their parents’ deportation.

Together, these actions violate the constitutional rights to legal due process, equal protection and, according to the Southern District of California, the right of parents to determine the care for their children.

“The liberty interest identified in the Fifth Amendment provides a right to family integrity or to familial association,” wrote Judge Dana M. Sabraw in a June 2018 ruling.

More routine civil rights violations happen to Mexicans in the U.S. every day, our report found.

Though children born in the U.S. are entitled by law to American citizenship regardless of their parents’ immigration status, hundreds of undocumented Mexican women in Texas have been denied birth certificates for their U.S.-born children since 2013, according to a lawsuit filed by parents. In 2016, Texas settled the lawsuit and agreed to expand the types of documents immigrants can use to prove their identity.

And in both Arizona and Texas, so-called “show me your papers” laws allow police to demand identification from anyone they have a “reasonable suspicion” may be undocumented, which may lead to discriminatory targeting of Latinos.

Once in government detention, surveys conducted in Mexico of recently deported immigrants show, Mexican deportees are often badly treated.

On average, in 2016 and 2017, about half of all recently deported Mexicans reported having no access to medical services or a bathroom while in government custody. One-third reported experiencing extreme heat or cold.

Mexicans are not alone in their negative experiences at border patrol facilities.

A recent report by the Office of Inspector General found unsafe and unsanitary conditions at several U.S. immigrant detention centers, and immigration lawyers found food shortages at some migrant children’s shelters.

A climate of fear

While Mexicans in the United States have faced biased law enforcement and discrimination for many decades, their treatment appears to have worsened since President Trump took office in 2017 with an openly anti-Mexican agenda.

A survey of Mexicans recently deported from the United States found that the number of people who reported experiencing verbal abuse or physical assault during their time in the U.S. increased 47% between 2016 and 2017.

The number of hate crimes against Latinos reported to the FBI also rose 24% in 2017 compared to 2016 – increasing from 344 incidents to 427.

Mexico is concerned about its citizens in the United States.

In March, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard announced it would provide more consular services online to increase the reach of Mexico’s 50 brick-and-mortar consulates in the U.S. and provide more legal training to consulate officials.

To support Mexicans in the U.S. with deportation and other immigration cases, the Mexican government will also strengthen its official ties with U.S.-based legal aid providers.

In theory, Mexico shouldn’t have to scramble to defend the rights of its citizens in the U.S. because the U.S. Constitution would. But, in practice, the civil rights of immigrants are simply not always guaranteed.

[ Like what you’ve read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter. ]

David FitzGerald, Theodore E. Gildred Chair in U.S.-Mexican Relations, Professor of Sociology, and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California San Diego; Angela Y. McClean, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology, Fellow and Graduate Researcher at Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California San Diego, and Gustavo López, Graduate Researcher at Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California San Diego

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, clearly this pattern of civil abuse has been building for a long time, and is not going to go away overnight. But you can still help us to recognize and call it out when we see it, as well as to applaud anyone who is trying to make things better … like those quinceañeras who are using their fiestas to promote voter registration.

The Furies and I will be back.

Cross posted to Care2 HERE.

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Since Juneteenth was this week, and I forgot to recognize it, and others have said they weren’t aware of it, I thought it might be a good time to do a little back story on it, and this article from The Conversation does a pretty good job with explaining why it matters – and how African-American independence is tied to the criminal justice system
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Juneteenth: Freedom’s promise is still denied to thousands of blacks unable to make bail

Matthew Larson, Wayne State University

June 19 marks Juneteenth, a celebration of the de facto end of slavery in the United States.

For hundreds of thousands of African-Americans stuck in pretrial detention – accused but not convicted of a crime, and unable to leave because of bail – that promise remains unfulfilled. And coming immediately after Father’s Day, it’s also a reminder of the loss associated with the forced separation of families.

On a very personal level, I know how this separation feels. Every Father’s Day since 2011, I’ve been reminded of the unexpected death of my dad at the age of 48. But also on a professional level, as a criminologist who has been researching mass incarceration for the past decade, I understand the disproportionate impact it’s had on African-Americans, destabilizing black families in the process.

Blacks behind bars

Juneteenth is a celebration of African-Americans’ triumph over slavery and access to freedom in the U.S., which occurred in Galveston, Texas, in June of 1865, over two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

While Juneteenth is a momentous day in U.S. history, it is important to appreciate that the civil rights and liberties promised to African-Americans have yet to be fully realized. As legal scholar Michelle Alexander forcefully explains, this is a consequence of Jim Crow laws and the proliferation of incarceration that began in the 1970s, including the increase of people placed in pretrial detention and other criminal justice policies.

There are 2.3 million people currently incarcerated in American prisons and jails – including those not convicted of any crime. Black people comprise 40 percent of them, even though they represent just 13 percent of the U.S. population.

Not yet guilty but not free

More troubling is the number of incarcerated individuals currently held in jail for crimes of which they have not yet been convicted.

The Prison Policy Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank that focuses on mass incarceration, has reported that over a half million citizens are languishing in pretrial detention. And like most criminal justice outcomes, the burden of this disproportionately falls on minorities, especially black men and women.

In local jails alone, over 300,000 people are awaiting trial for property, drug or public order crimes. And again, these disproportionately black defendants are confined and separated from their families, friends and jobs simply because they lack the means to post cash bail – the only reason they can’t get out.

Toll on families

It should be no surprise, then, that 1 in 9 black children now has a parent behind bars, compared with the national rate of 1 in 28.

And many of these children are at an increased likelihood of experiencing physical and mental health issues, academic struggles and a range of other behavioral problems. Children of incarcerated mothers are also at heightened odds of ending up in foster care and being exposed to other traumas.

Being the partner of an incarcerated individual is another often stressful experience that also falls disproportionately on black citizens, particularly women.

Some good news

The good news is that such injustices are receiving growing attention nationwide.

Just City, a nonprofit organization working to reduce the harms of the criminal justice system, has campaigned to raise funds and promote awareness of its Memphis Community Bail Fund project for Father’s Day – in part because nearly half a million of the black men behind bars are dads.

The aim of the project is to provide both financial and legal support for defendants lacking resources to independently secure their pretrial release, with the goal of the campaign being the release of jailed fathers so that they could be with their kids for the holiday.

Bail funds similar to Just City’s have proliferated throughout the U.S.

On one hand, the multiplication of these organizations is encouraging and reason for optimism. On the other, their growth is another reminder that many of the freedoms celebrated on Juneteenth remain unrealized.

A long road continues

In cities like Detroit, where 1 in 7 adult males is under some form of correctional control in some communities, it is a monumental task to make sense of the short- and long-term impacts of incarceration for black families.

Children suffer. Parents struggle. Relationships deteriorate. And as a result, so too do so many African-American communities. Lost wages matter to families, but they also matter to communities. The lower tax base that results makes it more difficult for struggling public institutions, like schools, to progress. And with such a large share of individuals removed from some communities due to incarceration, and branded as felons upon their release, these communities lose potential voters and the political capital they carry. They are too often disenfranchised and stripped of their full power and potential.

Juneteenth celebrates the freedom of black Americans and the long, hard road they were forced to traverse to gain that freedom. But as criminologists like me have maintained time and again, the U.S. criminal justice system remains biased, albeit implicitly, against them.

Matthew Larson, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, Wayne State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, please join activists in helping to equalize our criminal justice system so the free people can actually live in freedom.

And for all of us who want to share the Juneteenth message with people we know who may never have heard of it, let alone know anything about it, here’s a video – three minutes long – which may help to make it more easily sharable.

The Furies and I will be back.

Cross posted to Care2 HERE.