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Editor's Notes

• #5: For nearly two months after the Sept. 11, 1973, military coup that overthrew Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president, the stadium served as a makeshift prison camp where as many as 20,000 men and women suffered at the hands of a military junta, led by the right-wing army chief, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, that had seized control of Chile. For weeks after the coup, the military rounded up political and social activists and suspected supporters of the former president, Salvador Allende, and brought them to the concrete edifice, which opened in 1938 and hosted matches at the 1962 World Cup, including Brazil’s 3-1 victory over Czechoslovakia in the final. “I can remember some of the other prisoners talking about going to games there,” Mr. Castro said. It was the stadium’s intended purpose — international soccer, or at least the prospect of it — that eventually forced the Pinochet government to end its use as a prison camp on Nov. 9, 1973. That month, officials began preparing it for Chile’s scheduled World Cup qualifying match against the Soviet Union. The teams had played a scoreless tie in Moscow in the first leg, but when the Soviets complained about the site of the return match, saying the stadium was a place of blood, FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, said it would investigate. Many of the prisoners, including Mr. Castro, were rounded up and taken below on the day FIFA officials arrived, into dressing rooms underneath the stadium where they could not be seen from the playing field. At gunpoint, Mr. Castro said, they were instructed to remain silent. But other prisoners were left in the bleachers that day, and remembered watching the men from FIFA go about their inspection. “We wanted to yell out and say, ‘Hey, we are here, look at us,’ ” said one of those prisoners, Felipe Agüero, who was held captive for about a month. “But they seemed only interested in the condition of the grass.”
• #7: Not only did the amygdala and insula fire up (taken to indicate fear and disgust, respectively), the medial prefrontal cortex, which is usually active when thinking about people and social situations, as opposed to thinking about objects, was less active. This can be interpreted as evidence that disgust goes some way to trumping empathy and compassion. “When we respond to a homeless person with disgust, we avoid considering the person's mind,” says Fiske. “We treat the person as equivalent to a pile of garbage.” In making symbolic distinctions between us and them visceral, disgust could potentially foster greater cohesion within groups by bringing people together in defence against a common out-group. “Disgust works for the group as it does for the individual — what is in the group is 'me' and what is not is 'not me',” says Haidt. “Where core disgust is the guardian of the body, moral disgust acts as the guardian of social body — that's when disgust shows its ugliest side.”  people will readily admit to believing all sorts of vile things. And researchers don’t need to use implicit or subliminal measures to suss it all out. On average, they rated Muslims at a 55.4 (again, out of 100), Democrats at 60.4, black people at 64.7, Mexicans at 67.7, journalists at 58.6, Jews at 73, and feminists at 57. These groups appear as subhumans to those taking the survey. And what about white people? They were scored at a noble 91.8. (You can look through all the data here.) Dehumanization is scary. It’s the psychological trick we engage in that allows us to harm other people (because it’s easier to inflict pain on people who are not people). Historically it’s been the fuel of mass atrocities and genocide. Disgust is the flip side of purity/sanctity as builders of group cohesion
• #8: Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as cockroaches and rats; Hutu instigators denigrated Tutsis as cockroaches during the Rwandan genocide. As with the sight and smell of a dispossessed street person, identifying the enemy with an object of disgust throws up strong emotional barriers to empathy. “That's why I say that disgust is the nastiest of all emotions,” says Hauser. “Our moral disgust/indignation brain network is the source of prejudice, stereotyping and sometimes outward aggression,” says Moll. Fiske agrees, saying the picture of disgust painted by data from psychology and neuroscience should make us think twice about drawing on revulsion as a basis for our personal moral judgements. In my new book Flush, I describe how psychologists have come to view disgust as a kind of behavioral immune system that helps us avoid harm. Whether in response to feces or rats, disgust triggers an aversion to things that can make us physically sick. The emotion has a darker side, however: in excess, it can be weaponized against people. Propagandists have fomented disgust to dehumanize Jewish people as vermin; Black people as subhuman apes; Indigenous people as “savages”; immigrants as “animals” unworthy of protection; and members of the LGBTQ community as sexual deviants and “predators” who prey upon children.  people will readily admit to believing all sorts of vile things. And researchers don’t need to use implicit or subliminal measures to suss it all out. Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as cockroaches and rats; Hutu instigators denigrated Tutsis as cockroaches during the Rwandan genocide. As with the sight and smell of a dispossessed street person, identifying the enemy with an object of disgust throws up strong emotional barriers to empathy. “That's why I say that disgust is the nastiest of all emotions,” says Hauser. “Our moral disgust/indignation brain network is the source of prejudice, stereotyping and sometimes outward aggression,” says Moll. Fiske agrees, saying the picture of disgust painted by data from psychology and neuroscience should make us think twice about drawing on revulsion as a basis for our personal moral judgements. It goes to show: The alt-right is motivated by racial issues, not economic anxiety. But it goes deeper than that. The survey revealed that the alt-righters were much more concerned that their groups were at a disadvantage compared with the control sample. The alt-right (and white nationalists) is afraid of being displaced by increasing numbers of immigrants and outsiders in this country. And, yes, they see themselves as potential victims. In the Nazi era, the film The Eternal Jew depicted Jews as rats. During the Rwandan genocide, Hutu officials called Tutsis “cockroaches” that needed to be cleared out. The research predicts a vicious cycle. Trump’s policy and rhetoric gin up fear and dehumanize Muslim Americans. That provokes a more violent response from certain individuals in the Muslim community. Trump responds. And suddenly the whole country is a more hostile, less safe place for everyone, the researchers conclude in a paper that was recently published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Belief is a powerful social binding force that overwhelms critical thinking. In the history of our evolutionary development, it was probably more important to be part of the group than to be right. -=- Ken Caldeira, Twitter
• #9: Recent attack on Paul Pelosi by an intruder with a hammer searching for Speaker Pelosi is the latest example - Pelosi has been demonized online and in public by both far right and far left-leaning political websites and figures. Graphics depicting her being beheaded, and a call to send immigrants to her home, with her address, circulated online this summer, according to Site Intelligence Group, which researches online extremism. Rita Katz, executive director of Site, said the Speaker was a hate figure for much of the political right, and is the "face of the Democratic establishment and, as such, at the center of many QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theories." Those theories and people who espouse them are sometimes promoted by more mainstream public figures, amplifying the threats, experts say. "While the intent may be to mobilize one's political base or generate ratings it also adds to the volatility of the threat environment," said Cohen. "Today's radical extremism threat has this powerful digital component that can really accelerate recruitment and activate violence across a broader threat landscape," Aisha Qureshi, a social science analyst at the National Institute, said in an agency podcast before the Pelosi attack. But in recent months, those platforms have been shutting down the campaigns of hardline right-wingers and various other heroes of the alt-right. In response, there’s Hatreon, which caters to the neo-Nazis and outspoken racists those other platforms have left behind. Hatreon launched in August, with early adopters including Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin, who runs the neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer. While the two initially took in modest totals each month, they’re now making a decent living off donations from their racist supporters. Spencer, who lists his creative project as “Richard Spencer-ing” (really), gets $942 each month in contributions. Anglin, who has been in hiding for months trying to avoid an SPLC lawsuit against him for stochastic terrorism, pulls in nearly $7,725 each month. That’s nearly $93,000 a year, not a bad haul for cranking out racial slurs, Holocaust memes and generally making the world a more terrible place. Example – Cody Wilson, known for his legal fight to distribute 3-d printed plans for firearms on the internet, started Hatreon when Patreon shut down his fundraising campaign. Hatreon is a hate speech crowdfunding site.
• #10: "Just the sheer volume and speed of misinformation spread through social media really exacerbates this problem," she said. Threats against political leaders are rising in the United States. Cases related to "concerning statements and threats" against members of Congress jumped from 3,939 in 2017 to 9,625 in 2021, according to the U.S. Capitol Police. "Look at the FBI attack in Ohio," said Todd Helmus, a senior behavioral scientist at security research firm Rand Corp., referring to an August incident when an armed man tried to break into the Cincinnati FBI headquarters. Helmus linked that incident to rhetoric surrounding the FBI's removal of classified documents from Trump's Florida estate. Site said the Pelosi attack was being celebrated online by far-right supporters. "We're just waiting for more of these things to occur," said Helmus.
• #13: The plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi returning from the Arusha peace talks accord was shot down as it prepared its landing at the Kigali International Airport. The death of Rwandan president Habyarimana triggered the beginning of a genocide that had been planned months in advance. In 100 days, more than a million people were slaughtered for no reason other than the fact they were born Tutsi or moderate Hutus who refused to buy into the ethnic cleansing ideology. The result of Belgium’s maneuvers was mass violence against Tutsis. In 1959, the violence against the Tutsi focused on killings and misappropriation of Tutsi property. In 1994, the Hutu plan to exterminate Tutsis was driven partly by the logic that Hutu extremists spared the lives of children in 1959 and now the same children had returned to cause trouble. Hutu anti-Tutsi extremists were confident that they could easily decimate 14% of the population and the international community wouldn’t be bothered by what happens in a small impoverished African country. They vowed to eradicate the entire ethnic group so that in the future, children would ask their parents: “Mom, Dad, what does a Tutsi look like?” When you travel to Rwanda today, you see how Catholic churches across the country have become memorial sites. During the 1959 attacks, Tutsis sought refuge from anti-Tutsi violence in churches. In the 1994 genocide, churches became the killing fields. Priests invited Tutsis to come into the House of God. As soon the church was filled, they called the genocidaires to come and slaughter them. -European colonial past – impacts of imperialism and 'meddling' by the Belgian government to try to prop up the Hutu government, French peacekeepers sided with the Hutu extremists, Catholic Church was complicit in offering up churches as safe havens which were then turned over to the Hutu -Burundi – struggles resulted in dominance of the Tutsi over Hutu -in Rwanda, the Hutu gained the upper hand – over the next two decade up to a million Rwandas, especially Tutsi, feld into neighboring counteris, from thwich they periodically attaempted to invade Rwanda, resulting further retaliatory kills of tutsi by Hutu -1973 Hutu general Habyarimana took power over previous Hutu-dominated govt' Small UN peacekeeping force sent to enforce the Arusha Accord   -April 6 1994, Rwanda presidential plan, carrying Habyarimana and burundi's new provisional president back from a meeting in Tanzania, was shot down by two missiles as it came in to land at Kigali -recent info has suggested that it was Hutu extremists, and not Tutsi groups, who shot the plane down – within hours, Hutu extremists began killing Tutsi – lead taken by army using guns, then spread to population exhorted through radio and Tv broadcasts   800,000-1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus killed Tutsi-dominated Rwanda Patriotic Front invaded, established government in Kigali 1 m Hutus fled to refugee camps along Rwanda's borders -in 1993 businessmen close to Habyarimana imported 581,000 machetes for distribution to Hutu for killing Tutsi, because machetes were cheaper than guns -fears of Tutsi based on ongoing invasions, assassination of Burundi's Hutu president in 1993
• #14: -The Bybee Memos – a step along the way Deprived prisoners seized in wartime the protections of the Geneva Convention ‘enemy combatants’ – a distinct, new category of detainee the Bybee memos, which were written by John Yoo, an attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (and another member of Dick Cheney’s inner circle) ‘torture memos’ redefined torture so ‘waterboarding’ did not fit the definition 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal erupted 2006 US Supreme Court ruled that detainees, including ‘enemy combatants’ are protected by Geneva -prequels to genocide – how dehumanization happens -the torture game -just following orders What Nuremburg taught us -the Nazi’s joy -Major General Geoffrey Miller & Lindey England -90 guards supervising more than 10,000 prisoners – 1 to 100 ratio
• #16: Much has been made of President Trump’s disregard for rules and norms—boundaries delineated by ethics and morality if not written laws themselves. But transgressing laws, rules, and norms isn’t the only way to destroy them. Another way is simply not to enforce them. In that regard, the 44th president, Barack Obama, bears a measure of responsibility for the recklessness of his successor, in particular Trump’s decision to appoint Gina Haspel, the Central Intelligence Agency’s deputy director, to run the agency itself. Haspel oversaw a black site during the Bush era where at least one detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was tortured*. Despite that, al-Nashiri provided “essentially no actionable information,” according to a CIA interrogator cited in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report. Haspel also then played a role in a decision to destroy recordings of CIA detainees being tortured. 2014 overturning of the Civil Rights Acts by the US Supreme Court
• #21: A Way Forward on Dehumanization - It also helps to get white Americans to think through their hypocrisy. In a study under review, Bruneau finds that when white people are asked questions such as, “Are all Christians responsible for the actions of the Westboro Baptist Church?” they begin to see the folly of blaming all Muslims for a single act of terror. “The hypocrisy is totally unconscious for people,” Bruneau explains. (The point isn’t to call people hypocrites, but rather to have them come to the realization on their own.) Overall, the experts I spoke to all said that the No. 1 way to combat dehumanization is also, frustratingly, one of the hardest to accomplish: simply getting to know people who are different from us. Since 1994, every year in Rwanda between April 6th and 15th, business hours run from 8am to 3pm in the afternoon. People meet in their villages and attend dialogue sessions where survivors tell their stories. It gives a chance for young people to learn about the painful history. At a dialogue session I attended, a woman in her fifties stood up and shared with the audience: “After I learned about the death of my siblings and parents, the pain was too heavy to bear. The perpetrator came to ask me for forgiveness. I thought about it and a voice said to me: free yourself, let the pain go. I did. The minute I forgave the perpetrator I felt all the weight that I had been carrying on my shoulders lifted. I exhaled.”
• #22: “Those who make us believe that anything’s possible and fire our imagination over the long haul, are often the ones who have survived the bleakest of circumstances. The men and women who have every reason to despair, but don’t, may have the most to teach us, not only about how to hold true to our beliefs, but about how such a life can bring about seemingly impossible social change. ” ― Paul Rogat Loeb, The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear