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The recent heartbreaking events in Virginia remind me that the way our brains work has its downsides.

Nervous systems love contrasts, thrive on them. Its one reason why your brain does fancier things than your liver. For example, there are both excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters, so that the brain never confuses hollering yes with hollering no, or go with stop. There are also on/off cellular mechanisms that cause neurons to go sharply silent after a burst of excitation, generating a contrast like the difference between shouting news and shutting up. Or in another neural realm: Touch a spot on your skin, stimulating a tactile receptor neuron there, and it silences the tactile neurons surrounding it sharpening the signal to identify precisely where the sensation is happening.

Crucially, the range of contrasts can change sometimes the brain must distinguish between extremes of, say, 1 versus 100, but sometimes the extremes range only from 1 versus 1.00001. And brain processes shift to accommodate that.

For example, your brain typically navigates sounds ranging from silence to sirens, but huddle among people whispering, and soon your brain is detecting minute differences in decibels. Sit in dim light, and your brain soon distinguishes among tiny gradations of light intensity. Leave that dark room, where youre distinguishing between 1 and 1.00001, so to speak, and go into sunlight: Things will shift back to 1 versus 100. Sometimes the range of what counts as pleasurable maxes out with the smell of a flower, sometimes it requires winning the lottery.

And thanks to that neural capacity for adaptation, sometimes the difference between 1 and 1.00001 can feel roughly as important as the difference between 1 and 100.

Many on the left have been concerning themselves of late with debates that can be summarized as 1 versus 1.00001. A professor, long supportive of his schools efforts at fostering diversity, objects to one proposed version of those efforts, and soon crowds of students are accusing him of the worst kinds of prejudices, chanting for his firing.

A theater director, with the best of progressive intentions, mounts a play that showcases what she advocates. Soon she is condemned for deigning to present material about the tribulations of an out-group not her own.

Controversies roil as to whether a painting that screams empathy for the pain of an Other represents homage or exploitation, whether a fashion statement is cultural appropriation or appreciation, whether the best response to a foul academic ideologue is to attend his lecture and counter him with facts, or to silence him.

These are valid issues, and their currency reflects the lefts admirable ability to be introspective. But these debates also display the lefts time-honored capacity to eat itself alive with turmoil over the difference between 1 and 1.00001.

And then along comes Charlottesville, and we are reminded about just how contrasting contrasts really can be, how vast the difference between 1 and 100 is, or in this case, 1 and negative infinity. We are reminded what it is like when KKK garb, swastikas and torches are marched through our streets. What it is like when one of the marchers floors a cars accelerator to hurtle into a crowd, leaving Heather Heyer dead. What it is like when, 70 years after 407,000 Americans died fighting Nazism, fascism and racial supremacy, we have a president who gives comfort to those malignancies. We are reminded what evil actually looks like.

It is time to readjust our brains to focus on the biggest of contrasts, to remember who the real enemy is, to use our intellect and passion to destroy it.

Neuroscientist Robert M. Sapolsky is a professor of biology, neurological sciences and neurosurgery at Stanford University. His latest book is Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook

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We saw evil in Charlottesville. Now liberals need to readjust their brains to stop it - Los Angeles Times

Apparently, as long as violent leftists label their victims fascists, they are free to set fires, smash windows and beat civilians bloody. No police officer will stop them. They have carte blanche to physically assault anyone they disapprove of, including Charles Murray, Heather Mac Donald, Ben Shapiro, me and Milo Yiannopoulos, as well as anyone who wanted to hear us speak.

Even far-left liberals like Evergreen State professor Bret Weinstein will be stripped of police protection solely because the mob called him a racist.

If the liberal shock troops deem local Republicans Nazis because some of them support the duly elected Republican president Portland will cancel the annual Rose Festival parade rather than allow any Trump supporters to march.

Theyre all fascists! Ipso facto, the people cracking their skulls and smashing store windows are anti-fascists, or as they call themselves, antifa.

We have no way of knowing if the speakers at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally last weekend were Nazis, white supremacists or passionate Civil War buffs, inasmuch as they werent allowed to speak. The Democratic governor shut the event down, despite a court order to let it proceed.

We have only visuals presented to us by the activist media, showing some participants with Nazi paraphernalia. But for all we know, the Nazi photos are as unrepresentative of the rally as that photo of the drowned Syrian child is of Europes migrant crisis. Was it 1 percent Nazi or 99 percent Nazi?

As the Unite the Right crowd was dispersing, they were forced by the police into the path of the peace-loving, rock-throwing, fire-spraying antifa. A far-left reporter for The New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, tweeted live from the event: The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding antifa beating white nationalists being led out of the park.

Thats when protestor James Fields sped his car into a crowd of the counter-protesters, then immediately hit reverse, injuring dozens of people, and killing one woman, Heather Heyer.

This has been universally labeled terrorism, but we still dont know whether Fields hit the gas accidentally, was in fear for his life or if he rammed the group intentionally and maliciously.

With any luck, well unravel Fields motives faster than it took the Obama administration to discern the motives of a Muslim shouting Allahu Akbar! while gunning down soldiers at Fort Hood. (Six years.)

But so far, all we know is that Fields said he was upset about black people and wanted to kill as many as possible. On his Facebook page, he displayed a White Power poster and liked three organizations deemed white separatist hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. A subsequent search of his home turned up bomb-making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition and a personal journal of combat tactics.

Actually, none of that is true. The paragraph above describes, down to the letter, what was known about Micah Xavier Johnson, the black man who murdered five Dallas cops a year ago during a Black Lives Matter demonstration. My sole alteration to the facts is reversing the words black and white.

President Obama held a news conference the next day to say its very hard to untangle the motives. The New York Times editorialized agnostically that many possible motives will be ticked off for the killer. (One motive kind of sticks out like a sore thumb to me.)

In certain cases, the media are quite willing to jump to conclusions. In others, they seem to need an inordinate amount of time to detect motives.

The media think they already know all there is to know about James Fields, but they also thought they knew all about the Duke lacrosse players, gentle giant Michael Brown and those alleged gang-rapists at the University of Virginia.

Waiting for facts is now the Nazi position.

Liberals have Republicans over a barrel because they used the word racist. The word is kryptonite, capable of turning the entire GOP and 99 percent of the conservative media into a panicky mass of cowardice.

This week, Mitt Romney and Sen. Marco Rubio -- among others -- instructed us that masked liberals hitting people with baseball bats are pure of heart -- provided they first label the likes of Charles Murray or some housewife in a MAGA hat fascists.

Luckily, the week before opening fire on Republicans, critically injuring House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, Bernie Sanders-supporter James Hodgkinson had used the vital talisman, calling the GOP fascist. So you see, he wasnt trying to commit mass murder! He was just fighting Nazis. Rubio and Romney will be expert witnesses.

And lets recall the response of Hillary Clinton to the horrifying murder of five Dallas cops last year. The woman who ran against Trump displayed all the moral blindness currently being slanderously imputed to him.

In an interview on CNN about the slaughter that had taken place roughly 12 hours earlier, Hillary barely paused to acknowledge the five dead officers -- much less condemn the shooting -- before criticizing police for their implicit bias six times in about as many minutes.

What she really wanted to talk about were the two recent police shootings of black men in Baton Rouge and Minneapolis, refusing to contradict Minnesota Gov. Mark Daytons claim that the Minneapolis shooting was based on racism.

Officers in both cases were later found innocent of any wrongdoing. Either the left has had a really bad streak of luck on their police brutality cases, or bad cops are a lot rarer than they think.

Some people would not consider the mass murder of five white policemen by an anti-cop nut in the middle of a BLM protest a good jumping-off point for airing BLMs delusional complaints about the police. It would be like responding to John Hinckley Jr.s attempted murder of President Reagan by denouncing Jodie Foster for not dating him.

Or, to bring it back to Charlottesville, it would be as if Trump had responded by expounding on the kookiest positions of Unite the Right -- just as Hillarys response echoed the paranoid obsessions of the cop-killer. Trump would have quickly skipped over the dead girl and railed against black people, Jews and so on.

That is the precise analogy to what Hillary did as the bodies of five Dallas cops lay in the morgue.

Thank God Donald J. Trump is our president, and not Mitt Romney, not Marco Rubio and not that nasty woman.

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When liberals club people, it's with love in their hearts - Mt. Vernon Register-News

Now that Christy Clark has resigned and her party no longer governs, the B.C. Liberals have some hard thinking to do. Their governing philosophy was dictated, in large part, by the situation that existed when they came to power 16 years ago.

In 2001, voters were exhausted by the recurring crises that had wracked NDP premier Glen Clarks administration. They wanted a more disciplined approach, particularly to financial matters.

There was a sense also that government had come to occupy too large a place in peoples lives. Part of this was due to Clarks love of the limelight and his publicity-seeking style of politics.

When the Liberals took office, incoming premier Gordon Campbell, chose a different path. He intended to impose financial management, and succeeded. The budget was balanced early on.

He also wanted to take government off the front page of the newspapers, and here, too, for a time, he succeeded. Decisions that would have haunted an NDP administration, such as refusing to raise welfare rates for a decade, or permitting private surgery clinics to proliferate, caused barely a ripple.

After Christy Clark took over in 2011, she saw no need to change. Then came Mays election. Finally, it appeared, voters had had enough.

Care is needed with this judgment. The Liberals still won more seats than the NDP, and it took an NDP/Green Party alliance to unseat them. How stable that arrangement is remains to be seen.

However, its never a good idea in politics to pin hopes of a comeback on your opponents falling short. It does appear the pendulum has swung leftward in major population centres such as Greater Victoria and the Lower Mainland, at least for the present.

The question for the Liberals is how they should respond. Swing too far left, and they might lose their base.

We saw that in Christy Clarks last throne speech, delivered after the election, which adopted several NDP themes. It was a clumsy effort, and many of the party faithful were enraged.

An overly aggressive tack to the left also risks reinvigorating the provincial Conservative party.

Moreover, the Liberals economic message still has appeal thrift in government, low taxes and an emphasis on job creation. It is the social-policy side of the ledger that needs attention.

And here an awkward reality emerges. Most voters can say where the NDP and Greens stand on raising the minimum wage, increasing income assistance, subsidizing child care or strengthening public education. These are all key planks of a centre-left platform.

But for a centre-right party, the fit is more difficult. Here, too, the throne speech was telling. Clark and her colleagues could find no words of their own to embrace a social agenda.

The challenge lies in shifting some longstanding mindsets. The Liberals must find ways to make a more activist program acceptable to their base.

It should not, in principle, be hard to support strengthening the social safety net. The case for investing in education and skill training is likewise easy to make. And who disagrees with the need for more affordable housing, or the urgency of combating homelessness and drug abuse?

The difficulty lies in reconciling these projects with a party philosophy grounded in personal responsibility and small government. No simple matter.

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton was famous for solving such puzzles, or triangulating, as it was called. He could present ideas that were seemingly incompatible, and weld them together.

That is essentially what the Liberals next leader must do. Whether voluntarily or kicking and screaming, the party will have to confront a new reality.

Generating wealth is important, but distributing it fairly is also a duty of government.

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Editorial: BC Liberals face new reality - Times Colonist

Posted August 19, 2017 15:07:11

Federal Liberal Party president Nick Greiner says it is time for the party to "at last" take female representation in Parliament "seriously".

Mr Greiner told delegates at the party's state conference in Tasmania the number of women voting Liberal had dropped since 2001.

"It's actually time to improve the results and the results simply mean having more women in winnable positions," he said.

"I do hope that around Australia the party will at last take this seriously and take it seriously in terms of outcomes."

There are just 18 female Liberal parliamentarians across the two houses of Federal Parliament.

That is despite the party's target of 50 per cent female representation in Parliament by 2025.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's 21-person Coalition Cabinet has five women holding portfolios.

Mr Greiner said he does not support a quota for female representation as that would be "insulting", but he plans on enlisting the help of former senator Helen Kroger to boost the number of women in party ranks.

"To work with each of the state presidents and the state divisions, not just to come up with another report," he said.

"But with a genuinely targeted approach to improving our performance in this area.

"Is it too much to expect or to hope that out of five seats that one might have two female candidates?"

Last year, the Liberal Party's federal executive signed off on a 10-year plan to increase female representation.

It includes a bid to recruit more women at a grassroots level and offer mentoring to those interested in standing for election.

Topics: liberals, political-parties, government-and-politics, women, tas, australia

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Time for Liberals to take female representation in Parliament seriously, party president Nick Greiner says - ABC Online

By Arlie Russell Hochschild By Arlie Russell Hochschild August 18 at 2:44 PM

Arlie Russell Hochschilds book, "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right," is a finalist for the National Book Award.

Arlie Russell Hochschilds latest book is Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, a finalist for the National Book Award.

The country confronts an extraordinary challenge from the right. President Trumps budget proposes to cut funding for the Environmental Protection Agency by 31 percent, the Department of Education by 13.5 percent and the State Department by 30 percent, while boosting the military by 10 percent. Former adviser Stephen Bannon, a hero of the alt-right (a small, far-right movement that seeks a whites-only state), had whispered in the presidential ear about dismantling the administrative state, and a White House rhetorical campaign continues to delegitimize an independent judiciary and press. But are liberals in any shape to offer a compelling alternative vision? Can the myriad groups under the Democratic tent even work together? These questions have driven Mark Lilla to write his latest book, The Once and Future Liberal.

[The future of the Democratic Party could be written in upcoming gubernatorial race]

A professor of humanities at Columbia, and the author of five books on political philosophy including The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, Lilla in his new book issues an important, passionate and highly critical wake-up call to liberals who, he believes, are stuck in the mud. In its early stages, his argument is illuminating but then veers seriously off course before ending up focusing on the right goal. First, he contends, the Democrats have been whipped bigly, as Trump might say, at every level of electoral politics. Second, Lilla believes that liberals havent learned from their failure to appeal to voters. Third, they now have a window of opportunity. But, fourth, though liberals believe they are seizing the moment, they are not, because they are not focusing on elections. If the steady advance of a radicalized Republican Party, over many years and in every branch and at every level of government, should teach liberals anything, Lilla writes, it is the absolute priority of winning elections today.

Resistance isnt enough, Lilla says. Liberals need to join in support of a common set of ideals and policies. Lilla compares the Republican Partys website which features Principles of American Renewal with that of the Democratic Party, one of whose topic areas is People. In that category are women; Hispanics; the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community; the Jewish community, Native Americans in all, 17 separate groups, each with a unique message. Republicans reach out, make coalitions, focus on electoral office, and thats proved successful, Lilla says. If we want to protect black motorists from police abuse, or gay and lesbian couples from harassment on the street, Lilla writes, we need state attorneys general willing to prosecute such cases, and state judges willing to enforce the law. And the only way to make sure we get them is to elect liberal Democratic governors and state legislators who will make the appointments. So far, so good.

Lilla then describes liberalisms double-edged legacy from the New Left of the 1960s. As he puts it, the left spawned identity-based social movements for affirmative action and diversity, feminism, gay liberation that have made this country a more tolerant, more just and more inclusive place than it was fifty years ago. But it also unwittingly shifted the focus of American liberalism ... from commonality to difference. He adds, all too briefly, that whats missing is a cogent analysis of the painful class split in America that was abundantly revealed in our recent election. Again, so far, so good.

Then Lilla wades into stormy waters. Identity politics has launched liberals into a victimhood Olympics, he asserts. Sure, Id say, we have some of that. But, he concludes, given the Republicans rage for destruction, [winning elections] is the only way to guarantee that newly won protections for African-Americans, other minorities, women and gay Americans remain in place. Workshops and university seminars will not do it. Online mobilizing and flash mobs will not do it. Protesting, acting up and acting out will not do it. The age of movement politics is over, at least for now. We need no more marchers. We need more mayors. And governors, and state legislators, and members of Congress. Here I say, wait a minute. Whoa!

What Lilla isnt seeing is that we come to electoral politics in many different ways. Some people come to it through a desire for public service, bypassing social movements altogether. Others join social movements, get stuck in identity silos and ignore elections. This book is for them. But many others like myself were drawn to politics by participating in social movements. When I was in high school, politics seemed very much a male realm. It was through feminism that I learned that I, too, had a voice, could join the conversation, advocate, petition, vote. Again, it was as a civil rights worker in the South that I got a frightening look at the link between race and electoral politics.

[Why the Womens March may be the start of a serious social movement]

We need social movements, and we need to move outward from them. Im reminded of a conversation I had with a young black man who approached me after a talk I gave at the University of California at Berkeley. He referred to a June front-page photo in the New York Times of black Harvard graduate students in caps and gowns at their own black graduation ceremony. On the same page, he saw a photo of a white man above a headline reading Fringe Groups Revel as Protests Turn Violent, whom he guessed not to be a college graduate. I wish some of the black graduates from the top picture could tell the white guy from the bottom picture, Hey, were not leaving you out. Then he added, But if I drive three hours north from Berkeley, I dont feel safe as a black man. The young man felt both a need for a movement and a determination to reach common ground with others beyond it. This view is echoed by leaders such as the Rev. William Barber II, a pastor who spoke at New Yorks Riverside Morning Church on the anniversary of Martin Luther Kings Vietnam speech and who has launched an ecumenical Repairers of the Breach movement. In 2013, he led peaceful Moral Mondays demonstrations at the North Carolina General Assembly to protest restrictions on voting.

Lillas message to liberals is timely and welcome. But he might better advise them: Go on your march. Join the marches of other groups, too. And continue to protest, above all. Then come home and organize that fundraiser for your favorite candidate for governor, the state legislature or Congress.

The Once and Future Liberal

After Identity Politics

By Mark Lilla

Harper. 143 pp. $24.99

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Liberals woes run deep but the way out is murky - Washington Post