Business

Baseless Analogies and Bogus Claims

Trump was “merrily shoving America down the road to fascism and white nationalism?” Get real.

Published

6 months ago

February 18, 2021

Jeff Davidson

Last Summer, the coverage of the D-Day 75-year anniversary brought many World War II issues back into focus. One of them, that lingers to this day, is the use by those on the left of holocaust analogies when it comes to protecting our national sovereignty.

Following President Trump’s decision, which Biden is now reversing, to shore up control at our southern border, a popular blogger captured the thoughts of numerous pundits on the Left when he wrote (paraphrased):

This situation is going to become more extreme and justifiably so. We dwell in extreme times. The harm being done to each of us by the Trump Administration is extreme.

As such, we do not feel that Trump administration officials ought to be able to live their lives in peace and affluence while they inflict serious damage on significant portions of the U.S. population. Being unable to comfortably visit restaurants and attend gatherings is merely the minimum baseline. These administration officials, who are merrily shoving America down the road to fascism and white nationalism, are simply delusional if they do not believe that the backlash is going to become much worse.

Skipping Along to Fascism

“Merrily shoving America down the road to fascism?” Could the hyperbole be any greater? Or any more off-the-mark?

“White nationalism?” Several news sources corroborated that Black support for President Trump was rising during his entire term. One source noted that the Trump’s approval rating among African-Americans, pre-election, was at 24%, a staggeringly high number for Trump who won a mere 8% of the African-American vote in 2016.

The above figures were not out of line. A NAACP poll released in August, 2018 showed that President Trump’s approval among black voters stood at 21%. The Washington Examiner reported in April of 2020 that Trump’s approval rating among black voters was near 20%:

A NPR/Marist poll showed that his approval rating among Hispanics soared from 31 percent in December, 2018 to 50 percent in January 2019. Granted, polls numbers vary widely from time to time.

Holocaust Analogies

As reported by RealClearPolitics.com, “Growing support among Latinos would surely surprise many Trump critics in Washington and the legacy media, who remain fixated on border issues.” Nevertheless, “So intense is their hysteria regarding border enforcement, that people like former CIA Director Michael Hayden compared our detention policies to the Auschwitz concentration camp in a tweet and MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch proclaimed on Morning Joe that ALL Trump voters are essentially Nazis.”

If you’re on the Left, perhaps some self-reflection is in order. Do you believe that the Blacks and Hispanics have too little intelligence to know better than to have supported Trump? If you’re Caucasian, do you speak for minorities?

Do you believe Donald Trump supported Aryan Nations, considering that his daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism and married a Jew, and that from this marriage, Trump has three Jewish grandchildren?

Did you show concern when Obama/Biden separated adults and children at the border in greater numbers (actually many times that of Trump) and to much worse conditions? And that Joe Biden now is picking up where he left off as VP?

Selective Concern

If you were diametrically opposed to the Trump administration’s attempt to resolve the immigration problem in general, and the border crisis in particular, here are questions to consider:

1. When people arrived 100 to 130 years ago, no aid was supplied from the rest of the country, but now we are to pay for all who step foot in the U.S.?

2. Should we open our borders to everyone?

3. Should everyone who we allow into the U.S. receive welfare, food stamps, and HUD Section 8 Housing?

4. We are $27.9 trillion in debt and counting, with both parties at fault. Should we hit U.S. citizens with a special tax assessment of, say, $5000 a year and then allow everyone who wants to enter our country to do so, and hope this money will cover the multi-millions who show up?

5. If even one child is being transported by human slavers or drug runners and we leave them together, are you taking responsibility for what they might do to the child?

6. The vast majority of the country agrees it is the parents’ fault for bringing the children. Can you see they aren’t all racists but, perhaps, have a more balanced view?

7. Thousands of U.S. citizens have died at the hands of people who shouldn’t be here. Do you have any sympathy, at all, for any of them?

8. Do you have any plan to slow down illegal immigration?

Miracles Happen Occasionally

When one actually thinks through the points above, it’s a bit easier to adopt a somewhat broader point of view. Regardless, it’s time for everyone so ensconced to leave the liberal plantation for at least a couple hours a week.

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Jeff Davidson

Jeff Davidson is the world's only holder of the title "The Work-Life Balance Expert®" as awarded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He is the premier thought leader on work-life balance, integration, and harmony. Jeff speaks to organizations that seek to enhance their overall productivity by improving the effectiveness of their people. He is the author of Breathing Space, Simpler Living, Dial it Down, and Everyday Project Management. Visit www.BreathingSpace.com for more information on Jeff's keynote speeches and seminars, including: Managing the Pace with Grace® * Achieving Work-Life Balance™ * Managing Information and Communication Overload®

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Business

Multitasking Renders You Less Productive

Multitasking sends a message to your subconscious that this is how you must proceed to stay competitive and succeed

Published

16 hours ago

August 3, 2021

Jeff Davidson

Dividing your attention to complete multiple activities at once can make you less effective at everything you’re doing.

From CEOs to newbie hires, everyone has numerous tasks to manage throughout the course of a day, week, month, and year. The multitude of responsibilities on your plate requires the capacity for self-management, time management, and the effective allocation of your resources. However, don’t confuse legitimate workplace skills with the contemporary, ill-advised phenomenon called multitasking.

A False Promise

Multitasking might appear to be a reliable way to tackle many issues that compete for your time and attention. It seems intuitive that if you can juggle both A and B concurrently, you’re achieving a productivity gain and saving significant time. But the fallacy in that argument is surmising that the human brain can double-up or triple-up on tasks with no loss of attention, focus, or effectiveness.

A plethora of psychological studies have shown that the human brain can only give “sharp attention” in one direction at a time. Seeking to give this level of attention in multiple directions yields a reverberating type of attention allotted to each activity and predictably results in a loss of mental acuity and productivity.

A clear example of multitasking is when you’re driving along the highway and speaking on a smartphone. Even if you switch to the hands-free speaker phone feature, both activities compete for your brain’s vital sharp attention. So you execute neither activity as effectively as you could by undertaking one activity at a time. It’s also prudent to point out that driving while talking on the phone-hands-free or not-contributes to distracted driving and an elevated rate of vehicular accidents.

Multitasking Coexists Best With Routine

Certainly, it’s okay to multitask while completing some repetitive and familiar work activities. You can run a print job while you work with a file on your screen, for example. As long as the printer has adequate toner and the paper feeds through as designed, there is no deficit in multitasking in this manner.

Nevertheless, for whatever task you are attempting to handle, the fact that you are running a print job at the same time is likely to diminish your overall effectiveness.

The loss in mental acuity will be relatively minor, and you might not even be aware of it. The real risk of workplace multitasking, however, is that you never quite retreat to that mental space where you can offer concerted concentration and, hence, your best work. But if you trace your actions over time, you’ll likely see that for the larger tasks you executed effectively, you stopped multitasking and focused on the task at hand.

Sending the Wrong Message

Multitasking sends a message to your subconscious that this is the way you have to proceed to stay competitive and succeed. When multitasking becomes ingrained in your psyche, you’re telling yourself deep down that you can’t make it in real estate any other way. You end up missing the benefits derived from practicing the art of “doing one thing at a time.”

Multitaskers have trouble “seeing the forest for the trees” and often fail to focus on the most critical components of their day-to-day operations, abandoning less palatable tasks because they require creativity, concentration, and analysis.

As an everyday practice, repeated often, multitasking separates those who continually scramble to keep pace from those who rise to the top.

Avoid the Bind

Since we all face multiple priorities on the job, it’s easy to equate managing multiple priorities with multitasking. The larger and more vital the task, the more essential to focus on it intently. Practice doing one thing at a time. When you’ve finished a project or have taken it as far as you can, only then should you switch focus to your second most important task, and so on.

As your day and work unfold, mastering the art of doing one thing at a time is the best way to proceed. You may, however, multitask on issues that represent the routine or familiar and that carry few consequences for lost time on the trail. In general, though, your best strategy for high productivity is to forsake multitasking and its false promise as you handle the multiple priorities that you face.

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Business

Culture Jamming, by Kalle Lasn

America has been subverted by corporate agendas and its elected officials bow before corporate power as a condition of their survival in office

Published

2 days ago

August 2, 2021

Jeff Davidson

Here are excerpts from the culture-shaking book, Culture Jamming by Kalle Lasn, published by William Morrow in 1999, which rings truer now than ever!

A Multitrillion-dollar Brand

America is no longer a country. It’s a multitrillion-dollar brand…. essentially no different from McDonald’s, Marlboro or General Motors. It’s an image “sold” not only to the citizens of the U.S., but to consumers worldwide. The American brand is associated with catch-words such as “democracy;’ “opportunity” and “freedom.” But like cigarettes that are sold as symbols of vitality and youthful rebellion, the American reality is very different from its brand image.

America has been subverted by corporate agendas. Its elected officials bow before corporate power as a condition of their survival in office. A collective sense of powerlessness and disillusionment has set in. A deeply felt sense of betrayal is brewing.

By The People?

American culture is no longer created by the people. Our stories, once passed from one generation to the next by parents, neighbors and teachers, are now told by corporations with “something to sell as well as to tell.” Brands, products, fashions, celebrities, entertainments, the very spectacles that surround the production of culture, are now our culture.

Our role is mostly to listen and watch-and then, based on what we have heard and seen, to buy.

A free, authentic life is not possible in America today. We are being manipulated in the most insidious way. Our emotions, personalities and core values are under siege from media and cultural forces too complex to decode. A continuous product message has woven itself into the very fabric of our existence.

Most North Americans now live designer lives: sleep, eat, sit in car, work, shop, watch TV, sleep again. I doubt there’s more than a handful of free, spontaneous minutes anywhere in that cycle.

Smile Button Culture

The human spirit of prideful contrariness and fierce independence has been oddly tamed. We have evolved into a smile-button culture. We wear the trendiest fashions, drive the best cars industry can produce and project an image of incredible aff1uence-cool people living life to the hilt.

Behind that happy mask is a face so ugly it invariably shocks the hell out of my friends from developing countries who come to visit, expecting the giddy Americana depicted on TV and finding instead a horror show of disconnection and anomie.

Our mass media dispense a kind of Huxleyan “soma.” The most powerful narcotic in the world is the promise of belonging. And belonging is best achieved by conforming to the prescriptions of America™. In this way a perverted sense of cool takes hold of the imaginations of our children. And thus a heavily manipulative corporate ethos drives our culture.

The Facade of Cool

Cool is indispensable, and readily, endlessly dispensed. You can get it on every corner (for the right price), though it’s highly addictive and its effects are short-lived. If you’re here for cool today, you’ll almost certainly be back for more tomorrow.

American cool is a global pandemic. Communities, traditions, cultural heritages, sovereignty, whole histories are being replaced by a barren American monoculture.

Living in Japan during its period of sharpest transition to a western way of life, I was astonished by the speed and force with which the American brand took hold. I saw a culture with thousands of years of tradition behind it vanquished in two generations. Suddenly, high school girls were selling themselves after class for $150 a trick so they’d have cash to buy American jeans and handbags.

The Earth cannot support the lifestyle of the cool hunting American-style consumer. We have sought, bought, spewed and devoured too much, too fast, too brazenly, and now we’re about to pay.

Killing the Planet

Economic “progress” is killing the planet. This did not fully hit home for me until nightmarish environmental stories suddenly appeared on the news: acid rain, dying seals in the North Sea, medical waste washing up on New York beaches, garbage barges turned away from port after port, and the discovery that the milk in American mothers’ breasts had four times the amount of DDT permitted in cow’s milk.

To people like me, for whom time had always seemed like a constant, eternally moving train which people got on and, seventy years later, got off, it was the end of innocence. The premonition of ecocide — planetary death — became real and it terrified me. It still does.

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