Are You Going To Be In Phoenix This Wednesday, 9/21? | Manu Chao!!!!!

From The Alto AZ Campaign:

Join us in Phoenix, Arizona, for a historic "Festival de Resistencia."

On Wednesday, September 21st, Manu Chao will give a free benefit concert to celebrate the years of community resistance against anti-immigrant hate legislation in Arizona. The concert will also serve as a renewed national commitment to the Arizona Boycott - "La Huelga del Pueblo."

Resistance by the people of Arizona, led by the Comités de Defensa del Barrio (CDBs), has served to inspire and mobilize thousands of communities across the country. The CDBs are now looking to implement new boycott actions against the financial supporters of politicians and organizations who promote hate legislation. The power and determination of these resistance actions is demonstrated by the successful ballot initiative to recall State Senate President, Russell Pearce, set for November 8th. We're building our economic and political power and we plan to exercise it.

Manu Chao believes in the struggle for human dignity and has joined forces with the Comités de Defensa del Barrio and the AltoArizona campaign.

You can also be part of this resistance by helping us support community organizing in Arizona and by engaging in the ongoing efforts of the CDBs and other local groups.

Donate and Get Involved:

CAN YOU DONATE $10, $25, $50 OR MORE?

If you have already donated, Thank You. We have received over $1000 toward our goal and appreciate all that you've contributed.

If you haven't donated yet, please consider making one today to help cover the costs of production.

We make this request respectfully, knowing that these are challenging economic times. So we are reaching out to those who believe in our struggle, who stand for human rights and dignity, and who believe that love can conquer fear and bigotry. We call out to those who believe that no human being can ever be "illegal."

The Festival of Resistance is being organized as a family focused event and celebration for Civil Rights, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights and the Rights of Mother Earth. The event will be FREE of charge. There will be no drugs, alcohol or weapons allowed. It will be a peaceful celebration that will be remembered for a long time to come.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Sincerely,

Pablo Alvarado
Director of NDLON

P.S.

Please RSVP on Facebook and share with your friends here: http://on.fb.me/manu-az-concert

A Very Funny (and true) Article from Grist.org

There's a study running soon in the journal Global Environmental Change called "Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States." It analyzes poll and survey data from the last 10 years and finds that ... are you sitting down? ... conservative white men are far more likely to deny the threat of climate change than other people.

OK, that's no surprise to anyone who's been awake over the last decade. But the paper goes beyond that to put forward some theories about why conservative white men (CWM) are so loathe to accept climate change. The explanation is some mix of the following, all of which overlap in various ways:

First there's the "white male effect" -- generally speaking, white males are less concerned with a variety of risks. This probably has to do with the fact that they are less exposed to risk than other demographics, what with running things and all.

Then, as Chris Mooney notes, there's the "social dominance orientation" of conservatives, who see social life as following the law of the jungle. One's choice is to dominate or be dominated; that is the natural order of things. Such folk are leery of climate change solutions premised on fairness or egalitarianism.

Then there are the well-understood "system-justifying tendencies" of conservatives. The authors explain that conservatives ...

... strongly display tendencies to justify and defend the current social and economic system. Conservatives dislike change and uncertainty and attempt to simplify complexity. Further, conservative white males have disproportionately occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that conservative white males' strong system-justifying attitudes would be triggered to deny climate change.
Finally, there's "identity-protective cognition," a notion borrowed from Dan Kahan at Yale. (See this PDF.) Here's how Kahan and colleagues sum it up:

We propose that variance in risk perceptions -- across persons generally, and across race and gender in particular -- reflects a form of motivated cognition through which people seek to deflect threats to identities they hold, and roles they occupy, by virtue of contested cultural norms.
"Motivated cognition" refers to reasoning done in service of justifying an already held belief or goal. It helps explain why the CWM who know the most about climate science are the most likely to reject it; they learn about it in order to reject it. See Chris Mooney's great piece on that. Point being: when facts (or the implications of those facts) threaten people's social identities, they tend to dismiss the facts rather than the identity.
To all these reasons, I'd add "epistemic closure," the extraordinary way that the modern right has constructed a self-contained, hermetically sealed media environment in which conservatives can be protected from ever encountering a contrary view. It's an accelerant to all the tendencies described above.

Anyway, as you can see, the rejection of climate science among CWM is basically overdetermined. Climate change threatens their values, their privileges, and their worldview. They are reacting as one would expect them to react.