Radio Lab: What’s Left When You’re Right?

More often than not, a fight is just a fight… Someone wins, someone loses. But this hour, we have a series of face-offs that shine a light on the human condition, the benefit of coming at something from a different side, and the price of being right.

3 Part Series:

  1. British Gameshow features prisoner’s dilemma, which one contestant solves by promising to always defect.
  2. Enneagram 1 confronts uncooperative bike mechanic and potentially schizophrenic man, to the growing appreciation of possible Enneagram 9, who typically tries to go-along-to-get-along.
  3. Why is left-handedness a 90-10 trait?

Why I could no longer serve this president

I resigned because the traditional core values of the United States, as manifested in the president’s National Security Strategy and his foreign policies, have been warped and betrayed. I could no longer represent him personally and remain faithful to my beliefs about what makes America truly great.

.. These policies are purportedly being pursued to make good on nativist campaign rhetoric that resonated with many legitimately aggrieved Americans. But I know many of these voters. They are not “deplorables.” They deserve better. They deserve enlightened and informed debate about the true nature of the globalized economy, automation, and the need for education and reimagined job-skills programs to keep us competitive.

.. Instead, they are being offered the siren song of populist scapegoating of immigrants, jingoistic chest-beating and a schoolyard bully’s attitude that taunts: “I win, you lose.”
.. Moreover, policy options based on fear and hashtags will only offer us a false dichotomy.
.. immigration issue cannot be debated rationally when the president routinely encourages division and disparages today’s migrants with the same hateful language deployed a century ago to excoriate my Irish and Italian ancestors.
.. My goal is to create the conditions for respectful and nonconfrontational dialogue between supporters of the president’s immigration policy and the full panoply of migrants