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Author: New Neo

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New Neo

Neo is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at the new neo.

Posted by New Neo on September 09, 2018 41 Comments
Professor Jacobson recently wrote a post about Obama's recent rhetoric against President Trump. In giving his speech, Obama was violating the traditional code of behavior for ex-presidents, which was to keep their mouths shut and refrain from criticizing their successors. But no one on earth should be surprised by the fact that Obama just can't stay away. In fact, there's evidence that he's been trying to undermine Trump since Trump first took office, and perhaps even before.

Posted by New Neo on September 08, 2018 8 Comments
Last week, I wrote a post on Brazilian election frontrunner Jair Bolsonaro, sometimes known as the Trump of Brazil. Now comes news that Bolsonaro was stabbed two days ago:
The leading candidate in Brazil’s presidential election is in serious but stable condition after being stabbed by an assailant at a campaign rally on Thursday, doctors said, pushing an already chaotic campaign into further disarray.

Posted by New Neo on September 02, 2018 7 Comments
Brazil is scheduled to have a general election this October, and this article about the current frontrunner in the Brazilian presidential elections, a man named Jair Bolsonaro, describes him as "far-right" and given to racist and misogynistic utterances:

Posted by New Neo on July 18, 2018 30 Comments
When I was studying interpersonal communication and how to track an argument or any other verbal exchange, one thing that was very much emphasized was the difference between content and process. Content is just what it sounds like: the subject matter about which two people (let’s say, a married couple) are talking. “Did you do the dishes last night?” Process is everything else—for example, the emotion with which something is said, the type of vocabulary used, tone, repetition, body language, and the unspoken subtext (which can include a covert or overt goal of the speaker).

Posted by New Neo on June 26, 2018 12 Comments
In another of today's SCOTUS decisions, the Court ruled in NIFLA v. Becerra that a California law requiring crisis pregnancy centers (pregnancy counseling clinics usually run by pro-life Christians) to post notices that "California has public programs that provide immediate free or low-cost access to comprehensive family planning services (including all FDA-approved methods of contraception), prenatal care, and abortion for eligible women" was an unconstitutional violation of free speech. The vote was the familiar 5-4 and once again came down to the swing vote of Kennedy siding with the conservative wing, and all the liberal justices dissenting.

Posted by New Neo on June 12, 2018 75 Comments
""Should Brazil keep its Amazon tribes from taking the lives of their children?" is the subtitle of a recent article in Foreign Policy. It describes traditional but still-existent customs of many Amazon tribes in Brazil that dictate killing handicapped children and even those one might define as transgendered, and a controversy in Brazil over whether a law should be passed that bans such practices (it already has passed one legislative body in that country and is being considered by the other):

Posted by New Neo on June 03, 2018 64 Comments
One of the things that struck me about this article excoriating Alan Dershowitz for his recent defense (not support, but defense) of Trump is that author Elie Mystal doesn't actually engage in any detail with the substance of Dershowitz's arguments. Mystal's attack on Dershowitz (and Trump, for that matter) is ad hominem. I assume we're just supposed to take what the author says at face value. Or perhaps he assumes that if we're reading him at all, we already agree with him.

Posted by New Neo on May 21, 2018 99 Comments
Unlike Watergate, the current crisis in government/spying/politics doesn't have a memorable name. But for those of us who lived through Watergate, it has a certain resonance with that event as well as major differences, imparting a strange sense of familiarity, dislocation, and increasing alarm.

Posted by New Neo on March 24, 2018 8 Comments
What do these three things have in common: the recent Biden vs. Trump war of threatening words, the Dozens, and Inuit song duels? They're all ways that people threaten each other in an almost-comical way, in which the real competition is about who is being the wittiest and boldest in speech. They are all substitutes for an actual physical fight and are also popular spectator sports. That's the way I see this:

Posted by New Neo on March 11, 2018 4 Comments
Richard Landes is a brilliant man who has worked tirelessly for close to two decades to expose the biases and distortions present in worldwide media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I also count him as a friend. I've written about Landes and his work many times before. Among other things, he is the person who uncovered the media's compliance in shaping the Muhammed al Durah story into anti-Israel propaganda, and he also coined the phrase "Pallywood."

Posted by New Neo on March 10, 2018 5 Comments
Reading reports of so many high-profile murders by teenagers, it's not unusual for people to assume that there's been a big increase in killings by young people, both murder and suicide. But statistics tell a much more complex story. To the question of whether there been a rise in teen suicide, the answer is both yes and no (the following quotes are from an article dated November 2017):
An increase in suicide rates among US teens occurred at the same time social media use surged and a new analysis suggests there may be a link.
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