Majority privilege (Makiko Deguchi)

The first step toward eliminating structural discrimination is for people in the majority to be aware of their invisible privileges. Unless we realize how automatically advantaged we are within the current social structure, and how these advantages allow us not to face discrimination and microaggressions on a daily basis, we tend to see ourselves as a product of our own effort.
This leads people to blame marginalized people for their own victimization. We fall into the false sense of security that discrimination is something that other “bad” people do, and that the issue is irrelevant to them because they consciously do not discriminate against others. However, failing to take action when a discriminatory structure is in place is the same as helping to perpetuate discrimination.

心理の歪み(競馬・株)

競馬でも株でも、以下のような心理の歪みが、オッズや株価を本来の価値からズラす。

  • 人気馬・人気銘柄に過剰投票(過剰評価)
  • 不人気馬・不人気銘柄が過小評価される
  • 直近の成績に過剰反応する(近視眼バイアス)
  • 有名騎手・有名経営者に過剰信頼する(権威バイアス)
  • ストーリーに弱い(物語バイアス)
  • 損を避けたい(損失回避)
  • 群衆に従いたい(同調バイアス)

勝つ人は、このズレ=歪みだけを狙う。

Gary Stevenson (The Trading Game: A Confession)

The rich get the assets, the poor get the debt, and then the poor have to pay their whole salary to the rich every year just to live in a house. The rich use that money to buy the rest of the assets from the middle class and then the problem gets worse every year. The middle class disappears, spending power disappears permanently from the economy, the rich becoming much fucking richer and the poor, well, I guess they just die.

日本の倫理(神田淳)

「言挙げ」とは、言葉に出して言い立てることである。日本人は古来「言挙げしないこと」を美徳と考えてきた。自己主張する、自己宣伝する、言い訳する、理屈(屁理屈)を言う、自己を正当化する、口論する、人の悪を言い立てる、言わなくてもいいことを言う、実行できないことを壮語する。こういった「言挙げ」は、古来日本人の好まないところである。

NAZA

The lights go down, and for a moment I forget I’m watching a screen. It fills with a rooftop in Tel Aviv at night, black and grey. The camera pans down. Through windows, we see people watching screens of their own – couples holding each other close, following the news, eating food. They appear absorbed in their own worlds, and why wouldn’t they be?
That’s the thing I can’t get past as a Palestinian journalist from Gaza, watching this apparent tranquillity: this must be it – this must be what safety actually looks like. Just an evening uninterrupted, with no military aircraft flying overhead or drones buzzing incessantly. Meanwhile, men and women on the rooftop above them calmly talk about how they decided how many Palestinian civilians would die on any given night.
These are the soldiers, mostly intelligence officers, who helped Israel carry out its destruction of Gaza. Their testimonies form the basis of NAZA, a documentary whose title comes from an Israeli military acronym used to indicate how many civilians are likely to die in an airstrike on the territory.
What surprised me in the film wasn’t the massive scale of the killing, or even the coldness of it, but the proficiency of the soldiers who coolly described destroying people’s lives as if they were discussing a routine errand. One described the work simply as a “mission”, while another compared it to a “video game”.
One soldier described knowing exactly what some of the people were doing in the moments before he killed them. He recalled hearing a man talking to his wife in bed. A baby crying. The sound of the TV. Despite taking all that humanity in, he quickly gave permission to drop the bomb.
The soldier explained how he would then go out with friends in the evening, and come back the next morning to do it all over again. For these Israeli soldiers, killing Palestinians was simply a task that could be paused and repeated.
There was no hesitation in their voices, no sense that they were describing something that should be difficult to say aloud. They spoke with the ease of people who had learned how to do this, how to talk about it and how to carry on afterward – as one of them put it, with “zero” consideration for the lives they annihilated.