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tv   The Dylan Ratigan Show  MSNBC  November 11, 2011 4:00pm-5:00pm EST

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meeting so large it had to be moved from the board room to a nearby hotel ballroom. this, the latest move in a growing child sex abuse scandal that has left the powerhouse university and its storied football program reeling. at least nine young victims have come forward so far, telling prosecutors they were victimized by former assistant football coach jersey sandusky. those revelations, proving career ending, as you probably know by now, for veteran head coach joe paterno, who had been at the helm of that team for 46 seasons. he also knew about at least one alleged encounter, but failed to go to police at the time. news of paterno's firing led to riots on the penn state campus wednesday night. the governor calling those throngs of students knuckleheads. this is now a school trying to rebuild its image in the wake of the scandal, urging unity, not
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behind paterno, but for the victims of child sex abuse. the naming of rodney erickson as psu's new president, just the latest attempt to begin the heeling process. and as we wait for mr. erickson as the podium, i do want to bring in our friday mega panel, ari melber, krystal ball, and toure. and we were talking about this, excuse me, upstairs before we came down. the degree to which the trust in young relative to old and young men relative to older men is really shaken when you have the level of what we are calling patriarchal betrayal that's playing out in the situation. it's obvious what that does to penn state, throwing it into disarray and restructuring. what is less clear is what that
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does to our sense of trust outside of penn state, when we look at our leaders. go ahead, crystal. >> well, i think it's that. i think it's, obviously, turned penn state into a sense of sort of, hopefully, some soul searching, but i think we also, as a country, need to engage in a little soul searching and think about, there were so many people involved in this case who had an opportunity to do something and didn't. and maybe we in our own lives have witnessed something that we didn't have the courage to speak up to. not something as grave as what we're talking about, but i do think is it requires asking ourselves a question of, where have we failed in our own courage? what have we witnessed that we should have spoken out about? >> and the culture of disengagement. not my problem. >> exactly. and hoping somebody else is going to have the courage to speak out. >> well, i mean, but i think we can't dislocate this tragedy from football. in that football is the king of all american sports. and on college campuses, a football team that is
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dominating, that brings in a lot of money, that has a massive amount of social power on the campus, they become like -- like your experience at michigan. and when you have somebody like a joe paterno, who basically is the king of happy valley, you can't -- the amount of power that these people have is so massive. and that they would be able to protect one of their own when he commits the worst offense perhaps in human life. they can't -- i mean, i don't think you could get away with this, with even the basketball team, which is the number two thing on a lot of college campuses. number one on some campuses, but the thing of football, in american society, and football teams that make a ton of money, have a vast amount of power, and it's frightening. >> and i think we have to be very clear about what we're talking about. i have heard this in the media described as a sex scandal. this is not allegations of a sex scandal. these are allegations of rape, these are allegations of pedophilia. these are some of the most serious types of crimes that we
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deal with in human society. so just talking about it is actually difficult. and i think a lot of the first response on the campus from some students, as i understand it, was not a response of humanity. it was a response of denial. >> let's go to take a listen to the new president. >> -- meaningful and timely updates as frequently as needed. i encourage dialogue with students, faculty, alumni, and other members of the penn state community, to express their feelings and share with one another what we have learned from this experience. fourth. we will be respectful and sensitive to the victims and their families. we will seek appropriate ways to foster healing and raise broader awareness of the issues of sexual abuse. my administration will provide whatever resources, access, and information as needed to support the special committee's investigation.
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i pledge to take immediate action based upon their findings. these guiding principles are my personal commitment to help penn state address the substantiative issues we are facing, while also accomplishing the daily business of the university, including educating more than 96,000 students, breakthrough research, and our commitments to service. as i have just committed to providing timely updates, i want to cover a few additional topics before i take questions. first, assistant coach mike mcqueary has been placed on administrative leave. he will not be coaching nor attending tomorrow's game. second, we have received many questions about security at tomorrow's game. let me assure that we have taken every precaution, including extra security personnel to ensure a safe game day experience.
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but we need the public's assistance. there will be significant attention to the conduct of the crowd attending tomorrow's game. it is my sincere hope that all members of the penn state community and our guests will conduct themselves in a way that reflects our collective values, before, during, and after the game. i am especially heartened that unprompted a group of penn state students launched a blue-out movement to help raise awareness of child abuse. it is this kind of compassion and teamwork that really represents the best of penn state university. i also want to thank the thousands of people who have reached out to me and to the staff and faculty and students of the university during this very difficult time. i've tried to read as many of your note as i can, and there are literally thousands of them. i'd like to read one from a
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professor. "i can't imagine how many e-mails you will be plowing through for the next few weeks, but i wanted to write and say thanks for stepping up to such a monumental task. i also wanted to let you know about something that happened in my class today that provided a little flicker at the end of a very long and dark tunnel. a student waited to speak to me at the end of class, and she said her father called this morning and asked if she was okay. she said, of course, i am. i work with some of the best faculty in the world, and they are helping us move forward. we are going to be okay. i think this is one of those moments when the teacher becomes the students." just as you saw with the governor earlier, the students are really heart and soul of this university. let's not forget that. i will now take your questions.
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[ inaudible question ] >> the decision regarding assistant coach mcqueary was made by the athletic director and me. with respect to the status of tim curley, that's an ongoing topic of discussion. we'll return to that next week. [ inaudible question ] >> was the question -- my responsibility? [ inaudible ]
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>> it is within my responsibility, certainly, as president, to deal with these issues. >> rodney erickson making his first public appearance as the president of penn state, effectively asserting his authority as the new chief at that university and emphasizing, quite clearly there, his investment and his perceived importance and the importance of the teachers and the student body at penn state as a differentiated group from the football team. which kind of goes to what you were just saying, which is, these schools seem very happy to lord themselves as football programs, notre dame, penn state, michigan, and now one of them finds themselves saying, we are more than a football program. which most people don't necessarily perceive. >> yeah. yeah. i mean, finally, joe paterno, or the head football coach is not the leader of the whole community. and, you know, obviously, that was working out well for a
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while. but you can't disassociate the stunning lack of character that is shown in this end moment from what happened the 46 years -- it's not that, well, this is one mistake. this completely changes everything. as andrew sullivan wrote, you have changed the first line of your obituary this week. we cannot think of you in the same way, ever again. >> to that point, what i would like personally to see happen, every time penn state plays a football game, this is going to be brought up again. i think they should cancel the season, solicit their donors to sponsor a public service program, instead of students go to football programs on sunday, engage in community service, come together as a real community, not just around joe paterno and the football team, and have something positive come out of this horrific -- >> the one thing that students would say back to that is that the players and the students themselves did nothing wrong. >> and i understand that and i
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hear that, but every time they play a game, this is going to be a mark on their reputation. as a school, in order to recover, in order to come together as a community, i would argue that would be the most beneficial -- >> and the largest interests of the university should transcend the personal interests of a given football -- >> and i was a athlete scholar myself, and i understand that a lot of these students would not be able to go to the school were it not for scholarships. they can keep their scholarships, just cancel the season and invest in community service instead. >> we are also past the point of what the institution does in its own self-policing. this institution, like so many in american life, do not have the ability to police themselves. the only reason we got here was because the governor, empowered through its prosecutors, finally did what no one else was able to stand up and do, which is to say this this type of crime is
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wrong, but if it is what was alleged, we will have the punishment, right? i think the larger point that always comes up in sex abuse and rape scandals that people don't want to deal with it. they want to put it aside. it's nobody's problem. a lot of things like that in life, in society, only the government deals with. nobody else wants to. and we can think of other institutions that without indictments, never get rid of the top. to me, it's not the school, it's the government. >> let's not act like the school is just now doing the right thing because it's the right thick. civil trials are coming and the school needs to distance itself from -- >> and ari, what you're saying also does the not abdicate personal responsibility, just highlights the role the government place. coming up next, from war to work. a program helping unemployed veterans find jobs. we'll meet the founder and one of the success stories. plus, 42 million americans
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have served in the armed forces, but there's one number that makes this veterans day extra special. hey, hey, hey, hey. i can see who's on my network people! lance? lance? yes, yes you are next. all right. dave, i'm in. ♪ katie! what are you doing, sweetheart? supplementing my allowance. how long have we been gone? [ male announcer ] get low prices on the latest 4g phones, starting at $28.88. save money. live better. walmart. see? he's taking his vitamins. new one a day vitacraves plus omega-3 dha is a complete multivitamin for adults. plus an excellent source of omega-3 dha in a great tasting gummy. one a day, gummies for grown-ups. in a great tasting gummy. smal l bu in a great tasting gummy. sinesses are the smal lifeblood of our communities. on november 26th you can make a huge impact by shopping small on small business saturday.
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the other big story to have the day, coming home. today, as you may know, is veterans day. and president obama led the nation in honoring our men and women in uniform at the tomb of the unknowns at arlington national cemetery. ♪
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>> well, 22 million retired u.s. service members are now living civilian lives here at home. and with the wars in iraq and afghanistan winding down, that number is expected to grow another million by 2016. but many come home to find another enemy waiting for them. unemployment. 850,000 u.s. vets are looking for work right now. they fought for us, so now we must fight for them. >> recruit our veterans. if you're a business owner, hire them. if you're a community leader, a mayor, a pastor, a preacher, call on them to join your efforts. organize your community to make a sustained difference in the life of a veteran. >> just yesterday, the senate overwhelmingly passed a jobs bill aimed at getting american's bravest a place in the civilian workforce. it includes job training and career counseling for our veterans as well as tax credits
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for employers who hire them. that is exactly what our next guest is encouraging companies like his to do. move vets' resumes to the top of their hiring list. harley litman is ceo and founder of genesis 10, it's a technology consulting and staffing firm. he hired iraq war veteran, retired third class petty officer, richard sanchez, to help him launch a new program, helping others returning vets find a decent job. and officer sanchez, it must be fun to find a job where you help other veterans find jobs. >> it's a wonderful job. it's an exhilarating feeling. >> walk us through, harley, your goal. what are you doing? how could other people who may be want to do something similar to what you're doing learn from what you're doing, so they could help do what you are doing. that was a crazy question i just asked. sorry. >> it's all right. these veterans are the ones who put their live on tfe on the li
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us, so we can enjoy the benefits of what we get in this country. so i think we have an obligation to do everything possible to go out of our way and prioritize them and hire them in the workforce. what we're doing is, when we look at resumes, we're trying to redline when we see they have veterans experience and prioritize them and do everything possible so we can help them get hired. >> let's say that somebody watching the the show or they'll read about this on the internet or whatever it may be or other conversations like this say, i want to do that. what is the beginning process of somebody who's not a veteran, who wants to engage in a way that can really create a hive of activity around doing this? >> well, they have to focus on their resumes, reach out through many veterans organizations to contact veterans and then you can't do it alone. we need to reach out to corporate america, to be our partners, so that they can help us hire these people.
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they make great employees. >> we started to talk, officer sanchez, a little bit about the really incomprehensibly traumatic, for those who are not veterans, return from war. particularly in the context of accelerated communication, accelerated transportation, you can go 12, 24 hours from a war zone to a walmart or to a mall somewhere. how important is having productive work for a veteran in making the transition back to civilian life? >> it's very important that we get reintroduced to society. this helps us to be able to communicate with our future employers and deal with the new battles that we're going to do at home. it can be unemployment or education. >> and it would -- if you were to look -- and it's hard to know, because, obviously, none of us were there, but if you were to look at america's history in treating its veterans, coming home from world
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war i, even the veterans after the civil war, coming home after world war ii, and then more tragically, obviously, i think, everybody knows that the way that the veterans come home from vietnam were treated was shameful. how is america doing this time around? >> terrible. if i can say. no, they really are. they're forgetting these people. you know, basically, they're going on with life as usual. they have to remember that these people make great employees. they have discipline, they're goal orr geieoriented. they focus on teamwork, they have management experience, leadership. they're selfless. so i think corporate america is missing out on wonderful employees. >> you were going to say something? >> yes, absolutely. i think the public and companies need to be educated about these things, just like harley says. at a recent event that i went to, there were about 100 veterans that i met, and only two were employed veterans.
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>> how much of our disengagement with the veterans is correlated to the incredibly small percentage of the american population that has been involved in these two wars, where, i guess, what is it, 1% of the american population that is asked to go back and go back again and go back again and go back again and go back again, and how much is our inadequate, grossly inadequate response to the veterans' needs and their return, tied to the total lack of familiarity in the american population to the war itself? >> well, as you said, only 1% of americans have been in the military. so to a large number of people, they're invisible. and that's a problem. so we really have to reach out.
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they're the best of us, they put their life on the line for us, and really make a concerted effort to prioritize them and make sure we help them in training and hire them. >> genesis 10 your business if folks want to learn more about it, i'm presuming it's on the internet? >> that's correct. >> is there other places i can steer people while we're out here in public talking about this? >> there are other organizations, the wounded warrior project, the veterans of foreign wars, hire our heroes, and many other programs that they can reach out to to seek employment, advice, or counseling. >> there's a couple of them and we'll post those to the web as well. thank you for your service. and thank you, harley, for stepping in here and trying to make something happen. where a lot of people in this country have not. >> well, thank you for having us. >> harley litman, founder of genesis 10, an iraq war veteran. richard sanchez, officer, thank you. >> thank you. >> we'll be right back. tdd# 1-800-345-2550 let's talk about the personal attention
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what's in a name? well, in the case of skulls unlimited in oklahoma, pretty much everything. they promise more animal skulls and full skeletons that anywhere else in the world. the animals these bones come from are, of course, dead, but cleaning and preparing them takes a lot of very live, very creepy critters. >> americans love to watch "dirty jobs." they just aren't doing them. that, according to our next guest, who uses alabama as a
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prime example, where aggressive immigration laws have caused a mass exodus of undocumented workers, creating thousands of open jobs for legal residents. which is exactly what those laws were designed to do. except americans aren't taking those jobs. joining us now is elizabeth dwoskin, a staff writer for "bloomberg businessweek," and her story on "why americans won't do dirty jobs" is the cover story for this week's magazine. elizabeth, why won't they the take them? >> that's what we went to alabama to find out. the immigration law has created this economic laboratory, which is what with we're calling it. you have employers being tested right now. they're testing the the line between the bottom line and how far they'll go to recruit people. and for employees, what's being tested is what they're willing to do, the work they're willing
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to do, and for what wage. so we went to a town in alabama, a county in alabama that has 18% unemployment. it's the second highest unemployment county in alabama. it's one of the poorest counties in the country. and we went to a cat fish plant there. and that cat fish plant, until the immigration law hit, the majority of its workers were guatemalan. we went there to ask, well, how in a town that has almost 20% unemployment, how could there be any guatemalan workers, how could there be any immigrants doing these jobs? >> and the answer? >> well, what we found is that it's complicated. the historical answer is that a lot of immigrants came to do these jobs in alabama, in agro business and the poultry industry. they came in the '90s and they were actively recruited by industry. this was a time when the economy was expanding, so you have the expansion of the economy, and you also had rural labor shortages, which had toot with the expansion of the economy,
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and especially in perry county, there was a steady out-migration of african-americans in that counties, and other counties in alabama, people moved to better-paying jobs. >> let me cut to the chase. is there any correlation between the fact that these jobs don't pay any money and people's inability to take them? >> i think, definitely. i think that people in places where some of these -- these companies are located, very poor parts of the state, people really want these jobs. there's no other jobs out there. and a lot of the time, the only jobs out there are minimum wage jobs. or they're unemployed, or they have put out hundreds of resumes. people i'd interviewed at these plants, they'd already tried for mcdonald's and hardee's. that's when they turn to working for the plant. but what you see is sometimes people can't hack it in lots of different ways. so, for example, people told me that people will work just until the point that they can collect unemployment and then they'll quit or find a way to get fired.
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in a lot of these businesses, there's high turnover, because they're really terrible, hard jobs, and people are quitting all the time and then they get re-hired -- >> i'm going to jump in. this is ari melburne from "the nation." i love the journalist you're doing. there's a lot of demagoguing here. i guess my big question coming from all the work you've done here, when you look now at the people who continue to make these arguments, which is somewhat disproven by what you've found, do they need a reality check or a realness check? by that, i mean, if you're a politician beating up on immigrants here, do you need to know the facts, or from your reporting, do you think the people need to know the facts, don't care, or are not being genuine? >> i think that's a great question. i think the people who actually enacted this law did not do a lot of economic research. when i interviewed the senator scott bisen who was behind the
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law, i said, what research did you do? and he said, well, i looked at oklahoma, where the unemployment rate went down, you know, after they enacted similar laws. it's very can questionable research. and if you look at the economic research on the other side, there have been studies, for example, there was a study in arizona which pointed out that after arizona enacted everify, about 100,000 illegal immigrants have left the state. but americans have actually not come to fill those jobs. it didn't have any effect on unemployment. so the question now, though, is, there are many people in alabama who are unemployed, who are in dire straits. and policymakers there are actually trying very hard to steer americans to these jobs that historically they've been moving away from, at least for the past 15 years. >> actually, this is krystal ball, and i wanted to question you on that as well. because typically we've seen republicans support this type of legislation. and in a state like alabama,
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it's an overwhelmingly red republican state. are we seeing the business owners on the ground, people who have been republicans their whole life, are they changing their views on immigration because of what they're seeing in alabama and in georgia and other states across the country? >> definitely. this is actually something you'd think it is probably driving a wedge or schism in the republican party there. you have people, you have business owners who are looking at the reality, which is that they're, you know, they're facing a labor shortage. they lost some of these businesses. they lost half their workers overnight or over the course of a month. so they're looking, is they're saying to themselves, this is ridiculous. and you had every business coalition in the state of alabama opposing this law. i mean, every industry in the state. construction, hospitality, retail, agri business, every business coalition -- >> who was supporting it? what interest groups were supporting it? >> well, it polls pretty well.
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i think i saw a poll when i was in alabama that it was polling at 80%. and even just when i did sort of man on the street interviews, everywhere i went in alabama, i asked everyone i met about the law, and i'll tell you, 90% of people were for it. they don't interact with immigrants all the time. not all people are business owners. >> elizabeth, thank you very much. congrats on the piece. i look forward to seeing how this impacts, i think, to the point here, that the immigration debate gets more complex when the knee-jerk reaction backfires. toure stays for a rant a little bit later. ari and krystalkrystal, have a wonderful weekend. coming up, from maternity wards to the pyramids of egypt. [ male announcer ] our nation's veterans are real-life heroes.
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but when they come home, they don't want a parade; they want a job. the postal service employs more veterans than any other civilian employer. but congress is debating a bill that would force the postal service to fire tens of thousands of vets, close post offices, shut mail processing plants, and disrupt mail delivery. drastic cuts won't fix the postal service and aren't needed. tell your representative to vote "no" on house resolution 2309. it's time to deliver for our veterans -- and america. see? he's taking his vitamins. new one a day vitacraves plus omega-3 dha is a complete multivitamin for adults. plus an excellent source of omega-3 dha in a great tasting gummy.
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today is more than likely the last binary day of your life. 11/11/11. you don't know what a binary day is, or you think, who really cares, you ask? pish-posh, you may say. i don't know if you say "pish-posh." but it's a day where the written date only consists of 0s and 1s. it's not as chic as our end of day mayan calendar days, but the next one isn't until january 1st, 2100. an unusually large amount of people have set up their nuptials for this day and there are reports of scheduled c-sections so babies can be born with good luck. and it's not just here. they're all worked up about this, the world over. in fact, egypt has closed the great pyramids amid rumors that certain groups were planning on holding ceremonies there to cash in on the day's mysterious powers. me, on this binary day, i'll be
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watching "gold rush" on the discovery channel and ordering takeout this evening. like i said, it's a really big day. you know the old saying that "you're only kidding yourself"? well, next, we'll check the science behind it. what's better than gold ? free gold !
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the color of this pen is r-r-r -- the color of this pen is re-r re-rre-re re-re- -- the color of the pen that i hold in my hand is royal blue! >> jim carey may play the extreme in "liar, liar," but everyday people use self-deception to motivate themselves. it's happening all around us, and taking that even further, our next guest says that lying to yourself improves your ability to lie to everybody else. with us today is robert trifrs, a biology expert at rutgers university and the author of "the folly of fools: the logic
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of deceit and self-deception in human life." you say, many people see optimism and self-deception as a defense strategy, to stay sane in a harsh world. you argue that it is a psychological attack mechanism. what does that mean? >> it means that the major function of self-deception is the better to deceive others. so in that sense, it's an aggressive or an offensive strategy. it's not defensive. the psychologists interpret it generally as it's a defensive strategy to keep us happy. and they cite the fact that depressed people do not engage much in self-deflation. so then they argue, if we were all realistic, we wouldn't get out of bed in the morning, we'd be depressed. but that's getting cause and effect badly backwards. because when you're depressed is not a good time for self-deflation. if anything, it's a good time
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for a little bit of self-criticism. but you cannot pull off self-inflation very good when you're depressed. if i'm walking along depressed saying i'm better looking than everybody, it's implausible on its face. so psychologists have a history of getting things backwards, because they don't come out of any kind of functional, ie, evolutionary understanding of why we would have been selected in the first place. >> so walk us through the benefits -- or what is the forward or the non-backwards way to the deal with self-deception. if i say, okay, it's okay for me to deceive myself that i'm the greatest anchorman that ever walked the face of the earth because it makes me feel better about myself and i'm less depressed and all that sort of thing, or whatever i think about myself or want to deceive myself to, you say that that's an aggressive act towards everybody else? >> yes. because i don't see you as pumping yourself up as being the greatest anchor person as being an order to improve your
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happiness, so much as to fool the rest of us into thinking you're a better anchor person as you really are. and insofar as you believe your deception or your lies -- >> what if i think i'm terrible? what if i think i'm the worst anchor that ever walked -- what if the self-deception is negative? >> that's a very good people. and there are a minority of people that practice the diminutive side. so we can show that there are some people that regard themselves as uglier than they really are, and that is sometimes traced to a certain kind of parental upbringing, in which they lack a basic kind of self-confidence. so, yes, for a minority of people, they self-deceive downwards, and it's not clear that that's to their benefit at all. >> at the end of the day, there's actually biology here. you were explaining to me during the commercial break that living in a world of deception and living in a state of self-deception is biologically harmful. >> yes, absolutely. and we know that from a variety
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of angles. but let me give you one that relates to something you were talking about earlier on your show today, which is the whole penn state scandal. we know that trauma experienced in childhood has negative consequences on health in adulthood, but sexual trauma is the most harmful. and we're pretty sure the reason for that is that sexual trauma is the trauma that's least shared with other people. and sexual trauma is typically girls and not boys, as in penn state, but it's shameful, they're under threats, they don't even tell their mother. if it's their stepfather, they don't want to cause problems at home, et cetera, et cetera. and it's the suppression of the trauma, not sharing it with anyone, that is the really costly side of it in their adult health. and in the functioning of their adult immune system. >> that is a big statement. because the world lives in this
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view that trauma itself is the thing. and it's not to suggest that you are diminishing trauma, whatever that trauma may be, but you are suggesting that how we resolve trauma after it happens, whatever the trauma may be, is at least as significant if not more significant than the trauma itself. is that correct? >> absolutely. and i'll mention beautiful work that was done by a very brilliant psychologist named jamie penabaker down at the university of texas. he brought people down to the lab and said, tell us about the most dramatic event of your life. might have been that, might have been the divorce of their parents when they were young. then he splits them into two groups. one write about their trauma, three successive days for 20 days in a journal. the other write about what they did that day. the people that are writing about their trauma, their mood goes down because they're dwelling on something painful,
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but their immune system starts improving immediately. and three months later, their immune system sell is elevated and now their mood is elevated also. the control group just flatlined. now he's done deeper analyses, where he's done a linguistic analysis, to show what the improvements are from those who are just writing in a private journal, not even sharing it with someone else. obviously, we didn't evolve writing in private journals. so it's probably more, we share wit a friend. but you can even share things with the lord in prayer, as they put it, and that probably is beneficial in that you're sharing it with someone, just as a private journal. there may not be anyone at the other end of the line, so to speak, but you are sharing it and you think you're sharing it, and it's beneficial. >> and biologically, the act of actually sharing whatever it is, it's unbelievable. i want to read an article from
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matt taibbi in "rolling stone" about the occupation. which has its own aspects to a response of a feeling of deception, a rejection, an ambient rejection of a culture of deception that starts with the banks, as taibbi puts it, but seems to have expanded beyond the banks to a broader rejection of deception. he says, to quote matt, he says, "that, to me, is what occupy wall street is addressing. people don't know exactly what they want. but as one friend of mine put it. they know one thing. blank this blank. we want something deferent. a different life with different values, or at least a chance at different values." your interpretation of the occupation as a rejection of a sense of deceiving authority? >> well, you know, i don't have
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anything especially good to say on that, but i would say one thing that amuses me. if you ask the people with a lot of money to pay a, little bit more in taxes, you have a bunch of people shrieking class warfare, that's class warfare, well, no. class warfare was when the peasants took their, um, you know, weapons to the king's palace and confronted him. that's class warfare. to ask someone to pay their fair share in taxes. that's class warfare? that's utter nonsense. so these people that are occupying warfare -- sorry, occupying wall street, they're practicing a tiny bit. it's not even class warfare. but one guy had a sign that i loved at the beginning, hungry? eat a banker? so i suppose that sounds like class warfare. but really, they are bringing back a little bit of the class contradiction and sticking it in everyone's face, and saying, come on, annonow, you're talkinl
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this bs, all the time. just flooding our air waves and so on, and talking nonsense about timid suggestions to have a more equitable distribution of the wealth of this country. >> professor, it's a really pleasure. >> likewise. >> i like when professors visit and we learn stuff on this show. it's learning for free in public. heck, they pay me! professor, it's a pleasure. have a good weekend. robert trivers, author of "the folly of fools." coming up on "hardball," chris talking to a victim of sexual abuse who knows whys victims and the adults protecting them remain silent. but first, toure with something to say about a dark week for state college. [ kid ] there i was. another holiday and stuck at the kids table again. andrew, come on over here. sit over here. [ boy ] cool.
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we're back on a friday, which means it's toure's turn for a daily rant. >> the irrational worship of sports gods reached an all-time high this week when penn state students staged a sort of riot, or, if you will, a brief occupation in support of joe paterno. this happened after it became clear that joe pa had not displayed the character we have come to expect after learning that one of his coaches was a pedophile. there are few stories that should make supporters run farther and faster from someone than this one, but instead, many penn state students went out and embarrassed themselves by speaking in microphones about
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their undying love about the man who harbored a pedophile. >> i love joe pa and i'm going to support him, no matter what. >> still supporting joe pa? >> joe pa is the father of this university. >> basically, we're all supporting joe pa, because we think he's getting an unfair wrap about this whole thing. >> why do they feel this way? it can take time to move the furniture of the mind. to have somebody be a god in your head for so long, and then find out they've done something horrific is a shock to the system. and those kids are simply not processing that they simply now must recalculate what they think of joe. his entire legacy has to be recalculated. what are we to think of someone who knows a pedophile is in their midst and doesn't do everything they can to punish him? sport is still in the collective mind a kin to battling in the coliseum an evidence of character, facing down the enemy under pressure and showing them who they really are. especially like football. surely to be good at football proves you are a real man. either a strong, indestructible man if a player and a brilliant
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man if a coach. and either way, you are courageous. not so fast. it's dangerous to extrapolate that showing character on the football field truly means having character in real life. surely shows something, but we've all seen countless examples of athletes who seem to be full of character in the athletic realm, yet showing a stunning lack of character off the field. add to that litany the man who embodied the nittany. winning at football proves you can win at football. thinking it can be applied to any other aspects of life is a bit dangerous. paterno's last words were not "pray for the victims," he said that, but afterward he said a rallying cry. we are penn state! the crowd cheered, of course, but in a pedophile and his paternal protector are penn state, who else would want to be? making an ambiguous report to a supervisor, and then doing nothing more when you are in control of the world in which this all happened is a stunning gap in action, morals, and
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character. someone who would do the maximum when the opponent is a difficult football team and the minimum when it's a friend who's a pedophile. well, that person surely destroys the myth that football success proves you have character that is portable into the rest of human life. >> if you were to project, if you were to be a fortune teller, the fate of -- forget penn state, will this in any way affect america's relationship with its great college football clm. >> america's relationship in general? >> i'm saying on the campus in oklahoma, on the campus at michigan, on the campus at notre dame, where there's no issue like this whatsoever, but there is still a deference to the authority that could theoretically prevail over this? >> no, not a sweeping change in america, because i don't think we expect this to happen -- everybody would say, this would never happen in my backyard. >> but isn't this

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