If This Is Positive Mood, Negative Mood Is Going to Be A Doozy

Socionomist: Positive Social Mood Drives Manifestations of Inclusion in US

The May issue reported that Austria had installed pedestrian crossing lights featuring same-sex couples and that the US Food and Drug Administration had recommended the lifting of a decades-old ban on blood donations by gay men. We followed up in June with a look at the Supreme Court’s rulings in favor of Obamacare and same-sex marriage.

All of these events are expressions of inclusion, a manifestation of positive social mood. Since then, the inclusionary trend in the US has continued with the July 10 removal of the Confederate Battle Flag from the South Carolina State House. The decision to remove the flag followed the murder of nine African-Americans at a church in Charleston on June 17.

If there was an inclusionary trend, there wouldn't be massive protests against the removal of the flag, with it showing up in weird places like northwest Pennsylvania.

AP: SOME AMERICANS REFUSE TO GIVE UP ON CONFEDERATE FLAG

It's hardly the only place where Confederate flags fly in northern states. Hannah Alberstadt said she was surprised to see many of them in her hometown of Girard in northwestern Pennsylvania.

"My town has always had sort of a hickish contingent, but it's like every other day I see another Confederate flag, and it's just shocking," she said. "These people are definitely trying to make a statement, because people have them waving from their truck beds, people have them on a stick in their front yards, people are wearing them to the grocery store."

The symbol still raises ire: A flag on the back of a pickup truck parked in a convenience store lot in the middle of Hanover was set on fire. And in Elk Grove, California, a Confederate flag was displayed at a gun shop until the owners removed it in late June after getting death threats.

Setting cars on fire because of a sticker isn't the sign of positive social mood, it is an expression of a generally negative mood. I can't remember anything remotely similar in the 1990s or early 2000s, when social mood was at its peak.

Then there's the latest outrage: Cecil the lion killer's $1million Florida vacation home vandalized with graffiti and pigs feet as he remains in hiding

Angry vandals defaced the vacation home of lion killer Walter J Palmer overnight on Monday, while also littering the American dentist's driveway with pig's feet in a show of outrage over the death of a beloved lion named Cecil.

Pictures taken Tuesday morning outside the 55-year-old's $1million vacation home in Marco Island, Florida show the garage door spray painted with the words 'Lion killer!' and a handful of orange pig's feet scattered across the front of the house.

Palmer has been in hiding ever since he was identified last month as the big game hunter behind the cruel killing of a well-known lion named Cecil, who was illegally baited out of a protected Zimbabwe wildlife reserve and let to suffer an arrow wound for 40 hours before he was finally brought down.

These are the seeds of mob violence in America. The organizing is taking place online, while a few people carry action out in real life. The media seemingly finds an issue to stir up hatred between various factions every month, with online mobs hunting down people in real life, vandalizing their property, attacking their place of work (or getting them fired) and threatening physical violence.

This looks like a bear market rally. The long-term trend in mood is negative, even if the intermediate-term trend is positive. There were protests in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, MD in the past year, as the most glaring example of the underlying negative mood. If this is what passes for positive mood in the current bear market cycle, the bottom of this cycle will get ugly.