Skip to main content

Home/ New Culture Library/ Group items tagged problems

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
James Goodman

Is Loneliness a Public Policy Problem? - Zach McDade - The Atlantic Cities - 0 views

www.theatlanticcities.com/...5686

psychology society people loneliness isolation brain health

shared by James Goodman on 29 May 13 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 29 May 13
     
    Is Loneliness a Public Policy Problem? Zach McDade May 23, 2013 9 Comments Is Loneliness a Public Policy Problem? Shutterstock inShare3 Share Print Share on emailEmail Urban Institute MORE FROM THE URBAN INSTITUTE: The "Disconnected Youth" Paradigm Stemming the Tide of Federal Prison Growth The Continued Decline of North Korea Is a Case for Inclusive Politics A fascinating recent article in The New Republic reviewed a body of new science documenting the pernicious physiological effects of loneliness. Researchers have shown that loneliness-more formally, the want of intimacy-exacerbates a host of ailments, including Alzheimer's disease, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and even cancer. The share of Americans who report "not feeling close to people" at any given time is 30 percent and growing, and deemed by some a social health crisis. Should public policy researchers and practitioners care about something as intangible and inaccessible as loneliness? I'll give you three reasons why I think we should. First, some background… Feeling lonely actually sends misleading hormonal signals that physically change the molecular structure of the brain. According to the article, this "wrenches a whole slew" of bodily systems out of whack, causing loneliness to be seen by some as a risk factor for death as great as smoking. Who tends to be affected by loneliness, according to this research? Women more than men, blacks more than whites, the less-educated, the unemployed, the retired, anyone different. In other words, many of the same people affected by today's long-term unemployment and wealth disparities, persistent poverty, and isolation. If loneliness exacerbates these ills, it will further diminish people's ability to engage in economically and socially valuable and productive activities, which in turn could exacerbate loneliness. Three reasons why loneliness should be a p
James Goodman

Kid's Eating Problems Could Warn of Mental Issues | Psych Central News - 0 views

psychcentral.com/...75979.html

kids eating problems children health psychology science society

shared by James Goodman on 12 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 12 Oct 14
     
    The presence of multiple mental health issues in association with an eating disorder is not a surprise. "Many factors are associated with the development and persistence of eating disorders," Meilleur said. The results of this study indicate that 22.7 percent of the children identify having been mocked or insulted for his or her appearance as a trigger event to the modification of their behaviors. "For some children, bullying can initiate or reinforce boy image preoccupations and possibly lead to a change in eating behavior." Indeed, 95 percent of the children in the study had restrictive eating behaviors, 69.4 percent were afraid of putting on weight, and 46.6 percent described themselves as "fat." "These behaviors reflect the clinical presentations we observe in adolescents and support findings that body image is a preoccupation for some children as early as elementary school," Meilleur explained. The study also proves that eating disorders are not a "girl problem" as boys in the same age group were found to be similar to girls in most cases. The one exception to the similarity between boys and girls is that social isolation was more prevalent and lasted longer among boys. "The profound similarity between boys and girls supports, in our opinion, the hypothesis that common psychological and physical factors linked, amongst other things, to the developmental period, are involved in the development of an eating disorder," Meilleur said.
James Goodman

Unfit To Report - 0 views

www.nsfwcorp.com/...8d291b31731f8c86cf32a80b06c78c

politics health society wall street economy

shared by James Goodman on 05 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • quite possibly the scummiest — Planet Money/This American Life propaganda piece for the financial industry, disguised as highbrow progressive journalism.
  • The piece was called "Unfit For Work: The Startling Rise of Disability in America" and it essentially argued — using wildly flawed research and straight-up lies — that our Social Security program is burdened by a glut of freeloader disability queens, faking their disabilities in order to live high on the Social Security disability insurance hog. Why would NPR run such a flawed, biased story? The answer takes us right to the heart of Wall Street’s plans to privatize government benefits, which Wall Street bond holders want to slash for their own profits. This battle pits powerful Wall Street interests and their media and political lackeys on the one side, versus an overwhelming majority of Americans — Republicans and Democrats both — on the other. In the middle stands a radio piece from a trusted source, NPR/This American Life/Planet Money, telling its progressive, educated audience that there is in fact a problem with Social Security, and that problem is a bunch of human parasites faking disability to suckle from the Social Security teat. It’s the sort of rancid old 1930s anti-New Deal propaganda that the American Liberty League or NAM or the Chamber of Commerce used to puke out on a regular basis. But this is 2013, meaning this time around, the battleground is on the putative left, pitting the Democratic Party leaders including Obama against the people who voted for him, and who have nowhere else to turn. On the Democratic Party’s side: their funders on Wall Street, and their neoliberal propagandists in pundit-land and in universities. The key isn’t winning over right-wing conservatives, but rather affluent progressives — i.e., Planet Money's and NPR’s audience. If they can flip that demographic, Social Security is privatized toast.
  • The good thing is that the piece was such obvious crap, so intellectually flawed and propaganda-soaked, that Ira Glass and the This American Life/Planet Money/NPR people were forced to respond to their critics. The downside is that the critics were far too respectful, basing their criticism on factual flaws rather than on the corruption that made the flawed reporting not just possible, but inevitable.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • As we reported last year at our SHAME Project and in my piece for the NSFWCORP, Planet Money has a serious conflict-of-interest problem when it reports on anything involving the banking sector. Planet Money’s sole sponsor, as of late last year, is Ally Bank (formerly GMAC), one of the world’s most toxic subprime lenders. Ally/GMAC preyed on Americans on the upside, then plundered taxpayers for over $17 billion in TARP bailout funds when their fraud schemes came crashing down. As we showed, the disturbing overlap between GMAC’s lobbying efforts against bank regulation bills, and Planet Money programs attacking that legislation and its promoters, means that Planet Money has essentially doubled as a sophisticated PR vessel targeting a key audience unaware of the Planet Money/NPR financial arrangement with the banking industry.
  • When you know that Planet Money’s sole sponsor is a predatory lender, this hit-piece on Social Security "disability queens" makes an appalling sort of sense. Social Security is actually a fully funded and well-managed program. That’s precisely why Wall Street has been trying to grab it for years. When furious NPR viewers objected to seeing their donations funding anti-Social Security propaganda, Ira Glass felt compelled to issue this statement standing by the reporting: "We know of no factual errors. We stand by the story." Yet, as a Wired reporter pointed out, Planet Money did alter the online version of the show after listeners raised a fuss. NPR finally admitted that the text had been altered, lamely explaining that "sentences were changed for clarity after publication."
  • Among the products that Lincoln Financial Group sells is, you guessed it, disability insurance. So unless it’s a complete coincidence that Lincoln Financial’s ads keep popping up as the Planet Money sponsor for the show about disability queens, it looks like once again, Planet Money, This American Life and NPR have the same "failure to communicate their conflict-of-interest and media corruption" problem that we wrote about last summer. They’ve done nothing to address the corruption in their editorial process. No one is holding Planet Money, This American Life or NPR accountable for clear conflict-of-interest.
  • But perhaps NPR doesn’t give a shit. In their corporate sponsors page, NPR openly boasts that paying NPR to read your company’s name has a "halo effect" —that is, having a harmless squeaky progressive-sounding NPR voice reading out your company’s name essentially helps to whitewash the corporate sponsor’s brand reputation. That can really come in handy if you’re one of the banks that pocketed billions in taxpayer money and now you’re lobbying to cut Social Security benefits
  • So, as the financial lobby and the DC political class close in for the kill on your Social Security, you should be aware that Planet Money, This American Life and NPR are key players on the left flank of the bankers’ propaganda war. If you’re one of their listeners or donors, you’re a target. Welcome to what passes for the "liberal" media.
James Goodman

Do Psychiatrists Create the Very Mental Problems They Claim to Treat? | Alternet - 0 views

www.alternet.org/...psychiatry-dsm-mental-illness

society psychology health science psychiatry DSM mental health mental illness

shared by James Goodman on 11 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 11 Jun 13
     
    "It's easy to blame Big Pharma and the DSM for creating trendy mental illnesses, but the real problem is psychiatry's blindness to culture."
James Goodman

The physical reality of mental illness | The Incidental Economist - 0 views

theincidentaleconomist.com/...ical-reality-of-mental-illness

politics science mental health illness society psychology health

shared by James Goodman on 29 May 13 - No Cached
  • So mental illness isn’t just about happiness: Mental illness kills. Sometimes by suicide, of which mental illness is a principal cause. But most of the excess deaths among the mentally ill are caused by diseases such as cardiovascular disease or cancer.  In a sense, mental illness amplifies the risk or lethality of physical health problems. This occurs for many reasons.  Mentally ill people are more likely to develop tobacco, alcohol, and substance abuse addictions. Mentally ill people also experience high levels of stress from the loss of jobs, marriages, and families. Chronic diseases such as diabetes require intensive daily self-care routines and mental illness undermines a patient’s ability to carry these out.
James Goodman

Dr. Peter Breggin: New Research: Antidepressants Can Cause Long-Term Depression - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...term-depression_b_1077185.html

health research depression mental health science illness psychology

shared by James Goodman on 03 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 03 Jun 13
     
    "Shortly after Prozac became the best-selling drug in the world in the early 1990s, I proposed that there was little or no evidence for efficacy, but considerable evidence that the drug would worsen depression and cause severe behavioral abnormalities. I attributed much of the problem to "compensatory changes" in neurotransmitters as the brain resists the drug effect. Since then, in a series of books and articles, I've documented antidepressant-induced clinical worsening and some of its underlying physical causes. Now the idea has gained ground in the broader research community and has recently been named "tardive dysphoria.""
James Goodman

The "Family Members, Friends, Neighbors" approach to Mental Illness: Analysis... - 0 views

culturallydisoriented.wordpress.com/...al-conference-on-mental-health

psychology health mental health mental illness suffering family

shared by James Goodman on 12 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 12 Jun 13
     
    " for all that the conference was supposed to be about mental illnesses, it turned out to focus far more on *sane* family members and friends of the mentally ill, rather than on people with mental illnesses themselves. This tendency was  exemplified in the President's speech, when he stated:  "We all know somebody - a family member, a friend, a neighbor - who has struggled or will struggle with mental health issues at some point in their lives." Note the construction of the sentence: "We all know somebody - a family member, a friend, a neighbor - who has struggled with mental illness." The person with mental illness here is always someone else. They are always removed from ourselves. They are the people we help, the people we are sad for, the people we want to save. The people who are sick, the people who are hurting, the people with the problems - they are categorically not us. They are other. They are, moreover, specifically not the implied audience of the sentence. The implied audience is the people who "know somebody' with a mental illness. Obama probably wanted to evoke sympathy for people with mental illnesses. But in doing so, he reinforced the trope of the mentally ill as the "other" - as people who aren't worth speaking to, and about, directly. Despite the fact that one in five Americans suffer, or will suffer, from a mental illness, and thus make up a fairly sizeable portion of the audience."
James Goodman

The Secret Life of the Polyamorous « Relationships « Health - 0 views

www.edenfantasys.com/...et-life-of-polyamorous-0720111

relationships sexuality poly polyamory family tribe group community

shared by James Goodman on 24 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • As with any atypical lifestyle, the day-to-day running of a poly household is filled with those little details its inhabitants take for granted, forgetting to even mention them to those who ask. I don’t pretend to speak for everyone in this article; there are as many ways to run a poly household as there are to run a monogamous one — okay, maybe quite a few more!
  • There’s a familiar poly adage that goes “Whatever problems two people have in a relationship, three people have in a relationship, only squared.” This is true, but the same goes for the positives as well. There are more pros, more cons, and more everything to the poly experience. If you’re lucky, though, there’s more camaraderie, and that kind of compassionate we’re-in-this-together emotion can carry you through any number of life’s problems — even when they’re squared.
James Goodman

Net Worth, Self-Worth and How We Look at Money - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...07wealth.html

money psychology self-worth anxiety status

shared by James Goodman on 08 May 11 - No Cached
  • The Klontz study asked 422 people about 72 money-related beliefs and then analyzed correlations among the answers. This produced four broad categories that Mr. Klontz called “money scripts”: money avoidance, money worship, money status and money vigilance. How does he define them?
  • Those who are in the money avoidance camp share beliefs that make them distance themselves from money. Mr. Klontz said this group may be worried about abusing credit cards. They may believe that they do not deserve to have money and may sabotage their own financial well-being. People in this group tend to have low incomes and net worth. They also tend to be younger. People who fall into the money worship camp would seem to be the opposite, but their behaviors are equally destructive. They believe that an increase in income or a windfall will make everything better and love the status derived from the things that money can buy. This belief also lands people in debt because they use whatever credit they have to buy things that will impress others.
  • “They believe money will solve all of your problems,” Mr. Klontz said. “This is the money belief pattern that afflicts the majority of Americans.” Anxiety about money status occurs when people’s self-worth is linked to their net worth. These people often take bigger financial risks because they want to have the stories of big gains to impress their friends. (Don’t expect them to tell you when those big bets do not pay off.) The only affliction that did not have an overwhelmingly negative impact on people’s financial future was money vigilance. People with this disorder do not like to share information about their income or wealth, but they also do not spend foolishly. Still, excessive wariness about spending can keep these people from enjoying the benefits of what money can buy. On the other hand, while they did not necessarily have higher incomes, they paid off their credit card bills each month. “Maybe some anxiety and vigilance around money is good for your bottom line,” Mr. Klontz said. Not surprisingly, the four money scripts illustrate problems that have less to do with money than with what money represents. But what may be surprising is that the study found few links between who held what belief and their family background, race, gender, education level or income.
James Goodman

CM150 Listening: Our Most Used Communications Skill | University of Missouri Extension - 0 views

extension.missouri.edu/CM150

listening communications skill psychology science

shared by James Goodman on 04 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Listening is the communication skill most of us use the most frequently. Various studies stress the importance of listening as a communication skill. A typical study points out that many of us spend 70 to 80 percent of our waking hours in some form of communication. Of that time, we spend about 9 percent writing, 16 percent reading, 30 percent speaking, and 45 percent listening. Studies also confirm that most of us are poor and inefficient listeners.
  • Listening training unavailable Even though listening is the communication skill we use most frequently, it is also the skill in which we've had the least training. From personal experience, we know we've had much more formal training in other major communication skills — writing, reading, speaking. In fact, very few persons have had any extended formal training in listening. The same is true of informal training. It's not difficult to find workshops and conferences that provide opportunities to improve our writing and speaking skills. But it is difficult to find similar training programs to sharpen listening skills.
  • Thought speed greater than speaking speed Another reason for poor listening skills is that you and I can think faster than someone else can speak. Most of us speak at the rate of about 125 words per minute. However, we have the mental capacity to understand someone speaking at 400 words per minute (if that were possible). This difference between speaking speed and thought speed means that when we listen to the average speaker, we're using only 25 percent of our mental capacity. We still have 75 percent to do something else with. So, our minds will wander. This means we need to make a real effort to listen carefully and concentrate more of our mental capacity on the listening act. If we don't concentrate, we soon find that our minds have turned to other ideas.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • We are inefficient listeners Numerous tests confirm that we are inefficient listeners. Studies have shown that immediately after listening to a 10-minute oral presentation, the average listener has heard, understood and retained 50 percent of what was said. Within 48 hours, that drops off another 50 percent to a final level of 25 percent efficiency. In other words, we often comprehend and retain only one fourth of what we hear. We all want to be more than 25 percent efficient. It's not difficult to see the many problems inefficient listeners can create for themselves and others. Poor listening causes us many personal and professional problems.
  • Listening is hard work Another likely reason for inefficient listening is that it's hard work to listen intently. Have you been forced to listen intently for an extended period of time? Try to remember your feelings. You were probably physically and mentally tired after such a period of concentration.
  • Ten worst listening habits Nichols has described in speeches and articles the "10 worst listening habits of American people." He says that listening training is primarily eliminating bad habits and replacing them with good listening habits and skills. Here are the 10 bad listening habits. You'll recognize some that you have and that you can make an effort to correct.
  • Three ways to improve listening skill Nichols says there are three things that you can do to help yourself stop wasting thought power and become a better listener. One is to anticipate the speaker's next point If you anticipate correctly, learning has been reinforced. If you anticipate incorrectly, you wonder why and this too helps to increase attention. Another is to identify the supporting elements a speaker uses in building points. By and large, we use only three ways to build points: We explain the point, we get emotional and harangue the point, or we illustrate the point with a factual illustration. A sophisticated listener knows this. He or she spends a little of the differential between thought speed and speaking speed to identify what is being used as point-supporting material. This becomes highly profitable in terms of listening efficiency. A third way to improve yourself as a listener is to periodically make mental summaries as you listen. A good listener takes advantage of short pauses to summarize mentally what has been said. These periodic summaries reinforce learning tremendously.
James Goodman

Tendency Toward Egalitarianism May Have Helped Humans Survive - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...05angier.html

psychology society science hierarchy egalitarianism

shared by James Goodman on 08 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • mong America’s top executives today, according to a study commissioned by The New York Times, the average annual salary is about $10 million and rising some 12 percent a year. At the same time, the rest of the tribe of the United States of America struggles with miserably high unemployment, stagnant wages and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Now, maybe the wealth gap is a temporary problem, and shiny new quarters will soon rain down on us all. But if you’re feeling tetchy and surly about the lavished haves when you have not a job, if you’re tempted to go out and insult a piece of corporate meat, researchers who study the nature and evolution of human social organization say they are hardly surprised.
  • Among America’s top executives today, according to a study commissioned by The New York Times, the average annual salary is about $10 million and rising some 12 percent a year. At the same time, the rest of the tribe of the United States of America struggles with miserably high unemployment, stagnant wages and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Now, maybe the wealth gap is a temporary problem, and shiny new quarters will soon rain down on us all. But if you’re feeling tetchy and surly about the lavished haves when you have not a job, if you’re tempted to go out and insult a piece of corporate meat, researchers who study the nature and evolution of human social organization say they are hardly surprised.
  • A sense of fairness is both cerebral and visceral, cortical and limbic.
James Goodman

Philip Pilkington: Debt and the Decay of the Myth of Liberal Individualism « ... - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...-of-liberal-individualism.html

financial crisis economy society politics capitalism debt myth

shared by James Goodman on 08 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • The myth of the unbounded individual, the lone merchant with the devil-may-care attitude toward his fellow men allowed Smith to conceive of a society in which men might live without close ties to one another and yet a society which would not descend into barbarism. Emotional distance, a lack of love or compassion, need not descend into violence and murder, according to Smith, because of the principles of disinterested commerce and exchange which he thought that he had uncovered in Man.This is the legacy that Smith has left us today. Not just in the field of economics, but also as a sort of moral or mythic code by which we arrange our social intercourse in mass society. When we step into a shop and purchase a good or a service we are acting as Smithian individuals. We see ourselves as unbounded to those around us and free to make whatever decisions we please. And we believe that once the transaction is complete we can wash our hands of it.The problem is that this is not true and it probably never has been. Today, instead, we see all too clearly the importance of debt. Debt is what ties us together. We may be in the position of creditor or in the position of debtor – or we may even be in the position of neither – but debt affects all of us. Even those of us that balance our books perfectly and do not engage in any form of lending nevertheless rely on banking systems and systems of government founded on the simple and timeless principles of debt. And it is these principles that bind us together.
  • We are not, in any way, “men who owe no obligation to one another”. Our entire social system is founded on obligation and interconnectedness. This was likely true even in Smith’s time, but his genius was to have hidden it from view and in doing so to construct the founding myth of liberal individualism as it exists in modern times.Yet today the debt issue explodes once more. And because Smith’s mythology cannot contain it we see all around us anxiety together with its attendant primitive emotions such as envy, anger, spite and malice and, in countries such as Greece, a general collapse of the entire social economy. We see politicians obsessed over government debt sending their countries into ruin simply because they adhere to a redundant mythology. In short, we see the chaos that terrified Smith of a society in which, in his words, injustice prevails.
  • What Smith gave to humanity in his founding of economics was a great lie with which to structure our newly forming nation-states and mass societies. But it was a lie that was in many ways quite fragile. And it is this lie that we see cracking up all around us today. The question is whether we, as a species, will continue to live within this crumbling fiction or whether we can construct a different mythological system founded on principles that are a closer fit to our really existing circumstances.Almost every moral pillar of our contemporary societies – from the discipline of economics, to ideas that dominate about what constitutes good statesmanship – militates against the formation of such a new mythology. And, as psychopathology teaches us well, people are quite stubborn in their giving up of their mythologies, despite their possibly high degree of dysfunction. But given that the stakes are rather high and humans are a fairly adaptive species, we may surprise ourselves yet.
James Goodman

Diagnosing the Wrong Deficit - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gnosing-the-wrong-deficit.html

children health psychology society sleep ADHD apnea

shared by James Goodman on 28 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Attention-deficit problems are far from the only reasons to take our lack of quality sleep seriously. Laboratory animals die when they are deprived of delta sleep. Chronic delta sleep deficits in humans are implicated in many diseases, including depression, heart disease, hypertension, obesity, chronic pain, diabetes and cancer, not to mention thousands of fatigue-related car accidents each year. Sleep disorders are so prevalent that every internist, pediatrician and psychiatrist should routinely screen for them. And we need far more research into this issue. Every year billions of dollars are poured into researching cancer, depression and heart disease, but how much money goes into sleep?
James Goodman

What We're (Not) Eating: A Potential Danger Of Gluten-Free - Meghan Casserly - Girl Fri... - 0 views

blogs.forbes.com/...otential-danger-of-gluten-free

food eating eating disorder gluten diet dieting anorexia health pseudo-medical pseudo-science

shared by James Goodman on 24 May 11 - No Cached
  • It’s no wonder, then, that the young cheerleaders found the increasingly prevalent condition of gluten sensitivities the perfect cover for what turned out to be very real cases of anorexia. By the end of the school year, two out of the three girls were in treatment for eating disorders and the third was taken out of school by her parents.
  • Julie Dorfman, director of Nutrition at Philadelphia’s Renfrew Center, the country’s first residential facility for the treatment of women with eating disorders, is not surprised. “With the eating disordered population, I’d say that 110% of them are using intolerances or food ‘problems’ as a means to avoid eating these foods in a socially acceptable way. Gluten just happens to be the fad right now.”
  • Stacey Rosenfeld, Ph.D, a psychologist who specializes in eating disorders is in the camp of those who believe that using medical or pseudo-medical reasons for restrictive diets is often a cover-up for disordered eating.  “Nobody wants to be called out on an eating disorder or obsessive eating,” she says, “so anything they can do to hide it, they will.”
James Goodman

What is Urban Shamanism - 0 views

www.urbanshamanism.com/...UrbanShamanismInfo.html

healing personal growth shamanism spirituality depth psychology jungian psychology

shared by James Goodman on 27 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Urban Shamanism is the contemporary application of shamanic practices for use in healing, problem solving, self-discovery, and personal growth. It is a living, evolving system of healing tools. These tools transform and heal the conflicts between body, mind and spirit created by the chaotic pace of modern life.
James Goodman

Sex, Violence and the Supreme Court - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...sex-and-the-supremes

violence supreme court sex nudity hypocrisy insanity reactionary

shared by James Goodman on 08 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Quite a bit of rough stuff was bandied about in one of the final Supreme Court decisions of the term released last month — dismembering, bondage, decapitation, a bounty of bloodletting in video games that bring the thrill of the kill to new levels. No problem there, in the view of the court: for children who want to simulate brutal homicide, it’s protected free speech.Sex, not so good. Naked women. Naked men. Fornication. Ewww! The black-robed majority made it clear that the United States of America will always make an exception for sex: “historically unprotected speech,” in the words of Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the 7-2 video game opinion.
  • The take-away point from Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association was that the court continued to expand freedoms granted by the First Amendment. But in overturning a California attempt to ban underage video game sales, the case revealed a fascinating intra-justice discussion about modern depictions of sex and violence — why one can be censored, and the other cannot.Ultimately, the back-and-forth by the high court reinforced the notion of a nation that will always be a little skittish about sex, while viewing violence as American as apple pie. If this ruling is indeed a triumph for the First Amendment, it continues a strange double standard.
  • In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pressed the issue of why it was O.K. to protect children from sexual images but not from the worst kind of human carnage. His zinger points merit a second look before court-watchers settle into their Adirondack chairs for the summer:But what sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively but virtually binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?Breyer expanded further, pointing to the absurd implications of the court’s drift. “What kind of First Amendment would permit the government to protect children by restricting sales of that extremely violent video game only if the woman — bound, gagged, tortured and killed — is also topless?”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Since he asked, the answer seems to be that a First Amendment that bans an exposed breast to a certain age group is a good thing, while a First Amendment that gives that same age group unfettered access to avatars lopping off a breast is benign. It’s a theme that runs through the culture, enough so that Scalia could breezily dismiss parental concerns about the violent digital playpen he’s so afraid of regulating. “Mortal Kombat” and other games of graphic mayhem are part of a long, cherished tradition, this most conservative of justices argued.
James Goodman

Where Are the Jobs? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...brooks-where-are-the-jobs.html

society politics science economy

shared by James Goodman on 09 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Second, there has been a loss of utopian élan. If you go back and think about America’s big World’s Fairs or if you read about Bell Labs in its heyday or Silicon Valley in the 1980s or 1990s, you see people in the grip of utopian visions. They imagine absurdly perfect worlds. They feel as though they have the power to begin the world anew. These were delusions, but inspiring delusions. This utopianism is almost nowhere to be found today. Stephenson and Thiel point out that science fiction is moribund; the new work is dystopian, not inspiring. Thiel argues that the environmentalist ethos has undermined the faith in gee-whiz technological wizardry. Legal institutions and the cable TV culture dampen enthusiasm by punishing failure so remorselessly. NASA’s early failures were seen as steps along the way to a glorious future. Deepwater Horizon’s failure demoralized the whole nation.
  • Third, there is no essential culture clash. Look at the Steve Jobs obituaries. Over the course of his life, he combined three asynchronous idea spaces — the counterculture of the 1960s, the culture of early computer geeks and the culture of corporate America. There was LSD, “The Whole Earth Catalogue” and spiritual exploration in India. There were also nerdy hours devoted to trying to build a box to make free phone calls. The merger of these three idea networks set off a cascade of innovations, producing not only new products and management styles but also a new ideal personality — the corporate honcho in jeans and the long-sleeve black T-shirt. Formerly marginal people came together, competed fiercely and tried to resolve their own uncomfortable relationships with society.
  • The roots of great innovation are never just in the technology itself. They are always in the wider historical context. They require new ways of seeing. As Einstein put it, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” If you want to be the next Steve Jobs and end the innovation stagnation, maybe you should start in hip-hop.
James Goodman

Who You Are - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...brooks-who-you-are.html

psychology society

shared by James Goodman on 21 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Before Kahneman and Tversky, people who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents. They assumed that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assumed that people are basically sensible utility-maximizers and that when they depart from reason it’s because some passion like fear or love has distorted their judgment. Kahneman and Tversky conducted experiments. They proved that actual human behavior often deviates from the old models and that the flaws are not just in the passions but in the machinery of cognition. They demonstrated that people rely on unconscious biases and rules of thumb to navigate the world, for good and ill. Many of these biases have become famous: priming, framing, loss-aversion.
  • We are dual process thinkers. We have two interrelated systems running in our heads. One is slow, deliberate and arduous (our conscious reasoning). The other is fast, associative, automatic and supple (our unconscious pattern recognition). There is now a complex debate over the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two systems. In popular terms, think of it as the debate between “Moneyball” (look at the data) and “Blink” (go with your intuition). We are not blank slates. All humans seem to share similar sets of biases. There is such a thing as universal human nature. The trick is to understand the universals and how tightly or loosely they tie us down. We are players in a game we don’t understand. Most of our own thinking is below awareness. Fifty years ago, people may have assumed we are captains of our own ships, but, in fact, our behavior is often aroused by context in ways we can’t see. Our biases frequently cause us to want the wrong things. Our perceptions and memories are slippery, especially about our own mental states. Our free will is bounded. We have much less control over ourselves than we thought.
James Goodman

The Republicans' war on science and reason - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQALl3BEM_story.html

republicans science reason politics economy society

shared by James Goodman on 28 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Last month, Washington Post columnist Steve Pearlstein wrote that if you wanted to come up with a bumper sticker that defined the Republican Party’s platform it would be this: “Repeal the 20th century. Vote GOP.” With their unrelenting attempts to slash Social Security, end Medicare and Medicaid and destroy the social safety net, Republicans are, indeed, on a quest of reversal. But they have set their sights on an even bolder course than Pearlstein acknowledges in his column: It’s not just the 20th century they have targeted for repeal; it’s the 18th and 19th too. The 18th century was defined, in many ways, by the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement based on the idea that reason, rational discourse and the advancement of knowledge, were the critical pillars of modern life. The leaders of the movement inspired the thinking of Charles Darwin, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin; its tenets can be found in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. But more than 200 years later, those basic tenets — the very notion that facts and evidence matter — are being rejected, wholesale, by the 21st-century Republican Party.
  • The contempt with which the party views reason is staggering. Republicans have become proudly and unquestionably anti-science. (It is their litmus test, though they would probably reject the science behind litmus paper.) With the exception of Jon Huntsman, who polls about as well as Darwin would in a Republican primary, the Republican presidential candidates have either denied the existence of climate change, denied that it has been caused — and can be reversed — by man, or apologized for once holding a different view. They have come to this conclusion not because the science is inconclusive, but because they believe, as a matter of principle, that scientific evidence is no evidence at all.It’s on that basis that Ron Paul can say of evolution, “I think it’s a theory and I don’t accept it as a theory.” It’s on that basis that Rick Perry can call evolution “it’s a theory that’s out there, but one that’s got some gaps in it.” And it’s on that same basis, that same rejection of science, that Perry can say, “I’m not sure anybody actually knows completely and absolutely how old the earth is.”
  • Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, this kind of behavior is constantly rewarded by the media. As Al Gore noted in “An Inconvenient Truth,” while fewer than 1 percent of peer-reviewed scientific journals questioned the reality of man-made global warming, about half of all journalistic accounts did. In an age where media is obsessed with balance, facts are sidelined in favor of dueling opinions and false equivalence. That one is based on reason and science, the other on neither, is treated as entirely irrelevant. It’s a system ripe for exploitation, and conservatives are happy to oblige.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • t seems worth reminding the candidates that these debates have been settled, many for decades, some for centuries and that the year is 2011, not 1611. In the coming decades, science — and a respect for science — will prove crucial to confronting our greatest global challenges, whether that means reducing our carbon footprint to combat climate change, finding new treatments and new cures to the diseases that ail us, or developing new innovations that can lift hundreds of millions out of poverty. We cannot afford to ignore the power of science or the problems we will need it to solve. Nor can we afford to make decisions about our economy, and our future, without reason or sound evidence. It’s time to take back the Enlightenment.
1 - 20 of 22 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page