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James Goodman

Human rights: The gay divide | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...rovoked-backlash-elsewhere-gay

society psychology human rights sexuality politics rights

shared by James Goodman on 14 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 14 Oct 14
     
    "THERE was a teenager in Arizona in the 1970s who "could no more imagine longing to touch a woman than longing to touch a toaster". But he convinced himself that he was not gay. Longing to be "normal", he blamed his obsession with muscular men on envy of their good looks. It was not until he was 25 that he admitted the truth to himself-let alone other people. In 1996 he wrote a cover leader for The Economist in favour of same-sex marriage. He never thought it would happen during his lifetime. Yet now he is married to the man he loves and living in a Virginia suburb where few think this odd. The change in attitudes to homosexuality in many countries-not just the West but also Latin America, China and other places-is one of the wonders of the world (see article). This week America's Supreme Court gave gay marriage another big boost, by rejecting several challenges to it; most Americans already live in states where gays can wed. But five countries still execute gay people: Iran hangs them; Saudi Arabia stones them. Gay sex is illegal in 78 countries, and a few have recently passed laws that make gay life even grimmer. The gay divide is one of the world's widest (see article). What caused it? And will tolerance eventually spread? Two steps forward and one back The leap forward has been startlingly quick. In the 1950s gay sex was illegal nearly everywhere. In Britain, on the orders of a home secretary who vowed to "eradicate" it, undercover police were sent out to loiter in bars, entrap gay men and put them in jail. In China in the 1980s homosexuals were rounded up and sent to labour camps without trial. All around the world gay people lived furtively and in fear. Laws banning "sodomy" remained in some American states until 2003. Today gay sex is legal in at least 113 countries. Gay marriages or civil unions are recognised in three dozen and parts of others. In most of the West it is no longer socially acceptable to be homophobic. Gay life in C
James Goodman

What Are Personal Boundaries? How Do I Get Some? | Psych Central - 0 views

psychcentral.com/...l-boundaries-how-do-i-get-some

health psychology relationships love boundaries

shared by James Goodman on 23 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Love can’t exist without boundaries, even with your children. It’s easy to understand external boundaries as your bottom line. Think of rules and principles you live by when you say what you will or won’t do or allow. If you have difficulty saying no, override your needs to please others, or are bothered by someone who is demanding, controlling, criticizing, pushy, abusive, invasive, pleading, or even smothering you with kindness, it’s your responsibility to speak up.
  • Why It’s Hard It’s hard for codependents to set boundaries because: They put others’ needs and feelings first; They don’t know themselves; They don’t feel they have rights; They believe setting boundaries jeopardizes the relationship; and They never learned to have healthy boundaries. Boundaries are learned. If yours weren’t valued as a child, you didn’t learn you had them. Any kind of abuse violates personal boundaries, including teasing. For example, my brother ignored my pleas for him to stop tickling me until I could barely breathe. This made me feel powerless and that I didn’t have a right to say “stop” when I was uncomfortable. In recovery, I gained the capacity to tell a masseuse to stop and use less pressure. In some cases, boundary violations affect a child’s ability to mature into an independent, responsible adult.
  • You Have Rights You may not believe you have any rights if yours weren’t respected growing up. For example, you have a right to privacy, to say “no,” to be addressed with courtesy and respect, to change your mind or cancel commitments, to ask people you hire to work the way you want, to ask for help, to be left alone, to conserve your energy, and not to answer a question, the phone, or an email.
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  • It takes time, support, and relearning to be able to set effective boundaries. Self-awareness and learning to be assertive are the first steps. Setting boundaries isn’t selfish. It’s self-love – you say “yes” to yourself each time you say “no.” It builds self-esteem. But it usually takes encouragement to make yourself a priority and to persist, especially when you receive pushback.
  • James Goodman on 23 Apr 13
     
    "Love can't exist without boundaries, even with your children. It's easy to understand external boundaries as your bottom line. Think of rules and principles you live by when you say what you will or won't do or allow. If you have difficulty saying no, override your needs to please others, or are bothered by someone who is demanding, controlling, criticizing, pushy, abusive, invasive, pleading, or even smothering you with kindness, it's your responsibility to speak up."
James Goodman

How Can We Jump-Start the Struggle for Gender Equality? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...e-struggle-for-gender-equality

gender equality inequality roles male female work career

shared by James Goodman on 01 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 01 Dec 13
     
    "The restrictions on women's lives that prevailed in the early 1960s today seem draconian; removing them was an obvious extension of basic rights to half the population. But there was fierce opposition to such reforms, and their success was never guaranteed. Someday we may come to see paid family leave, reduced work hours, and public child care as part of our natural suite of rights. And with them, gender equality may not be as far behind as it looks today."
James Goodman

Occupy Wall Street's Victory: It has shaken up American politics. Here's what it should... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...ken_up_american_politics_.html

wall street politics society economy

shared by James Goodman on 16 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Occupy Wall Street Has Already Won
  • Occupy Wall Street has already won, perhaps not the victory most of its participants want, but a momentous victory nonetheless. It has already altered our political debate, changed the agenda, shifted the discussion in newspapers, on cable TV, and even around the water cooler. And that is wonderful.
  • And then OWS showed up. They brought something that had been in short supply: passion—the necessary ingredient that powers citizen activism. The tempered, carefully modulated, and finely nuanced statements of Beltway politicians and policy wonks do not alter the debate.
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  • Suddenly, the issues of equity, fairness, justice, income distribution, and accountability for the economic cataclysm–issues all but ignored for a generation—are front and center. We have moved beyond the one-dimensional conversation about how much and where to cut the deficit. Questions more central to the social fabric of our nation have returned to the heart of the political debate. By forcing this new discussion, OWS has made most of the other participants in our politics—who either didn’t want to have this conversation or weren’t able to make it happen—look pretty small.
  • Of course, the visceral emotions that accompany citizen activism generate not only an energy that can change politics but an incoherence that is easily mocked. OWS is not a Brookings Institution report with five carefully researched policy points and an appendix of data. It is a leaderless movement, and it can often be painfully simplistic in its economic critique, lacking in subtlety in its political strategies, and marred by fringe elements whose presence distracts and demeans. Yet, the point of OWS is not to be subtle, parsed, or nuanced. Its role is to drag politics to a different place, to provide the exuberance and energy upon which reform can take place.
  • The major social movements that have transformed our country since its founding all began as passionate grassroots activism that then radiated out. Only later do traditional politicians get involved. The history of the civil rights movement, women’s rights movement, labor movement, peace movement, environmental movement, gay rights movement, and, yes, even the Tea Party, follow this model. In every instance, visceral emotions about justice, right, and wrong ignited a movement. Precise demands and strategies followed later. So the critique of OWS as unformed and sometimes shallow may be correct, but it is also irrelevant. Just as importantly, most of those who are so critical of OWS have failed to recognize inflection points in our politics. They fail to recognize that the public is responding to OWS because it is desperate for somebody to speak with the passion, and even anger, that has filled the public since the inequities and failures of our economy have become so apparent.
  • There is much ground to cover before real reform, but as a voice challenging a self-satisfied, well-protected status quo, OWS is already powerful and successful.
James Goodman

Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...revolution-not-a-memorial.html

revolution memorial MLK MLK Jr. materialism military-industrial complex civil rights economy inequity povety racism

shared by James Goodman on 27 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.
  • Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.
  • The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.
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  • As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.
  • The absence of a King-worthy narrative to reinvigorate poor and working people has enabled right-wing populists to seize the moment with credible claims about government corruption and ridiculous claims about tax cuts’ stimulating growth. This right-wing threat is a catastrophic response to King’s four catastrophes; its agenda would lead to hellish conditions for most Americans.
  • King weeps from his grave. He never confused substance with symbolism. He never conflated a flesh and blood sacrifice with a stone and mortar edifice. We rightly celebrate his substance and sacrifice because he loved us all so deeply. Let us not remain satisfied with symbolism because we too often fear the challenge he embraced. Our greatest writer, Herman Melville, who spent his life in love with America even as he was our most fierce critic of the myth of American exceptionalism, noted, “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial.”
  • King’s response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a re-evaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens. In concrete terms, this means support for progressive politicians like Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor; extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be. Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle.
James Goodman

The autocratic response to OWS - Occupy Wall Street - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...ows_bloomberg_hickenlooper

society politics economy wall street OWS Occupy Wall Street protests non-violent

shared by James Goodman on 22 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Back on the East Coast, it was much the same, as His Majesty King Michael Bloomberg issued a decree stating that as a benevolent despot, he would “allow” his Manhattan subjects to occupy Wall Street (as if the mayor has the power to grant — or withhold — democratic rights). But then King Mike quickly sent his police force in for mass arrests, standing down only after a wave of outrage from the larger serfdom watching on television.
  • Alas, it’s a predictable situation. Horrifying economic inequality has prompted the bottom 99 percent of income earners to finally exercise their constitutional rights to protest. In response, the nobles in the top 1 percent are demanding their political puppets make clear that such dissent will not be tolerated — and they expect their demands to be followed. This country’s landed gentry, after all, spent a lot on campaign contributions to make sure their hand-picked autocrats were installed in governors’ and mayors’ offices, and now they’re having those autocrats engineer a whole new kind of bailout.
  • As opposed to merely cutting a check to the bankers, this bailout is all about resource allocation. It has the kings preventing law enforcement from being deployed on financial criminals who destroyed the American economy. Instead, those finite law enforcement resources are being funneled into arresting more than 1,000 protesters and abrogating the vassals’ First Amendment rights to “peaceably assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
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  • With such extra-judicial authoritarianism now being used against dissidents all over America, Denver and New York’s responses are indeed serving as a “model,” as King John himself predicted. And because of that, the United States is now emulating the very autocracy we originally waged our founding revolution against.
  • Ultimately, that’s why this historical moment is so important. Whatever you call the spontaneous uprisings against oligarchy — Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Denver or simply “We the People” — they prove that the only savior in these neo-feudal times is continued protest. Without it, the future of the economy and our freedoms are clearly at risk from King John, King Mike and every other self-styled monarch now waging war on the fundamental principles of American liberty.
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.
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  • 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

Lady Psychopaths Welcome - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-lady-psychopaths-welcome.html

society psychology sexuality psychopaths

shared by James Goodman on 13 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 13 Oct 14
     
    "Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids." Given my choice between allowing portrayals of women who are sexually manipulative, erotically aggressive, fearless in a deranged kind of way, completely true to their own temperament, desperately vital, or the alternative - wallowing in feminist propaganda and succumbing to the niceness plague - I'll take the former. If "Gone Girl" is sending the wrong message about women, then Emma Bovary should have gone to medical school instead of cheating on her husband, Anna Karenina should have been a train engineer rather than throwing herself onto the tracks, and Eve Harrington should have waited her turn. The idea that every portrait of a woman should be an ideal woman, meant to stand for all of womanhood, is an enemy of art - not to mention wickedly delicious Joan Crawford and Bette Davis movies. Art is meant to explore all the unattractive inner realities as well as to recommend glittering ideals. It is not meant to provide uplift or confirm people's prior ideological assumptions. Art says "Think," not "You're right."
James Goodman

Rising atheism in America puts 'religious right on the defensive' | World news | The Ob... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...theism-america-religious-right

atheism america religious society politics

shared by James Goodman on 03 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • The US is increasingly portrayed as a hotbed of religious fervour. Yet in the homeland of ostentatiously religious politicians such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, agnostics and atheists are actually part of one of the fastest-growing demographics in the US: the godless. Far from being in thrall to its religious leaders, the US is in fact becoming a more secular country, some experts say. "It has never been better to be a free-thinker or an agnostic in America," says Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the FFRF.
James Goodman

The Better Angels of Our Nature - By Steven Pinker - Book Review - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...steven-pinker-book-review.html

society psychology science

shared by James Goodman on 09 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE Why Violence Has Declined
  • The central thesis of “Better Angels” is that our era is less violent, less cruel and more peaceful than any previous period of human existence. The decline in violence holds for violence in the family, in neighborhoods, between tribes and between states. People living now are less likely to meet a violent death, or to suffer from violence or cruelty at the hands of others, than people living in any previous century.
  • Pinker begins with studies of the causes of death in different eras and peoples. Some studies are based on skeletons found at archaeological sites; averaging their results suggests that 15 percent of prehistoric humans met a violent death at the hands of another person. Research into contemporary or recent hunter-gatherer societies yields a remarkably similarly average, while another cluster of studies of pre-state societies that include some horticulture has an even higher rate of violent death. In contrast, among state societies, the most violent appears to have been Aztec Mexico, in which 5 percent of people were killed by others. In Europe, even during the bloodiest periods — the 17th century and the first half of the 20th —­ deaths in war were around 3 percent. The data vindicates Hobbes’s basic insight, that without a state, life is likely to be “nasty, brutish and short.” In contrast, a state monopoly on the legitimate use of force reduces violence and makes everyone living under that monopoly better off than they would otherwise have been. Pinker calls this the “pacification process.”
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  • It’s not only deaths in war, but murder, too, that is declining over the long term. Even those tribal peoples extolled by anthropologists as especially “gentle,” like the Semai of Malaysia, the Kung of the Kalahari and the Central Arctic Inuit, turn out to have murder rates that are, relative to population, comparable to those of Detroit. In Europe, your chance of being murdered is now less than one-tenth, and in some countries only one-fiftieth, of what it would have been if you had lived 500 years ago. American rates, too, have fallen steeply over the past two or three centuries. Pinker sees this decline as part of the “civilizing process,” a term he borrows from the sociologist Norbert Elias, who attributes it to the consolidation of the power of the state above feudal loyalties, and to the effect of the spread of commerce. (Consistent with this view, Pinker argues that at least part of the reason for the regional differences in American homicide rates is that people in the South are less likely to accept the state’s monopoly on force. Instead, a tradition of self-help justice and a “culture of honor” sanctions retaliation when one is insulted or mistreated. Statistics bear this out — the higher homicide rate in the South is due to quarrels that turn lethal, not to more killings during armed robberies — and experiments show that even today Southerners respond more strongly to insults than Northerners.)
  • The final trend Pinker discusses is the “rights revolution,” the revulsion against violence inflicted on ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals and animals that has developed over the past half-century. Pinker is not, of course, arguing that these movements have achieved their goals, but he reminds us how far we have come in a relatively short time from the days when lynchings were commonplace in the South; domestic violence was tolerated to such a degree that a 1950s ad could show a husband with his wife over his knees, spanking her for failing to buy the right brand of coffee; and Pinker, then a young research assistant working under the direction of a professor in an animal behavior lab, tortured a rat to death. (Pinker now considers this “the worst thing I have ever done.” In 1975 it wasn’t uncommon.)
James Goodman

Want to Ace That Test? Get the Right Kind of Sleep - NYTimes.com - 0 views

parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/...st-get-the-right-kind-of-sleep

society science sleep

shared by James Goodman on 21 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 21 Oct 14
     
    " "
James Goodman

Why Americans Are So Ignorant -- It's Not Only Fox News, There Are Some Understandable ... - 0 views

www.alternet.org/...news-there-are-some-reasonable

politics society americans fox news psychology

shared by James Goodman on 09 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 09 Apr 13
     
    " In 2008, Rick Shenkman, the Editor-in-Chief of the History News Network, published a book entitled Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter. In it he demonstrated, among other things, that most Americans were: (1) ignorant about major international events, (2) knew little about how their own government runs and who runs it, (3) were nonetheless willing to accept government positions and policies even though a moderate amount of critical thought suggested they were bad for the country, and (4) were readily swayed by stereotyping, simplistic solutions, irrational fears and public relations babble."
James Goodman

Occupy Wall Street: how How the protesters should respond to escalating violence. - Sla... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...rs_should_respond_to_esca.html

wall street violence politics

shared by James Goodman on 04 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Going up against Wall Street, it turns out, is serious business. And the more serious the Occupy movement gets, the more official and near-lethal hostility it's likely to encounter.
  • As they sort out what to do next, the Occupiers might take a page from the history of
  • American labor, the only social movement that has ever made a real dent in the nation’s extremes of wealth and poverty.
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  • For more than half a century, between the 1870s and the 1930s, labor organizers and strikers regularly faced levels of violence all but unimaginable to modern-day activists. They nonetheless managed to create a movement that changed the nation’s economic institutions and reshaped ideas about wealth, inequality, and Wall Street power. Along the way, they also helped to launch the modern civil liberties ethos, insisting that the fight to tame capitalism went hand in hand with the right to free speech.
James Goodman

How the rich rig the system - U.S. Economy - Salon.com - 0 views

politics.salon.com/...how_the_rich_rig_the_system

wall street society politics economy

shared by James Goodman on 18 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Beginning with Ronald Reagan, the U.S. government has systematically derigged labor markets for the many while rigging compensation markets even more for the elite few. Mass immigration, including mass illegal immigration, resumed after the 1960s, lowering wages for the poorest workers and weakening the ability of unions to organize. In the late 20th century, Congress allowed inflation to erode the real value of the minimum wage. Even after several increases, it is still lower, in real terms, than it was in the 1960s. And having effectively destroyed private-sector unions, the right is now trying to eliminate public sector unions, on the theory that schoolteachers and emergency responders are a much greater threat to the American economy than the reckless bankers who created a near-Depression and the CEOs who are rewarded for offshoring one industry after another.
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

HOW, AND WHEN, TO MAKE A DECISION | More Intelligent Life - 0 views

moreintelligentlife.com/...how-and-when-make-a-decision

psychology society science sexuality

shared by James Goodman on 06 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Seemingly trivial things have a huge influence on the way that we make decisions, research shows. Bill Ridgers reports ...
  • You have a big decision to make. Whether to put in an offer on a house, say, or change jobs. Which of the following will help you make the right choice: being in a state of sexual excitement or having a full bladder? Most likely, it is not something you have pondered. Psychologists, however, have long studied the ways that external factors such as these influence our decision-making. A full bladder, apparently, helps us take more rational, long-term decisions. At least that was the finding of a study carried out by Mirjam Tuk, a professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
  • If true, Tuk’s findings are interesting because they challenge an established psychological theory called “ego depletion”. This states that we only have a finite well of self-control. Each time we deny ourselves something—whether going to the bathroom or choosing a salad for lunch, rather than the sausage sandwich we really wanted—we use up some of our reserves. The theory of ego depletion was developed by Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University. In practical terms, he says, this means that if you have an important decision to make, you shouldn’t draw from your well of self-control beforehand. Reserves, he says, can be depleted in all sorts of ways: “Even things like trying to look interested at a boring meeting, trying to pretend your boss’s jokes are funny or not saying something unkind to your spouse when you are angry.”
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  • Decision-making ability can be thought of as akin to a muscle, Baumeister says, in that it is liable to be worn out with overuse. For some, this effect can be life-changing.
  • The reason, Ackerman believes, is that touch is the first sense that we develop after birth. “People learn how to make decisions about the world by understanding what they’ve already experienced, and that means the physical world.” The ability to think in the abstract, of course, comes much later.
  • Another area of interest to the study of decision-making revolves around sleep deprivation. Professor Michael Chee, a neuroscientist at the National University of Singapore, says that most of us already realise that making decisions when we are exhausted is not advisable. Yet the effect that tiredness has on us is counter-intuitive. Chee says that we tend to believe that we become overly cautious in order to compensate. But the truth, he says, is that a lack of sleep makes us much too optimistic in our decision-making.
  • To return to the original question, being sexually aroused, alas, is not an aid to decision-making. Studies have shown that it can make us impetuous, much as you’d expect. But what is striking is that we greatly underestimate its effect. When Dan Ariely, a professor at Duke University in America, and author of “Predictably Irrational”, experimented on his undergraduates, he found that they had no idea of the extent to which they were being led by their libidos. One reason, Ariely believes, is that we have only a limited mix of emotion and cognition to draw upon. Increase one and you automatically detract from the other. So Robin Williams may have been making a valid psychological point when he said: “God gave men both a penis and a brain, but unfortunately not enough blood supply to run both at the same time.”
  • But if all our decisions are so influenced by external factors, that raises an inevitable question: to what extent are we involved in our own decision-making? Professor Ackerman believes the answer is very little: “All of these subtle influences suggest that most of what is causing our behaviour we are really not aware of. People are just very good at post-hoc reasons for their behaviour.”
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