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James Goodman

Zoë Triska: The Worst Word Ever - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...worst-word-ever_b_1880906.html

word society sexuality children sex psychology

shared by James Goodman on 24 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 24 Sep 12
     
    But why do some women, in particular, seem to hate words like "moist" and "panties" more than men do? Carol Lloyd in Salon offers one possibility: "The word 'moist' straddles the same cultural polarities of shame and openness that still haunt modern female sexuality. After all, moist is now mostly used with positive connotations to describe baked goods and soil, but it still harbors its less than appealing root meanings. First cited in the English language in 1374, the word came from the French word 'moiste,' for damp, which came from the Latin words for moldy, slimy and musty."
James Goodman

How Not to Be Alone - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...how-not-to-be-alone.html

psychology society relationships loneliness isolation alienation

shared by James Goodman on 09 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 09 Jun 13
     
    "Most of the time, most people are not crying in public, but everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs. There are as many ways to do this as there are kinds of loneliness, but all of them require attentiveness, all of them require the hard work of emotional computation and corporeal compassion. All of them require the human processing of the only animal who risks "getting it wrong" and whose dreams provide shelters and vaccines and words to crying strangers."
James Goodman

U.S. Capitalism and Economic Injustice: Can We Do Better? - Politics - Utne Reader - 0 views

www.utne.com/...ic-injustice-ze0z1206zsie.aspx

capitalism injustice u s economy politics society

shared by James Goodman on 04 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 04 Jul 12
     
    For the last half-century, capitalism has been a taboo subject in the United States. Among politicians, journalists, and academics-and in public conversation generally-the word has been avoided or else exclusively praised in over-the-top prose. Professional economists have used words like "perfect competition" and "optimal allocation of resources" and "efficiency" to teach their students and assure one another how absolutely wonderful capitalism was for everyone. Politicians repeated, robot-style, that the "U.S. is the greatest country in the world" and that "capitalism is the greatest economic system in the world." Those few who have dared to raise questions or criticisms about capitalism have been either ignored or told to go live in North Korea, China or Cuba as if that were the only alternative to pro-capitalism cheerleading.
James Goodman

Book review: Armstrong's spiritually bountiful 'In Search of Civilization' - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AFKKyYYD_story.html

civilization society spirituality philosophy book review

shared by James Goodman on 14 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • the rich accomplishments of China, the West and Islam are not in conflict, but are rather “on the same side in a clash between cultivated intelligence and barbarism. The irony is that such barbarism too often goes under the name of loyalty to a civilization.” In fact, true civilization is “the life-support system for high-quality relationships to people, ideas and objects.” (Love, Armstrong explains, is the one-word version of the phrase “high quality of relationship.”) Civilization, then, seeks “to find and protect the good things with which — potentially — we can form high-quality relationships.” It also “fosters and protects the qualities in us that allow us to love such things for the right reasons. The qualities that inspire love are: goodness, beauty and truth. And when we love these qualities, we come to possess the corresponding capacities of wisdom, kindness and taste.”
  • our tragic sense of life is “founded on the fact that not all good things are compatible: it may be (for most people) impossible to have a happy marriage and a raucous erotic life; or to have a well-paid job and follow your own vocation; it may be that you cannot live in the place where you most want to live; responsibility is tedious and frightening; yet taking responsibility is important.” In the face of such inner conflicts, as well as life’s normal vicissitudes, civilization should help “strengthen us to face inevitable disappointment and suffering,” largely by instilling the stoic virtues: “the capacity to do without, to postpone pleasure, to make ourselves do things we do not want to do (when there is good reason to do them); to put up with minor irritations, to avoid complaint and useless criticism.”
  • James Goodman on 14 Apr 11
     
    What does the word "civilization" mean? 
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

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

What Does It Take for Traumatized Kids to Thrive? - - 0 views

www.psmag.com/...aumatized-kids-to-thrive-56488

children health society kids psychology trauma

shared by James Goodman on 06 May 13 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 06 May 13
     
    "Given the emphasis that researchers place on "secure attachment" to a parent, it was striking to me how much kids used the word "family" when they talked about Lincoln. The school made them feel like "part of [a] family," some said. "In a family," one young woman told me, "nobody gets left behind." Sporleder talks the same way: "I'm not shy about saying that we tell our kids we love them," he says. "We're a family. The kids here are getting love and two meals a day.""
James Goodman

Burning Question: Why Sit Up Straight? - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3628004578461270192692406.html

sedentary health sitting standing

shared by James Goodman on 07 May 13 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 07 May 13
     
    "Sitting to Death? His clinic sees patients with multiple chronic illnesses. Nearly all of them sit for long periods each day. The term Sedentary Death Syndrome was coined by the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports in 2002 to address the growing consequences of a seated lifestyle. "There are studies on Sedentary Death Syndrome that show that sitting for hours can cause anything from lower back pain to high cholesterol, diabetes and obesity," he says. In other words, no matter what position you're sitting in all day, it is pretty bad for you."
James Goodman

Philip Pilkington: Debt and the Decay of the Myth of Liberal Individualism « naked capitalism - 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

Math Lessons for Locavores - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...20budiansky.html

energy food farming Environment

shared by James Goodman on 02 Jan 12 - Cached
  • But the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas. Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations. Words like “sustainability” and “food-miles” are thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture of energy and land use.
  • The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such doctrinaire assertions are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus. This is particularly the case with respect to the energy costs of transporting food. One popular and oft-repeated statistic is that it takes 36 (sometimes it’s 97) calories of fossil fuel energy to bring one calorie of iceberg lettuce from California to the East Coast. That’s an apples and oranges (or maybe apples and rocks) comparison to begin with, because you can’t eat petroleum or burn iceberg lettuce.
  • The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far. A single 10-mile round trip by car to the grocery store or the farmers’ market will easily eat up about 14,000 calories of fossil fuel energy. Just running your refrigerator for a week consumes 9,000 calories of energy. That assumes it’s one of the latest high-efficiency models; otherwise, you can double that figure. Cooking and running dishwashers, freezers and second or third refrigerators (more than 25 percent of American households have more than one) all add major hits. Indeed, households make up for 22 percent of all the energy expenditures in the United States. Agriculture, on the other hand, accounts for just 2 percent of our nation’s energy usage; that energy is mainly devoted to running farm machinery and manufacturing fertilizer. In return for that quite modest energy investment, we have fed hundreds of millions of people, liberated tens of millions from backbreaking manual labor and spared hundreds of millions of acres for nature preserves, forests and parks that otherwise would have come under the plow.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Don’t forget the astonishing fact that the total land area of American farms remains almost unchanged from a century ago, at a little under a billion acres, even though those farms now feed three times as many Americans and export more than 10 times as much as they did in 1910. The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of land, favorable climates and human labor is to grow lettuce, oranges, wheat, peppers, bananas, whatever, in the places where they grow best and with the most efficient technologies — and then pay the relatively tiny energy cost to get them to market, as we do with every other commodity in the economy. Sometimes that means growing vegetables in your backyard. Sometimes that means buying vegetables grown in California or Costa Rica.
  • Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself. The relative pittance of our energy budget that we spend on modern farming is one of the wisest energy investments we can make, when we honestly look at what it returns to our land, our economy, our environment and our well-being.
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.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • 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

Inertia, Not Progress Defines the Decade After 9/11 : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...110912fa_fact_packer

society politics economy inertia decade 9_11

shared by James Goodman on 23 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • But the main reason that 9/11 didn’t become a source of jobs, or of ideas for revitalizing the economy, was that the country wasn’t thinking about its own weaknesses. President George W. Bush defined his era in terms of war, and the public largely saw it the same way. September 11th was a tragedy that, in the years that followed, tragically consumed the nation’s attention.The attacks were supposed to have signalled one of the great transformations in the country’s history. Bush talked about ridding the world of evil, columnists wrote of “World War Three,” and almost all Americans felt that, in their private lives and in the national life, nothing would ever be the same. But the decade that followed did not live up to expectations. In most of the ways that mattered, 9/11 changed nothing.
  • The Second World War brought a truce in the American class war that had raged throughout the thirties, and it unified a bitterly divided country. By the time of the Japanese surrender, the Great Depression was over and America had been transformed. This isn’t to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors’ narrative): both wars were about the country’s survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11th. On the interstate south of Mount Airy, there’s a recruiting billboard with the famous image of marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, and the slogan “For Our Nation. For Us All.” In recent years, “For Us All” has been a fantasy. Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country.
  • “We are at war against terror.” Those were fateful words. Defining the enemy by its tactic was a strange conceptual diversion that immediately made the focus too narrow (what about the ideology behind the terror?) and too broad (were we at war with all terrorists and their supporters everywhere?). The President could have said, “We are at war against Al Qaeda,” but he didn’t. Instead, he escalated his rhetoric, in an attempt to overpower any ambiguities. Freedom was at war with fear, he told the country, and he would not rest until the final victory. In short, the new world of 2001 looked very much like the bygone worlds of 1861 and 1941. The President took inspiration from a painting, in the White House Treaty Room, depicting Lincoln on board a steamship with Generals Grant and Sherman: it reminded Bush of Lincoln’s “clarity of purpose.” The size of the undertaking seemed to give Bush a new comfort. His entire sense of the job came to depend on being a war President.
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  • What were the American people to do in this vast new war? In his address to Congress on September 20, 2001—the speech that gave his most eloquent account of the meaning of September 11th—the President told Americans to live their lives, hug their children, uphold their values, participate in the economy, and pray for the victims. These quiet continuities were supposed to be reassuring, but instead they revealed the unreality that lay beneath his call to arms. Wasn’t there anything else? Should Americans enlist in the armed forces, join the foreign service, pay more taxes, do volunteer work, study foreign languages, travel to Muslim countries? No—just go on using their credit cards. Bush’s Presidency would emulate Woodrow Wilson’s and Warren G. Harding’s simultaneously. Never was the mismatch between the idea of the war and the war itself more apparent. Everything had changed, Bush announced, but not to worry—nothing would change.
  • At the time of the attacks, few educated Americans born after 1950 had any direct experience of war or persecution or cataclysmic failure. After 9/11, this gap in the résumés of intellectuals gave them both a sense of inadequacy—an outbreak of envy for the Greatest Generation—and a compensatory tendency to inflate the drama of the war on terror and their own role in it. This took place at a level of abstraction that is made possible when the fighting is eight thousand miles away. As a result, a number of the country’s best minds mistook the post-September 11th era for a new American golden age.
  • After the attacks, Americans asked, “Why do they hate us?” This turned out to be the wrong line of inquiry. The most pressing questions were about us, not them: our leaders, our institutions, our ability to act as a cohesive nation and make rational decisions, our power to take action abroad in a way that would not be a self-defeating waste. Starting with the intelligence failures that did not foresee the attacks, every major American institution flunked the test of the September 11th decade. The media got the W.M.D.s wrong. The military failed to plan for chaos in postwar Iraq. Congress neglected its oversight duties. The political system produced no statesmen. C.E.O.s and financiers couldn’t see past short-term profits. The Bush Administration had one major success: it succeeded in staving off another terrorist attack in America. It botched almost everything else.
  • After 9/11, life in America changed in a few palpable ways: you needed I.D. to get into an office building, and boarding an airplane became an ordeal. But all the structural trends stayed on course: the stock market, after a setback, maintained its relentless upward climb; inequality soared, as Wall Street fortunes reached unimaginable new heights, while average wages began to decline; just about every remaining textile job in Surry County disappeared; Americans sank deeper into debt and depended more on their houses for wealth; the iMac progressed to the iPad; CBS News continued its descent into irrelevance and Fox News its corrosive rise, while newspapers kept cutting back or closing shop. The political division of America into red and blue hardened into the mutually hostile and unintelligible universes in which we live today. Bush, already viewed as illegitimate by many Democrats, became one of the most hated Presidents in American history; the writer Nicholson Baker even published a novella about the merits of assassinating him. Meanwhile, the Republican Party fell completely under the control of its most extreme elements, and “traitor” became a routine term for its opponents. For all the talk of national unity and a new sense of purpose, the terror attacks did nothing to bring together the country. America after September 11th was like a couch potato who survives a heart attack, vows to start a strict regimen of diet and exercise, and after a few weeks still finds himself camped out in the living room.
  • The Bush Administration collapsed in the late summer of 2005—not in Falluja or Kandahar but in the submerged neighborhoods of New Orleans. The response to Hurricane Katrina gave Americans such a devastating picture of official failure that it suggested something fatally wrong with an entire approach to governing. Iraq, of course, had provided evidence of high-level arrogance, incompetence, and neglect for two years, and Afghanistan for even longer than that, but, because these places were far away and American troops were risking their lives to serve the nation, the public wasn’t ready to withdraw its support. When the footage came out of the Gulf Coast—when, for the second time in four years, a great American city looked like Kabul or Kinshasa—it was Iraq in fast motion, and right around the corner. Government at all levels, but especially in Washington, had failed to plan for the worst outcome, even when the entire country saw it coming. An Administration staffed by cronies neglected to take care of citizens for whom it had the greatest responsibility. Katrina made brutally clear that the White House had substituted passive, self-congratulatory bravado for serious organized effort. Like Iraq, New Orleans represented a failure of individual leaders, but also of national institutions.
  • After Katrina, support for the Iraq war evaporated. Having been asked for very little ever since September 11th, other than to take the Administration’s way on faith, Americans had little trouble reframing their allegiances. This was the price of a foreign policy based on assertion rather than on persuasion. The war on terror had been a kind of confidence game: it depended on a belief in American virtue and ability that had proved unwarranted. With the exception of his advocacy of the surge, in 2007, Bush became an increasingly irrelevant figure, and his foreign policy crawled away from grand projects for “world order.” When Vice-President Cheney called for new wars with Iran and Syria, there were no takers.
  • In the years after Katrina, Americans began to see that the same unstable combination of hoopla and neglect that had characterized the war on terror also characterized the decade’s supposed economic boom. While the media were riveted by the spectacle of celebrity wealth, large areas of the country were—like Surry County—left to rot. The boom had been built on sand: housing speculation, overvalued stocks, reckless deregulation, irresponsible deficits. When the foundation started to crumble with the first wave of mortgage defaults, in 2007, the scale of the destruction became the latest of the decade’s surprises. Hardly anyone foresaw how far the economy would fall; hardly anyone imagined how many people it would take on the way down. Even the economic advisers of the next Administration badly misjudged the crisis. The trillions of dollars spent and, often, misspent on wars and domestic bureaucracies were no longer available to fill the hole left by the implosion of the private economy. Reborn champions of austerity pointed to the deficits in order to make the case that the country couldn’t afford to spend its way back to health. And, like the attacks that were supposed to change everything, the recession—which was given the epithet “Great” and was constantly compared with the Depression of the nineteen-thirties—inspired very little change in economic policy. Without effective leadership, the country blindly reverted to the status quo ante, with the same few people making a lot of money, if a little less than before, and the same people doing badly, if a little worse.
  • This malignant persistence since September 11th is the biggest surprise of all. In previous decades, sneak attacks, stock-market crashes, and other great crises became hinges on which American history swung in dramatically new directions. But events on the same scale, or nearly so, no longer seem to have that power; moneyed interests may have become too entrenched, élites too self-seeking, institutions too feeble, and the public too polarized and passive for the country to be shocked into fundamental change.
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?”
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  • 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

Wall Street Protest Shows Power of Place - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...test-shows-power-of-place.html

society politics economy wall street protest

shared by James Goodman on 16 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • no matter how instrumental new media have become in spreading protest these days, nothing replaces people taking to the streets.
  • In his “Politics,” Aristotle argued that the size of an ideal polis extended to the limits of a herald’s cry. He believed that the human voice was directly linked to civic order. A healthy citizenry in a proper city required face-to-face conversation.
  • We’re so distracted these days, people have forgotten how to focus. But the ‘mic check’ demands not just that we listen to other people’s opinions but that we really hear what they’re saying because we have to repeat their words exactly.
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  • Living in Europe for the past few years, I often came across parks and squares, in Barcelona and Madrid, Athens and Milan, Paris and Rome, occupied by tent communities of protesters. Public protest and assembly are part of the European social compact. Maybe the difference in America has something to do with our longstanding obsessions with automobiles and autonomy, with our predilection for isolationism, or our preference just for watching, more than participating.
  • This peculiarity of zoning law has turned an unexpected spotlight on the bankruptcy of so much of what in the last couple of generations has passed for public space in America. Most of it is token gestures by developers in return for erecting bigger, taller buildings. Think of the atrium of the I.B.M. tower on Madison Avenue and countless other places like it: “public” spaces that are not really public at all but quasi-public, controlled by their landlords. Zuccotti in principle is subject to Brookfield’s rules prohibiting tarps, sleeping bags and the storage of personal property on the site. The whole situation illustrates just how far we have allowed the ancient civic ideal of public space to drift from an arena of public expression and public assembly (Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, say) to a commercial sop (the foyer of the Time Warner Center).
  • “It requires an architecture of consciousness,”
  • In Europe, the protests were about jobs, government rollbacks and debt. That the message of the Zuccotti Park occupiers is fuzzy somewhat misses the point. The encampment itself has become the point. “We come to get a sense of being part of a larger community,” said Brian Pickett, a 33-year-old adjunct professor of theater and speech at City University of New York. I found him sitting last week among the neat, tarpaulin-covered stacks of sleeping bags in one corner of the park. “It’s important to see this in the context of alienation today. We do Facebook alone. But people are not alone here.”
  • Imagine Zuccotti Park, one protester told me, as a Venn diagram of characters representing disparate political and economic disenchantments. The park is where their grievances overlap. It’s literally common ground.
  • And it was obvious to me watching the crowd coalesce over several days that consensus emerges urbanistically, meaning that the demonstrators, who have devised their own form of leaderless governance to keep the peace, find unity in community
  • The governing process they choose is itself a bedrock message of the protest.
  • That said, on the ground is where the protesters are building an architecture of consciousness.
James Goodman

Choosing a Pronoun - He, She or Other - After Curfew - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...she-or-other-after-curfew.html

society health politics psychology sexuality

shared by James Goodman on 13 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Though Google created the “other” option for privacy reasons rather than as a transgender choice, young supporters of preferred gender pronouns (or P.G.P.’s as they are called) could not help but rejoice. Katy is one of a growing number of high school and college students who are questioning the gender roles society assigns individuals simply because they have been born male or female.
  • “You have to understand, this has nothing to do with your sexuality and everything to do with who you feel like inside,” Katy said, explaining that at the start of every LGBTQQA meeting, participants are first asked if they would like to share their P.G.P.’s. “Mine are ‘she,’ ‘her’ and ‘hers’ and sometimes ‘they,’ ‘them’ and ‘theirs.’ ”
  • P.G.P.’s can change as often as one likes. If the pronouns in the dictionary don’t suffice, there are numerous made-up ones now in use, including “ze,” “hir” and “hirs,” words that connote both genders because, as Katy explained, “Maybe one day you wake up and feel more like a boy.”
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  • Teenagers are by nature prone to rebellion against adult conventions, and as the gender nonconformity movement gains momentum among young people, “it is about rejecting the boxes adults try to put kids in by assuming their sexual identity labels their personal identity,” said Dr. Ritch C. Savin-Williams, director of the Cornell University Sex and Gender Lab. “These teens are fighting the idea that your equipment defines what it means for you to be a boy or girl. They are saying: ‘You don’t know me by looking at me. Assume nothing.’ ”
  • Dr. Savin-Williams, who is also the author of the book “The New Gay Teenager,” went on to list some of the new adjectives young people use to describe themselves: “bi-curious,” “heteroflexible,” “polyamorous” and even “wiggly.”
  • The semantic variations are part of a nascent effort worldwide to acknowledge some sort of neutral ground between male and female, starting at the youngest ages. Last year, a preschool in Sweden, appropriately called Egalia, opened with the goal of eliminating all gender bias by referring to the children as “friends,” instead of girls and boys, as well as avoiding all gender-specific pronouns.
James Goodman

Occupy Wall Street's 'Political Disobedience' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...streets-political-disobedience

wall street politics society economy

shared by James Goodman on 14 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Our language has not yet caught up with the political phenomenon that is emerging in Zuccotti Park and spreading across the nation, though it is clear that a political paradigm shift is taking place before our very eyes. It’s time to begin to name and in naming, to better understand this moment. So let me propose some words: “political disobedience.”Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of what could be called “political disobedience,” as opposed to civil disobedience, that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that we inherited from the Cold War.
  • Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.
  • Occupy Wall Street, which identifies itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many … political persuasions,” is politically disobedient precisely in refusing to articulate policy demands or to embrace old ideologies. Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver. Similarly, those who want to push an ideology onto these new forms of political disobedience, like Slavoj Zizek or Raymond Lotta, are missing the point of the resistance.
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  • One way to understand the emerging disobedience is to see it as a refusal to engage these sorts of  worn-out ideologies rooted in the Cold War. The key point here is that the Cold War’s ideological divide — with the Chicago Boys at one end and the Maoists at the other — merely served as a weapon in this country for the financial and political elite: the ploy, in the United States, was to demonize the chimera of a controlled economy (that of the former Soviet Union or China, for example) in order to prop up the illusion of a free market and to legitimize the fantasy of less regulation — of what was euphemistically called “deregulation.” By reinvigorating the myth of free markets, the financial and political architects of our economy over the past three plus decades — both Republicans and Democrats — were able to disguise massive redistribution toward the richest by claiming they were simply “deregulating” when all along they were actually reregulating to the benefit of their largest campaign donors.
  • This ideological fog blinded the American people to the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a colossal late-modern economy and that necessarily distribute wealth throughout society — and in this country, that quietly redistributed massive amounts of wealth to the richest 1 percent. Many of the voices at Occupy Wall Street accuse political ideology on both sides, on the side of free markets but also on the side of big government, for serving the few at the expense of the other 99 percent — for paving the way to an entrenched permissive regulatory system that “privatizes gains and socializes losses.”
  • The central point, of course, is that it takes both a big government and the illusion of free markets to achieve such massive redistribution. If you take a look at the tattered posters at Zuccotti Park, you’ll see that many are intensely anti-government and just as many stridently oppose big government.Occupy Wall Street is surely right in holding the old ideologies to account. The truth is, as I’ve argued in a book, “The Illusion of Free Markets,” and recently in Harper’s magazine, there never have been and never will be free markets. All markets are man-made, constructed, regulated and administered by often-complex mechanisms that necessarily distribute wealth — that inevitably distribute wealth — in large and small ways. Tax incentives for domestic oil production and lower capital gains rates are obvious illustrations. But there are all kinds of more minute rules and regulations surrounding our wheat pits, stock markets and economic exchanges that have significant wealth effects: limits on retail buyers flipping shares after an I.P.O., rulings allowing exchanges to cut communication to non-member dealers, fixed prices in extended after-hour trading, even the advent of options markets. The mere existence of a privately chartered organization like the Chicago Board of Trade, which required the state of Illinois to criminalize and forcibly shut down competing bucket shops, has huge redistributional wealth effects on farmers and consumers — and, of course, bankers, brokers and dealers.
  • The semantic games — the talk of deregulation rather than reregulation — would have been entertaining had it not been for their devastating effects. As the sociologist Douglas Massey minutely documents in “Categorically Unequal,” after decades of improvement, the income gap between the richest and poorest in this country has dramatically widened since the 1970s, resulting in what social scientists now refer to as U-curve of increasing inequality. Recent reports from the Census Bureau confirm this, with new evidence last month that “the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.” Today, 27 percent of African-Americans and 26 percent of Hispanics in this country — more than 1 in 4 — live in poverty; and 1 in 9 African-American men between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated.
  • On this account, the fundamental choice is no longer the ideological one we were indoctrinated to believe — between free markets and controlled economies — but rather a continuous choice between kinds of regulation and how they distribute wealth in society. There is, in the end, no “realistic alternative,” nor any “utopian project” that can avoid the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a complex late-modern economy — and that’s the point. The vast and distributive regulatory framework will neither disappear with deregulation, nor with the withering of a socialist state. What is required is constant vigilance of all the micro and macro rules that permeate our markets, our contracts, our tax codes, our banking regulations, our property laws — in sum, all the ordinary, often mundane, but frequently invisible forms of laws and regulations that are required to organize and maintain a colossal economy in the 21st-century and that constantly distribute wealth and resources.
  • In the end, if the concept of “political disobedience” accurately captures this new political paradigm, then the resistance movement needs to occupy Zuccotti Park because levels of social inequality and the number of children in poverty are intolerable. Or, to put it another way, the movement needs to resist partisan politics and worn-out ideologies because the outcomes have become simply unacceptable. The Volcker rule, debt relief for working Americans, a tax on the wealthy — those might help, but they represent no more than a few drops in the bucket of regulations that distribute and redistribute wealth and resources in this country every minute of every day. Ultimately, what matters to the politically disobedient is the kind of society we live in, not a handful of policy demands.
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