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Javier E

'In all reality, there were three shooters.' Oklahomans kill an active shooter, and it'... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...its-not-as-simple-as-it-sounds

guns debate security

shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • police also noted that armed citizens can complicate volatile situations. The first of 57 uniformed police officers arrived just a minute after the initial 911 calls and found a complex scene with multiple armed people and no clear sense of what had happened or who was responsible.
  • “We don’t want people to be vigilantes,” Bo Mathews, a spokesman for the Oklahoma City Police Department, said in a recent interview. “That’s why we have police officers.”
  • Both men did what they believed was right, but that meant they had killed a man they did not know. Whittle wondered whether he was going to jail. Nazario went over ways that the confrontation could have ended differently — perhaps with his own death
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  • They both marveled that amid the chaos, the result was as intended: The attacker was stopped before he could hurt anyone else
  • The FBI examined 160 shootings between 2000 and 2013 and found that most of the violence ended when the assailant stopped shooting, committed suicide or fled. Unarmed citizens successfully restrained shooters in 21 of those incidents, according to the FBI.
  • Two attacks stopped when off-duty officers shot and killed the attackers. Five ended in much the way the attack at Louie’s did — when armed civilians, mostly security guards, exchanged fire with the shooters.
  • “How is the officer going to discern who is the Good Samaritan and who is not?” Serpas said. “They don’t have placards on the front of their shirts that say ‘I’m the good guy’ or ‘I’m the bad guy.’ 
  • In videos, Tilghman complained that he was “under hardcore demonic attack,” noting in one recording: “I’m not doing well . . . doing really, really bad right now.
  • Gerald Konkler, general counsel of the Oklahoma Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training, confirmed that Tilghman was licensed to carry a weapon and had been through training that would have included a psychological evaluation. Tilghman’s relatives could not be reached for comment.
  • “It is what it is,” Whittle said. “You’d better be damn sure that what you are doing is right, because you’ll pay the consequences if you are wrong.
  • In the weeks since the shooting, he has replayed in his head different endings to the incident. What if instead of retreating to the grassy bank, the gunman had followed his initial shots through the broken glass door into the restaurant? And what if Whittle had followed the gunman inside? “Bryan would have entered the front,” Nazario said. “I would have entered the back.” There they would have been, two good guys with guns, face to face. “He could have thought I was the shooter,” Nazario said. Or vice versa. And if Nazario had asked — and Whittle refused — to drop his weapon, Nazario said, “I would have had to take action.”
Javier E

Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court, and the Confirmation Wars - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...567422

court polarization politization judicial

shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • In fact, both sides have incrementally escalated at every stage since at least the late 1980s. At no point did either step back and sue for peace. The erosion of the norm of a relatively modest Senate confirmation process took place because both sides calculated at every stage—probably rightly—that the other would take the next incremental escalatory step if roles were reversed. They calculated that base voters would sooner forgive escalation than they would forgive weakness. They calculated that they could get away with escalation. And they calculated that they could lie about what they were doing—flamboyantly and without shame—and get away with it. And so they did.
  • Whether the war for the courts is more cause or effect of the increasing ideological uniformity of appointments is a complicated question. In all likelihood, cause runs in both directions. That is, we fight more over courts because of an increasingly ideological sense of how courts should operate, and in turn, our fights over the courts tend to entrench our increasingly ideological sense of how courts should operate
  • Already, in response to the retirement of Kennedy and the nomination of Kavanaugh, some Democrats have begun talking about court packing. And why not? There’s no magic to the number nine
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  • Polarization put cracks in that confidence. And once people no longer believed the other side would observe the norm, the norm collapsed remarkably quickly.
  • here’s the problem: The breakdown of the norms that have traditionally induced restraint in the judicial-confirmation process will not end with the creation of polarized judicial nominations and confirmations. It will run deeper. A highly polarized Senate in interaction with a winner-take-all presidency picking judges on the basis of raw power alone and creating party factions on every court in the country is a contagion that will spread.
  • In the world that I argued for, liberal senators would support Kavanaugh. They would do so because he is qualified, because the decision to give President Trump the authority to select judges was made when the electorate chose Trump over Hillary Clinton, and because the cost of opposing Kavanaugh—that Republican senators would oppose similarly qualified judges when the presidency is in Democratic hands—exceeds the possible benefits of opposition. This set of assumptions was driven by norms: not by law, not by the Constitution, not even by Senate rules. It was just the way things worked, because everything worked better if everyone behaved that way. And everyone behaved that way because everyone had confidence that those on the other side would behave that way as well.
  • Why not break up courts that routinely do things that political majorities don’t like?
  • Even the Supreme Court is not immune from a much more activist Congress. We tend to think of the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction as vast, but it’s only vast because Congress makes it so.
  • If Congress doesn’t want the Supreme Court to hear abortion cases, it could strip it of appellate jurisdiction over them—or at least, it could try.
  • In a world of polarized partisan control over the gateways to courts and thus partisan factions on the courts themselves, I can see no reason why these things won’t eventually happen. And I won’t even be able to make a principled argument that they shouldn’t happen.
Javier E

The Myth of the Kindly General Lee - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...529038

slavery history Lee confederacy racism civil war race

shared by Javier E on 26 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • To describe this man as an American hero requires ignoring the immense suffering for which he was personally responsible, both on and off the battlefield. It requires ignoring his participation in the industry of human bondage, his betrayal of his country in defense of that institution, the battlefields scattered with the lifeless bodies of men who followed his orders and those they killed, his hostility toward the rights of the freedmen and his indifference to his own students waging a campaign of terror against the newly emancipated
  • It requires reducing the sum of human virtue to a sense of decorum and the ability to convey gravitas in a gray uniform.
  • The white supremacists who have protested on Lee’s behalf are not betraying his legacy. In fact, they have every reason to admire him. Lee, whose devotion to white supremacy outshone his loyalty to his country, is the embodiment of everything they stand for. Tribe and race over country is the core of white nationalism, and racists can embrace Lee in good conscience.
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  • The question is why anyone else would
oliviaodon

You're in the Army Now. (Now Being the Year 5678.) - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...w-now-being-the-year-5678.html

war Culture

shared by oliviaodon on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Men of the Jewish faith from New York, who have just been drafted into the national Army, attending a religious service during the Jewish New Year holidays in a cantonment building assigned to them for the purpose
  • Resplendent in chapeaux, our cover subjects 100 years ago were Maj. Gen. Tasker H. Bliss, the Army chief of staff, and his predecessor, Maj. Gen. Hugh L. Scott. Are you surprised that a uniform should look so quaintly ornate in an era of aerial bombing and chemical warfare? The chapeaux proved surprisingly resilient. “Although for all intents and purposes it died with the United States’ entry into World War I, the chapeau was not finally and officially dropped as an item of officers’ dress until 1936,” Edgar M. Howell wrote in “United States Army Headgear 1855-1902.”
  • With almost every issue of the Mid-Week Pictorial, the camera was proving more adept as a chronicler of war at its decisive, spontaneous moments. The caption of the photograph below read, “Remarkable snapshot of a scene during the retreat of the Russians, showing the first mad rush after the cry was raised that ‘the German cavalry have broken through!’ ”
krystalxu

Japan - VALUES AND BELIEFS - 0 views

countrystudies.us/58.htm

janpanese culture value history society

shared by krystalxu on 07 Oct 17 - Cached
  • Confucianism
    • krystalxu
      krystalxu on 07 Oct 17
       
      Interesting fact : nowadays Chinese, according my previous reading, don't think this is important or needed within the society or culutre
  • This view implies that hierarchy is natural.
  • Japanese find it awkward, even unbecoming, when a person does not behave in accordance with status expectations.
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  • As is appropriate in a culture that stresses the value of empathy, one person cannot speak without considering the other.
  • Men and women employ somewhat different speech patterns, with women making greater use of polite forms.
  • But the kind of hierarchical sense that pervades the whole society is of a different sort, which anthropologist Robert J. Smith calls "diffuse order."
  • they may have had no direct involvement in the situation.
  • apan, like all other societies, has conflicts between individual and group.
  • most Japanese place greater emphasis on cultivating "a self that can feel human in the company of others," according to David W. Plath.
  • secular society
  • Religious practice, too, emphasizes the maintenance of harmonious relations with others
  • Harmony, order, and self-development are three of the most important values that underlie Japanese social interaction.
  • the gods display human emotions,
  • Empathy and Human Relations
  • Japan is among the societies that most strongly rely on social rather than supernatural sanctions and emphasize the benefits of harmony.
  • Children learn early to recognize that they are part of an interdependent society,
  • most Japanese tend to avoid open competition and confrontation.
  • If each individual in the group understands personal obligations and empathizes with the situations of others, then the group as a whole benefits.
  • Success can come only if all put forth their best individual efforts. Decisions are often made only after consulting with everyone in the group. Consensus does not imply that there has been universal agreement, but this style of consultative decision making involves each member of the group in an information exchange, reinforces feelings of group identity, and makes implementation of the decision smoother.
  • Symbols such as uniforms, names, banners, and songs identify the group as distinct from others both to outsiders and to those within the group.
  • It is often the individual, however, who bears the burden of these interpersonal tensions.
  • Many Japanese cope with these stresses by retreating into the private self or by enjoying the escapism offered by much of the popular culture.
  • Order and Status
Javier E

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Jordan B. Peterson) - 0 views

DIIGO_FILE_HOME/7ui9/3fb0b43be56b260e2a28c47e9e49819f

philosophy religion mythology social science history lifelong learning

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • RULES? MORE RULES? REALLY? Isn’t life complicated enough, restricting enough, without abstract rules that don’t take our unique, individual situations into account? And given that our brains are plastic, and all develop differently based on our life experiences, why even expect that a few rules might be helpful to us all?
  • “I’ve got some good news…and I’ve got some bad news,” the lawgiver yells to them. “Which do you want first?” “The good news!” the hedonists reply. “I got Him from fifteen commandments down to ten!” “Hallelujah!” cries the unruly crowd. “And the bad?” “Adultery is still in.”
  • Maps of Meaning was sparked by Jordan’s agonized awareness, as a teenager growing up in the midst of the Cold War, that much of mankind seemed on the verge of blowing up the planet to defend their various identities. He felt he had to understand how it could be that people would sacrifice everything for an “identity,”
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  • the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions—and there’s nothing freeing about that.
  • And the story suggests something more: unchaperoned, and left to our own untutored judgment, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are beneath us—in this case, an artificial animal that brings out our own animal instincts in a completely unregulated way.
  • Similarly, in this book Professor Peterson doesn’t just propose his twelve rules, he tells stories, too, bringing to bear his knowledge of many fields as he illustrates and explains why the best rules do not ultimately restrict us but instead facilitate our goals and make for fuller, freer lives.
  • Peterson wasn’t really an “eccentric”; he had sufficient conventional chops, had been a Harvard professor, was a gentleman (as cowboys can be) though he did say damn and bloody a lot, in a rural 1950s sort of way. But everyone listened, with fascination on their faces, because he was in fact addressing questions of concern to everyone at the table.
  • unlike many academics who take the floor and hold it, if someone challenged or corrected him he really seemed to like it. He didn’t rear up and neigh. He’d say, in a kind of folksy way, “Yeah,” and bow his head involuntarily, wag it if he had overlooked something, laughing at himself for overgeneralizing. He appreciated being shown another side of an issue, and it became clear that thinking through a problem was, for him, a dialogic process.
  • for an egghead Peterson was extremely practical. His examples were filled with applications to everyday life: business management, how to make furniture (he made much of his own), designing a simple house, making a room beautiful (now an internet meme) or in another, specific case related to education, creating an online writing project that kept minority students from dropping out of school by getting them to do a kind of psychoanalytic exercise on themselves,
  • These Westerners were different: self-made, unentitled, hands on, neighbourly and less precious than many of their big-city peers, who increasingly spend their lives indoors, manipulating symbols on computers. This cowboy psychologist seemed to care about a thought only if it might, in some way, be helpful to someone.
  • I was drawn to him because here was a clinician who also had given himself a great books education, and who not only loved soulful Russian novels, philosophy and ancient mythology, but who also seemed to treat them as his most treasured inheritance. But he also did illuminating statistical research on personality and temperament, and had studied neuroscience. Though trained as a behaviourist, he was powerfully drawn to psychoanalysis with its focus on dreams, archetypes, the persistence of childhood conflicts in the adult, and the role of defences and rationalization in everyday life. He was also an outlier in being the only member of the research-oriented Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto who also kept a clinical practice.
  • Maps of Meaning, published nearly two decades ago, shows Jordan’s wide-ranging approach to understanding how human beings and the human brain deal with the archetypal situation that arises whenever we, in our daily lives, must face something we do not understand.
  • The brilliance of the book is in his demonstration of how rooted this situation is in evolution, our DNA, our brains and our most ancient stories. And he shows that these stories have survived because they still provide guidance in dealing with uncertainty, and the unavoidable unknown.
  • this is why many of the rules in this book, being based on Maps of Meaning, have an element of universality to them.
  • We are ambivalent about rules, even when we know they are good for us. If we are spirited souls, if we have character, rules seem restrictive, an affront to our sense of agency and our pride in working out our own lives. Why should we be judged according to another’s rule?
  • And he felt he had to understand the ideologies that drove totalitarian regimes to a variant of that same behaviour: killing their own citizens.
  • Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it.
  • Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place” before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within.
  • Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.
  • To understand ideology, Jordan read extensively about not only the Soviet gulag, but also the Holocaust and the rise of Nazism. I had never before met a person, born Christian and of my generation, who was so utterly tormented by what happened in Europe to the Jews, and who had worked so hard to understand how it could have occurred.
  • I saw what now millions have seen online: a brilliant, often dazzling public speaker who was at his best riffing like a jazz artist; at times he resembled an ardent Prairie preacher (not in evangelizing, but in his passion, in his ability to tell stories that convey the life-stakes that go with believing or disbelieving various ideas). Then he’d just as easily switch to do a breathtakingly systematic summary of a series of scientific studies. He was a master at helping students become more reflective, and take themselves and their futures seriously. He taught them to respect many of the greatest books ever written. He gave vivid examples from clinical practice, was (appropriately) self-revealing, even of his own vulnerabilities, and made fascinating links between evolution, the brain and religious stories.
  • Above all, he alerted his students to topics rarely discussed in university, such as the simple fact that all the ancients, from Buddha to the biblical authors, knew what every slightly worn-out adult knows, that life is suffering.
  • chances are, if you or someone you love is not suffering now, they will be within five years, unless you are freakishly lucky. Rearing kids is hard, work is hard, aging, sickness and death are hard, and Jordan emphasized that doing all that totally on your own, without the benefit of a loving relationship, or wisdom, or the psychological insights of the greatest psychologists, only makes it harder.
  • focused on triumphant heroes. In all these triumph stories, the hero has to go into the unknown, into an unexplored territory, and deal with a new great challenge and take great risks. In the process, something of himself has to die, or be given up, so he can be reborn and meet the challenge. This requires courage, something rarely discussed in a psychology class or textbook.
  • Jordan
  • views of his first YouTube statements quickly numbered in the hundreds of thousands. But people have kept listening because what he is saying meets a deep and unarticulated need. And that is because alongside our wish to be free of rules, we all search for structure.
  • the first generation to have been so thoroughly taught two seemingly contradictory ideas about morality, simultaneously—at their schools, colleges and universities, by many in my own generation. This contradiction has left them at times disoriented and uncertain, without guidance and, more tragically, deprived of riches they don’t even know exist.
  • morality and the rules associated with it are just a matter of personal opinion or happenstance, “relative to” or “related to” a particular framework, such as one’s ethnicity, one’s upbringing, or the culture or historical…
  • The first idea or teaching is that morality is relative, at best a…
  • So, the decent thing to do—once it becomes apparent how arbitrary your, and your society’s, “moral values” are—is to show tolerance for people who think differently, and…
  • for many people one of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be “judgmental.”* And, since we don’t know right from wrong, or what is good, just about the most inappropriate thing an adult can…
  • That emphasis on tolerance is so paramount that for many people one of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be “judgmental.”* And, since we don’t know right from wrong, or what is good, just about the most inappropriate thing an…
  • And so a generation has been raised untutored in what was once called, aptly, “practical wisdom,” which guided previous generations. Millennials, often told they have received the finest education available anywhere, have actually…
  • professors, chose to devalue thousands of years of human knowledge about how to acquire virtue, dismissing it as passé, “…
  • They were so successful at it that the very word “virtue” sounds out of date, and someone using it appears…
  • The study of virtue is not quite the same as the study of morals (right and wrong, good and evil). Aristotle defined the virtues simply as the ways of behaving that are most conducive to happiness in life. Vice was…
  • Cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something…
  • By contrast, our modern relativism begins by asserting that making judgments about how to live is impossible, because there is no real good, and no…
  • Thus relativism’s closest approximation to “virtue” is “tolerance.” Only tolerance will provide social cohesion between different groups, and save us from harming each other. On Facebook and other forms of social media, therefore, you signal your so-called…
  • Intolerance of others’ views (no matter how ignorant or incoherent they may be) is not simply wrong; in a world where there is no right or wrong, it is worse: it is a sign you are…
  • But it turns out that many people cannot tolerate the vacuum—the chaos—which is inherent in life, but made worse by this moral relativism; they cannot live without a moral compass,…
  • So, right alongside relativism, we find the spread of nihilism and despair, and also the opposite of moral relativism: the blind certainty offered by ideologies…
  • Dr. Norman Doidge, MD, is the author of The Brain That Changes Itself
  • so we arrive at the second teaching that millennials have been bombarded with. They sign up for a humanities course, to study the greatest books ever written. But they’re not assigned the books; instead they are given…
  • (But the idea that we can easily separate facts and values was and remains naive; to some extent, one’s values determine what one will pay…
  • For the ancients, the discovery that different people have different ideas about how, practically, to live, did not paralyze them; it deepened their understanding of humanity and led to some of the most satisfying conversations human beings have ever had, about how life might be lived.
  • Modern moral relativism has many sources. As we in the West learned more history, we understood that different epochs had different moral codes. As we travelled the seas and explored the globe, we learned of far-flung tribes on different continents whose different moral codes made sense relative to, or within the framework of, their societies. Science played a role, too, by attacking the religious view of the world, and thus undermining the religious grounds for ethics and rules. Materialist social science implied that we could divide the world into facts (which all could observe, and were objective and “real”) and values (…
  • it seems that all human beings are, by some kind of biological endowment, so ineradicably concerned with morality that we create a structure of laws and rules wherever we are. The idea that human life can be free of moral concerns is a fantasy.
  • given that we are moral animals, what must be the effect of our simplistic modern relativism upon us? It means we are hobbling ourselves by pretending to be something we are not. It is a mask, but a strange one, for it mostly deceives the one who wears it.
  • Far better to integrate the best of what we are now learning with the books human beings saw fit to preserve over millennia, and with the stories that have survived, against all odds, time’s tendency to obliterate.
  • these really are rules. And the foremost rule is that you must take responsibility for your own life. Period.
  • Jordan’s message that each individual has ultimate responsibility to bear; that if one wants to live a full life, one first sets one’s own house in order; and only then can one sensibly aim to take on bigger responsibilities.
  • if it’s uncertain that our ideals are attainable, why do we bother reaching in the first place? Because if you don’t reach for them, it is certain you will never feel that your life has meaning.
  • And perhaps because, as unfamiliar and strange as it sounds, in the deepest part of our psyche, we all want to be judged.
  • Instead of despairing about these differences in moral codes, Aristotle argued that though specific rules, laws and customs differed from place to place, what does not differ is that in all places human beings, by their nature, have a proclivity to make rules, laws and customs.
  • Freud never argued (as do some who want all culture to become one huge group therapy session) that one can live one’s entire life without ever making judgments, or without morality. In fact, his point in Civilization and Its Discontents is that civilization only arises when some restraining rules and morality are in place.
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great documenter of the slave-labour-camp horrors of the latter, once wrote that the “pitiful ideology” holding that “human beings are created for happiness” was an ideology “done in by the first blow of the work assigner’s cudgel.”1 In a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. On the radio show, I suggested, instead, that a deeper meaning was required. I noted that the nature of such meaning was constantly re-presented in the great stories of the past, and that it had more to do with developing character in the face of suffering than with happiness.
  • I proposed in Maps of Meaning that the great myths and religious stories of the past, particularly those derived from an earlier, oral tradition, were moral in their intent, rather than descriptive. Thus, they did not concern themselves with what the world was, as a scientist might have it, but with how a human being should act.
  • I suggested that our ancestors portrayed the world as a stage—a drama—instead of a place of objects. I described how I had come
  • to believe that the constituent elements of the world as drama were order and chaos, and not material things.
  • Order is where the people around you act according to well-understood social norms, and remain predictable and cooperative. It’s the world of social structure, explored territory, and familiarity. The state of Order is typically portrayed, symbolically—imaginatively—as masculine.
  • Chaos, by contrast, is where—or when—something unexpected happens.
  • As the antithesis of symbolically masculine order, it’s presented imaginatively as feminine. It’s the new and unpredictable suddenly emerging in the midst of the commonplace familiar. It’s Creation and Destruction,
  • Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.
  • For the Taoists, meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair. To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way. And that’s much better than happiness.
  • trying to address a perplexing problem: the reason or reasons for the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. I couldn’t understand how belief systems could be so important to people that they were willing to risk the destruction of the world to protect them. I came to realize that shared belief systems made people intelligible to one another—and that the systems weren’t just about belief.
  • People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another. They act in keeping with each other’s expectations and desires. They can cooperate. They can even compete peacefully, because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else.
  • Shared beliefs simplify the world, as well, because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world. There is perhaps nothing more important than the maintenance of this organization—this simplification. If it’s threatened, the great ship of state rocks.
  • It isn’t precisely that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight, instead, to maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect, and what they desire. They will fight to maintain the match between what they expect and how everyone is acting. It is precisely the maintenance of that match that enables everyone
  • There’s more to it, too. A shared cultural system stabilizes human interaction, but is also a system of value—a hierarchy of value, where some things are given priority and importance and others are not. In the absence of such a system of value, people simply cannot act. In fact, they can’t even perceive, because both action and perception require a goal, and a valid goal is, by necessity, something valued.
  • We experience much of our positive emotion in relation to goals. We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we see ourselves progressing—and the very idea of progression implies value.
  • Worse yet is the fact that the meaning of life without positive value is not simply neutral. Because we are vulnerable and mortal, pain and anxiety are an integral part of human existence. We must have something to set against the suffering that is intrinsic to Being.*2 We must have the meaning inherent in a profound system of value or the horror of existence rapidly becomes paramount. Then, nihilism beckons, with its hopelessness and despair.
  • So: no value, no meaning. Between value systems, however, there is the possibility of conflict. We are thus eternally caught between the most diamantine rock and the hardest of places:
  • loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable.
  • In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.
  • While writing Maps of Meaning, I was (also) driven by the realization that we can no longer afford conflict—certainly not on the scale of the world conflagrations of the twentieth century.
  • I came to a more complete, personal realization of what the great stories of the past continually insist upon: the centre is occupied by the individual.
  • It is possible to transcend slavish adherence to the group and its doctrines and, simultaneously, to avoid the pitfalls of its opposite extreme, nihilism. It is possible, instead, to find sufficient meaning in individual consciousness and experience.
  • How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path. We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world.
  • We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated. It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the world. It’s asking a lot. It’s asking for everything.
  • the alternative—the horror of authoritarian belief, the chaos of the collapsed state, the tragic catastrophe of the unbridled natural world, the existential angst and weakness of the purposeless
  • individual—is clearly worse.
  • a title: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Why did that one rise up above all others? First and foremost, because of its simplicity. It indicates clearly that people need ordering principles, and that chaos otherwise beckons.
  • We require rules, standards, values—alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence. We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown—and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path.
  • I hope that these rules and their accompanying essays will help people understand what they already know: that the soul of the individual eternally hungers for the heroism of genuine Being, and that the willingness to take on that responsibility is identical to the decision to live a meaningful life.
  • RULE 1   STAND UP STRAIGHT WITH YOUR SHOULDERS BACK
  • Because territory matters, and because the best locales are always in short supply, territory-seeking among animals produces conflict. Conflict, in turn, produces another problem: how to win or lose without the disagreeing parties incurring too great a cost.
  • It’s winner-take-all in the lobster world, just as it is in human societies, where the top 1 percent have as much loot as the bottom 50 percent11—and where the richest eighty-five people have as much as the bottom three and a half billion.
  • This principle is sometimes known as Price’s law, after Derek J. de Solla Price,13 the researcher who discovered its application in science in 1963. It can be modelled using an approximately L-shaped graph, with number of people on the vertical axis, and productivity or resources on the horizontal.
  • Instead of undertaking the computationally difficult task of identifying the best man, the females outsource the problem to the machine-like calculations of the dominance hierarchy. They let the males fight it out and peel their paramours from the top.
  • The dominant male, with his upright and confident posture, not only gets the prime real estate and easiest access to the best hunting grounds. He also gets all the girls. It is exponentially more worthwhile to be successful, if you are a lobster, and male.
  • dominance hierarchies have been an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted. A third of a billion years ago, brains and nervous systems were comparatively simple. Nonetheless, they already had the structure and neurochemistry necessary to process information about status and society. The importance of this fact can hardly be overstated.
  • evolution works, in large part, through variation and natural selection. Variation exists for many reasons, including gene-shuffling (to put it simply) and random mutation. Individuals vary within a species for such reasons. Nature chooses from among them, across time. That theory, as stated, appears to account for the continual alteration of life-forms over the eons.
  • But there’s an additional question lurking under the surface: what exactly is the “nature” in “natural selection”? What exactly is “the environment” to which animals adapt?
  • Nature “selects.” The idea of selects contains implicitly nested within it the idea of fitness. It is “fitness” that is “selected.” Fitness, roughly speaking, is the probability that a given organism will leave offspring (will propagate its genes through time). The “fit” in “fitness” is therefore the matching of organismal attribute to environmental demand.
  • But nature, the selecting agent, is not a static selector—not in any simple sense.
  • As the environment supporting a species transforms and changes, the features that make a given individual successful in surviving and reproducing also transform and change. Thus, the theory of natural selection does not posit creatures matching themselves ever more precisely to a template specified by the world. It is more that creatures are in a dance with nature, albeit one that is deadly.
  • Nature is not simply dynamic, either. Some things change quickly, but they are nested within other things that change less quickly (music
  • It’s chaos, within order, within chaos, within higher order. The order that is most real is the order that is most unchanging—and that is not necessarily the order that is most easily seen. The leaf, when perceived, might blind the observer to the tree. The tree can blind him to the forest.
  • It is also a mistake to conceptualize nature romantically.
  • Unfortunately, “the environment” is also elephantiasis and guinea worms (don’t ask), anopheles mosquitoes and malaria, starvation-level droughts, AIDS and the Black Plague.
  • It is because of the existence of such things, of course, that we attempt to modify our surroundings, protecting our children, building cities and transportation systems and growing food and generating power.
  • this brings us to a third erroneous concept: that nature is something strictly segregated from the cultural constructs that have emerged within it.
  • It does not matter whether that feature is physical and biological, or social and cultural. All that matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is permanence—and the dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years.
  • The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism, either, for that matter. It’s not the military-industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy—that disposable, malleable, arbitrary cultural artefact. It’s not even a human creation; not in the most profound sense. It is instead a near-eternal aspect of the environment, and much of what is blamed on these more ephemeral manifestations is a consequence of its unchanging existence.
  • We were struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones. There is little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees.
  • The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental.17 It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions. It powerfully affects every aspect of our Being, conscious and unconscious alike.
  • The ancient part of your brain specialized for assessing dominance watches how you are treated by other people. On that evidence, it renders a determination of your value and assigns you a status. If you are judged by your peers as of little worth, the counter restricts serotonin availability. That makes you much more physically and psychologically reactive to any circumstance or event that might produce emotion, particularly if it is negative. You need that reactivity. Emergencies are common at the bottom, and you must be ready to survive. Unfortunately, that physical hyper-response, that constant alertness, burns up a lot of precious energy and physical resources.
  • It will leave you far more likely to live, or die, carelessly, for a rare opportunity at pleasure, when it manifests itself. The physical demands of emergency preparedness will wear you down in every way.21
  • If you have a high status, on the other hand, the counter’s cold, pre-reptilian mechanics assume that your niche is secure, productive
  • You can delay gratification, without forgoing it forever. You can afford to be a reliable and thoughtful citizen.
  • Sometimes, however, the counter mechanism can go wrong. Erratic habits of sleeping and eating can interfere with its function. Uncertainty can throw it for a loop. The body, with its various parts,
  • needs
  • to function like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos ensue. It is for this reason that routine is so necessary. The acts of life we repeat every day need to be automatized. They must be turned into stable and reliable habits, so they lose their complexity and gain predictability and simplicity.
  • It is for such reasons that I always ask my clinical clients first about sleep. Do they wake up in the morning at approximately the time the typical person wakes up, and at the same time every day?
  • The next thing I ask about is breakfast. I counsel my clients to eat a fat and protein-heavy breakfast as soon as possible after they awaken (no simple carbohydrates, no sugars,
  • I have had many clients whose anxiety was reduced to subclinical levels merely because they started to sleep on a predictable schedule and eat breakfast.
  • Other bad habits can also interfere with the counter’s accuracy.
  • There are many systems of interaction between brain, body and social world that can get caught in positive feedback loops. Depressed people, for example, can start feeling useless and burdensome, as well as grief-stricken and pained. This makes them withdraw from contact with friends and family. Then the withdrawal makes them more lonesome and isolated, and more likely to feel useless and burdensome. Then they withdraw more. In this manner, depression spirals and amplifies.
  • If someone is badly hurt at some point in life—traumatized—the dominance counter can transform in a manner that makes additional hurt more rather than less likely. This often happens in the case of people, now adults, who were viciously bullied during childhood or adolescence. They become anxious and easily upset. They shield themselves with a defensive crouch, and avoid the direct eye contact interpretable as a dominance challenge.
  • With their capacity for aggression strait-jacketed within a too-narrow morality, those who are only or merely compassionate and self-sacrificing (and naïve and exploitable) cannot call forth the genuinely righteous and appropriately self-protective anger necessary to defend themselves. If you can bite, you generally don’t have to. When skillfully integrated, the ability to respond with aggression and violence decreases rather than increases the probability that actual aggression will become necessary.
  • Naive, harmless people usually guide their perceptions and actions with a few simple axioms: people are basically good; no one really wants to hurt anyone else; the threat (and, certainly, the use) of force, physical or otherwise, is wrong. These axioms collapse, or worse, in the presence of
  • individuals who are genuinely malevolent.27
  • I have had clients who were terrified into literally years of daily hysterical convulsions by the sheer look of malevolence on their attackers’ faces. Such individuals typically come from hyper-sheltered families, where nothing
  • terrible is allowed to exist, and everything is fairyland wonderful (or else).
  • When the wakening occurs—when once-naïve people recognize in themselves the seeds of evil and monstrosity, and see themselves as dangerous (at least potentially)— their fear decreases. They develop more self-respect. Then, perhaps, they begin to resist oppression. They see that they have the ability to withstand, because they are terrible too. They see they can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous they will become, otherwise,
  • There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life.
  • even if you came by your poor posture honestly—even if you were unpopular or bullied at home or in grade school28—it’s not necessarily appropriate now. Circumstances change. If you slump around, with the same bearing that characterizes a defeated lobster, people will assign you a lower status, and the old counter that you share with crustaceans, sitting at the very base of your brain, will assign you a low dominance number.
  • the other, far more optimistic lesson of Price’s law and the Pareto distribution: those who start to have will probably get more.
  • Some of these upwardly moving loops can occur in your own private, subjective space.
  • If you are asked to move the muscles one by one into a position that looks happy, you will report feeling happier. Emotion is partly bodily expression, and can be amplified (or dampened) by that expression.29
  • To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open.
  • It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).
  • So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.
  • Thus emboldened, you will embark on the voyage of your life, let your light shine, so to speak, on the heavenly hill, and pursue your rightful destiny. Then the meaning of your life may be sufficient to keep the corrupting influence of mortal despair at bay. Then you may be able to accept the terrible burden of the World, and find joy.
  • RULE 2   TREAT YOURSELF LIKE SOMEONE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR HELPING
  • People are better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves. That
  • It is difficult to conclude anything from this set of facts except that people appear to love their dogs, cats, ferrets and birds (and maybe even their lizards) more than themselves. How horrible is that? How much shame must exist, for something like that to be true? What could it be about people that makes them prefer their pets to themselves?
  • To understand Genesis 1, the Priestly story, with its insistence on speech as the fundamental creative force, it is first necessary to review a few fundamental, ancient assumptions (these are markedly different in type and intent from the assumptions of science, which are, historically speaking, quite novel).
  • those who existed during the distant time in which the foundational epics of our culture emerged were much more concerned with the actions that dictated survival (and with interpreting the world in a manner commensurate with that goal) than with anything approximating what we now understand as objective truth.
  • Before the dawn of the scientific worldview, reality was construed differently. Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things.31 It was understood as something more akin to story or drama. That story or drama was lived, subjective experience, as it manifested itself moment to moment in the consciousness of every living person.
  • subjective pain. That’s something so real no argument can stand against it. Everyone acts as if their pain is real—ultimately, finally real. Pain matters, more than matter matters. It is for this reason, I believe, that so many of the world’s traditions regard the suffering attendant upon existence as the irreducible truth of Being.
  • In any case, that which we subjectively experience can be likened much more to a novel or a movie than to a scientific description of physical reality.
  • The Domain, Not of Matter, but of What Matters
  • the world of experience has primal constituents, as well. These are the necessary elements whose interactions define drama and fiction. One of these is chaos. Another is order. The third (as there are three) is the process that mediates between the two, which appears identical to what modern people call consciousness.
  • Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. It’s unexplored territory. Chaos is what extends, eternally and without limit, beyond the boundaries of all states, all ideas, and all disciplines. It’s the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the bushes in the night-time,
  • It is, in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor understand.
  • Chaos is also the formless potential from which the God of Genesis 1 called forth order using language at the beginning of time. It’s the same potential from which we, made in that Image, call forth the novel and ever-changing moments of our lives. And Chaos is freedom, dreadful freedom, too.
  • Order, by contrast, is explored territory. That’s the hundreds-of-millions-of-years-old hierarchy of place, position and authority. That’s the structure of society. It’s the structure provided by biology, too—particularly insofar as you are adapted, as you are, to the structure of society. Order is tribe, religion, hearth, home and country.
  • Order is the public façade we’re called upon to wear, the politeness of a gathering of civilized strangers, and the thin ice on which we all skate. Order is the place where the behavior of the world matches our expectations and our desires; the place where all things turn out the way we want them to.
  • But order is sometimes tyranny and stultification, as well, when the demand for certainty and uniformity and purity becomes too one-sided.
  • In order, we’re able to think about things in the long term. There, things work, and we’re stable, calm and competent. We seldom leave places we
  • understand—geographical or conceptual—for that reason, and we certainly do not like it when we are compelled to or when it happens accidentally.
  • When the same person betrays you, sells you out, you move from the daytime world of clarity and light to the dark underworld of chaos, confusion and despair. That’s the same move you make, and the same place you visit, when the company you work for starts to fail and your job is placed in doubt.
  • Before the Twin Towers fell—that was order. Chaos manifested itself afterward. Everyone felt it. The very air became uncertain. What exactly was it that fell? Wrong question. What exactly remained standing? That was the issue at hand.
  • Chaos is the deep ocean bottom to which Pinocchio voyaged to rescue his father from Monstro, whale and fire-breathing dragon. That journey into darkness and rescue is the most difficult thing a puppet must do, if he wants to be real; if he wants to extract himself from the temptations of deceit and acting and victimization and impulsive pleasure and totalitarian subjugation; if he wants to take his place as a genuine Being in the world.
  • Chaos is the new place and time that emerges when tragedy strikes suddenly, or malevolence reveals its paralyzing visage, even in the confines of your own home. Something unexpected or undesired can always make its appearance, when a plan is being laid out, regardless of how familiar the circumstances.
  • Our brains respond instantly when chaos appears, with simple, hyper-fast circuits maintained from the ancient days, when our ancestors dwelled in trees, and snakes struck in a flash.32 After that nigh-instantaneous, deeply reflexive bodily response comes the later-evolving, more complex but slower responses of emotions—and, after that, comes thinking, of the higher order, which can extend over seconds, minutes or years. All that response is instinctive, in some sense—but the faster the response, the more instinctive.
  • Things or objects are part of the objective world. They’re inanimate; spiritless. They’re dead. This is not true of chaos and order. Those are perceived, experienced and understood (to the degree that they are understood at all) as personalities—and that is just as true of the perceptions, experiences and understanding of modern people as their ancient forebears. It’s just that moderners don’t notice.
  • Perception of things as entities with personality also occurs before perception of things as things. This is particularly true of the action of others,34 living others, but we also see the non-living “objective world” as animated, with purpose and intent.
  • This is because of the operation of what psychologists have called “the hyperactive agency detector” within us.35 We evolved, over millennia, within intensely social circumstances. This means that the most significant elements of our environment of origin were personalities, not things, objects or situations.
  • The personalities we have evolved to perceive have been around, in predictable form, and in typical, hierarchical configurations, forever, for all intents and purposes. They have been…
  • the category of “parent” and/or “child” has been around for 200 million years. That’s longer than birds have existed. That’s longer than flowers have grown. It’s not a billion years, but it’s still a very long time. It’s plenty long enough for male and female and parent and child to serve as vital and fundamental parts of the environment to which we have adapted. This means that male and female and parent and child are…
  • Our brains are deeply social. Other creatures (particularly, other humans) were crucially important to us as we lived, mated and evolved. Those creatures were…
  • From a Darwinian perspective, nature—reality itself; the environment, itself—is what selects. The environment cannot be defined in any more fundamental manner. It is not mere inert matter. Reality itself is whatever we contend with when we are striving to survive and reproduce. A…
  • as our brain capacity increased and we developed curiosity to spare, we became increasingly aware of and curious about the nature of the world—what we eventually conceptualized as the objective…
  • “outside” is not merely unexplored physical territory. Outside is outside of what we currently understand—and understanding is dealing with and coping with…
  • when we first began to perceive the unknown, chaotic, non-animal world, we used categories that had originally evolved to represent the pre-human animal social world. Our minds are far older than mere…
  • Our most…
  • category—as old, in some sense, as the sexual act itself—appears to be that of sex, male and female. We appear to have taken that primordial knowledge of structured, creative opposition and…
  • Order, the known, appears symbolically associated with masculinity (as illustrated in the aforementioned yang of the Taoist yin-yang symbol). This is perhaps because the primary…
  • Chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine. This is partly because all the things we have come to know were born, originally, of the unknown, just as all beings we encounter were born of mothers. Chaos is mater, origin, source, mother; materia, the substance from which all things are made.
  • In its positive guise, chaos is possibility itself, the source of ideas, the mysterious realm of gestation and birth. As a negative force, it’s the impenetrable darkness of a cave and the accident by the side of the road.
  • Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection.
  • Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness.40
  • Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.42 It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.”
  • Many things begin to fall into place when you begin to consciously understand the world in this manner. It’s as if the knowledge of your body and soul falls into alignment with the knowledge of your intellect.
  • And there’s more: such knowledge is proscriptive, as well as descriptive. This is the kind of knowing what that helps you know how. This is the kind of is from which you can derive an ought. The Taoist juxtaposition of yin and yang, for example, doesn’t simply portray chaos and order as the fundamental elements of Being—it also tells you how to act.
  • The Way, the Taoist path of life, is represented by (or exists on) the border between the twin serpents. The Way is the path of proper Being. It’s the same Way as that referred to by Christ in John 14:6: I am the way, and the truth and the life. The same idea is expressed in Matthew 7:14: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
  • We eternally inhabit order, surrounded by chaos. We eternally occupy known territory, surrounded by the unknown. We experience meaningful engagement when we mediate appropriately between them. We are adapted, in the deepest Darwinian sense, not to the world of objects, but to the meta-realities of order and chaos, yang and yin. Chaos and order make up the eternal, transcendent environment of the living.
  • To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure.
  • Chaos and order are fundamental elements because every lived situation (even every conceivable lived situation) is made up of both.
  • you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.
  • The serpent in Eden therefore means the same thing as the black dot in the yin side of the Taoist yin/yang symbol of totality—that is, the possibility of the unknown and revolutionary suddenly manifesting itself where everything appears calm.
  • The outside, chaos, always sneaks into the inside, because nothing can be completely walled off from the rest of reality. So even the ultimate in safe spaces inevitably harbours a snake.
  • We have seen the enemy, after all, and he is us. The snake inhabits each of our souls.
  • The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal. No walls, however tall, will keep that out. Even if the fortress were thick enough, in principle, to keep everything bad whatsoever outside, it would immediately appear again within.
  • I have learned that these old stories contain nothing superfluous. Anything accidental—anything that does not serve the plot—has long been forgotten in the telling. As the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov advised, “If there is a rifle hanging on the wall in act one, it must be fired in the next act. Otherwise it has no
  • business being there.”50
  • Eve immediately shares the fruit with Adam. That makes him self-conscious. Little has changed. Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. They do this primarily by rejecting them—but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not take responsibility. Since women bear the primary burden of reproduction, it’s no wonder. It is very hard to see how it could be otherwise. But the capacity of women to shame men and render them self-conscious is still a primal force of nature.
  • What does it mean to know yourself naked
  • Naked means vulnerable and easily damaged. Naked means subject to judgment for beauty and health. Naked means unprotected and unarmed in the jungle of nature and man. This is why Adam and Eve became ashamed, immediately after their eyes were opened. They could see—and what they first saw was themselves.
  • In their vulnerability, now fully realized, they felt unworthy to stand before God.
  • Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living—and the Ideal shames us all.
  • He tells the woman that she will now bring forth children in sorrow, and desire an unworthy, sometimes resentful man, who will in consequence lord her biological fate over her, permanently. What might this mean? It could just mean that God is a patriarchal tyrant, as politically motivated interpretations of the ancient story insist. I think it’s merely descriptive.
  • women pay a high price for pregnancy and child-rearing, particularly in the early stages, and that one of the inevitable consequences is increased dependence upon the sometimes unreliable and always problematic good graces of men.
  • then God banishes the first man and the first woman from Paradise, out of infancy, out of the unconscious animal world, into the horrors of history itself. And then He puts cherubim and a flaming sword at the gate of Eden, just to stop them from eating the Fruit of the Tree of Life.
  • Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn.
  • so we return to our original query: Why would someone buy prescription medication for his dog, and then so carefully administer it, when he would not do the same for himself?
  • Why should anyone take care of anything as naked, ugly, ashamed, frightened, worthless, cowardly, resentful, defensive and accusatory as a descendant of Adam? Even if that thing, that being, is himself?
  • We know how we are naked, and how that nakedness can be exploited—and that means we know how others are naked, and how they can be exploited. We can terrify other people, consciously. We can hurt and humiliate them for faults we understand only too well. We can torture them—literally—slowly, artfully and terribly. That’s far more than predation. That’s a qualitative shift in understanding. That’s a cataclysm as large as the development of self-consciousness itself. That’s the entry of the knowledge of Good and Evil into the world.
  • Only man could conceive of the rack, the iron maiden and the thumbscrew. Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been able to formulate.
  • with this realization we have well-nigh full legitimization of the idea, very unpopular in modern intellectual circles, of Original Sin.
  • Human beings have a great capacity for wrongdoing. It’s an attribute that is unique in the world of life. We can and do make things worse, voluntarily, with full knowledge of what we are doing (as well as accidentally, and carelessly, and in a manner that is willfully blind). Given that terrible capacity, that proclivity for malevolent actions, is it any wonder we have a hard time taking care of ourselves, or others—or even that we doubt the value of the entire human enterprise?
  • The juxtaposition of Genesis 1 with Genesis 2 & 3 (the latter two chapters outlining the fall of man, describing why our lot is so tragedy-ridden and ethically torturous) produces a narrative sequence almost unbearable in its profundity. The moral of Genesis 1 is that Being brought into existence through true speech is Good.
  • The original Man and Woman, existing in unbroken unity with their Creator, did not appear conscious (and certainly not self-conscious). Their eyes were not open. But, in their perfection, they were also less, not more, than their post-Fall counterparts. Their goodness was something bestowed, rather than deserved or earned.
  • Maybe, even in some cosmic sense (assuming that consciousness itself is a phenomenon of cosmic significance), free choice matters.
  • here’s a proposition: perhaps it is not simply the emergence of self-consciousness and the rise of our moral knowledge of Death and the Fall that besets us and makes us doubt our own worth. Perhaps it is instead our unwillingness—reflected in Adam’s shamed hiding—to walk with God, despite our fragility and propensity for evil.
  • The entire Bible is structured so that everything after the Fall—the history of Israel, the prophets, the coming of Christ—is presented as a remedy for that Fall, a way out of evil. The beginning of conscious history, the rise of the state and all its pathologies of pride and rigidity, the emergence of great moral figures who try to set things right, culminating in the Messiah Himself—that is all part of humanity’s attempt, God willing, to set itself right. And what would that mean?
  • And this is an amazing thing: the answer is already implicit in Genesis 1: to embody the Image of God—to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good—but to do so consciously, of our own free choice.
  • Back is the way forward—as T. S. Eliot so rightly insisted
  • We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
  • If we wish to take care of ourselves properly, we would have to respect ourselves—but we don’t, because we are—not least in our own eyes—fallen creatures.
  • If we lived in Truth; if we spoke the Truth—then we could walk with God once again, and respect ourselves, and others, and the world. Then we might treat ourselves like people we cared for.
  • We might strive to set the world straight. We might orient it toward Heaven, where we would want people we cared for to dwell, instead of Hell, where our resentment and hatred would eternally sentence everyone.
  • Then, the primary moral issue confronting society was control of violent, impulsive selfishness and the mindless greed and brutality that accompanies it.
  • It is easy to believe that people are arrogant, and egotistical, and always looking out for themselves. The cynicism that makes that opinion a universal truism is widespread and fashionable.
  • But such an orientation to the world is not at all characteristic of many people. They have the opposite problem: they shoulder intolerable burdens of self-disgust, self-contempt, shame and self-consciousness. Thus, instead of narcissistically inflating their own importance, they don’t value themselves at all, and they don’t take care of themselves with attention and skill.
  • Christ’s archetypal death exists as an example of how to accept finitude, betrayal and tyranny heroically—how to walk with God despite the tragedy of self-conscious knowledge—and not as a directive to victimize ourselves in the service of others.
  • To sacrifice ourselves to God (to the highest good, if you like) does not mean to suffer silently and willingly when some person or organization demands more from us, consistently, than is offered in return. That means we are supporting tyranny, and allowing ourselves to be treated like slaves.
  • I learned two very important lessons from Carl Jung, the famous Swiss depth psychologist, about “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “loving your neighbour as yourself.”
  • The first lesson was that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than injunctions.
  • If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs.
  • there is little difference between standing up and speaking for yourself, when you are being bullied or otherwise tormented and enslaved, and standing up and speaking for someone else.
  • you do not simply belong to yourself. You are not simply your own possession to torture and mistreat. This is partly because your Being is inexorably tied up with that of others, and your mistreatment of yourself can have catastrophic consequences for others.
  • metaphorically speaking, there is also this: you have a spark of the divine in you, which belongs not to you, but to God. We are, after all—according to Genesis—made in His image.
  • We can make order from chaos—and vice versa—in our way, with our words. So, we may not exactly be God, but we’re not exactly nothing, either.
  • In my own periods of darkness, in the underworld of the soul, I find myself frequently overcome and amazed by the ability of people to befriend each other, to love their intimate partners and parents and children, and to do what they must do to keep the machinery of the world running.
  • It is this sympathy that should be the proper medicament for self-conscious self-contempt, which has its justification, but is only half the full and proper story. Hatred for self and mankind must be balanced with gratefulness for tradition and the state and astonishment at what normal, everyday people accomplish
  • You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself.
  • To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you. This is not “what you want.” It is also not “what would make you happy.”
  • You must help a child become a virtuous, responsible, awake being, capable of full reciprocity—able to take care of himself and others, and to thrive while doing so. Why would you think it acceptable to do anything less for yourself?
  • You need to know who you are, so that you understand your armament and bolster yourself in respect to your limitations. You need to know where you are going, so that you can limit the extent of chaos in your life, restructure order, and bring the divine force of Hope to bear on the world.
  • You need to determine how to act toward yourself so that you are most likely to become and to stay a good person.
  • Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities.
  • Once having understood Hell, researched it, so to speak—particularly your
  • own individual Hell—you could decide against going there or creating that.
  • You could, in fact, devote your life to this. That would give you a Meaning, with a capital M. That would justify your miserable existence.
  • That would atone for your sinful nature, and replace your shame and self-consciousness with the natural pride and forthright confidence of someone who has learned once again to walk with God in the Garden.
  • RULE 3   MAKE FRIENDS WITH PEOPLE WHO WANT THE BEST FOR YOU
  • It would be more romantic, I suppose, to suggest that we would have all jumped at the chance for something more productive, bored out of our skulls as we were. But it’s not true. We were all too prematurely cynical and world-weary and leery of responsibility to stick to the debating clubs and Air Cadets and school sports that the adults around us tried to organize. Doing anything wasn’t cool.
  • When you move, everything is up in the air, at least for a while. It’s stressful, but in the chaos there are new possibilities. People, including you, can’t hem you in with their old notions. You get shaken out of your ruts. You can make new, better ruts, with people aiming at better things. I thought this was just a natural development. I thought that every person who moved would have—and want—the same phoenix-like experience.
  • What was it that made Chris and Carl and Ed unable (or, worse, perhaps, unwilling) to move or to change their friendships and improve the circumstances of their lives? Was it inevitable—a consequence of their own limitations, nascent illnesses and traumas of the past?
  • Why did he—like his cousin, like my other friends—continually choose people who, and places that, were not good for him?
  • perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better. Freud called this a “repetition compulsion.” He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past
  • People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results.
  • It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. It’s partly fate. It’s partly inability. It’s partly…unwillingness to learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?
  • People choose friends who aren’t good for them for other reasons, too. Sometimes it’s because they want to rescue someone.
  • it is not easy to distinguish between someone truly wanting and needing help and someone who is merely exploiting a willing helper. The distinction is difficult even for the person who is wanting and needing and possibly exploiting.
  • When it’s not just naïveté, the attempt to rescue someone is often fuelled by vanity and narcissism.
  • But Christ himself, you might object, befriended tax-collectors and prostitutes. How dare I cast aspersions on the motives of those who are trying to help? But Christ was the archetypal perfect man. And you’re you.
  • How do you know that your attempts to pull someone up won’t instead bring them—or you—further down?
  • The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability.65 Down is a lot easier than up.
  • maybe you’re saving someone because you want to convince yourself that the strength of your character is more than just a side effect of your luck and birthplace. Or maybe it’s because it’s easier to look virtuous when standing alongside someone utterly irresponsible.
  • Or maybe you have no plan, genuine or otherwise, to rescue anybody. You’re associating with people who are bad for you not because it’s better for anyone, but because it’s easier.
  • You know it. Your friends know it. You’re all bound by an implicit contract—one aimed at nihilism, and failure, and suffering of the stupidest sort.
  • Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. You shouldn’t merely assume that he or she is a noble victim of unjust circumstances and exploitation. It’s the most unlikely explanation, not the most probable.
  • Besides, if you buy the story that everything terrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the part of the victim, you deny that person all agency in the past (and, by implication, in the present and future, as well).
  • It is far more likely that a given individual has just decided to reject the path upward, because of its difficulty. Perhaps that should even be your default assumption, when faced with such a situation.
  • failure is easy to understand. No explanation for its existence is required. In the same manner, fear, hatred, addiction, promiscuity, betrayal and deception require no explanation. It’s not the existence of vice, or the indulgence in it, that requires explanation. Vice is easy.
  • Failure is easy, too. It’s easier not to shoulder a burden. It’s easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It’s easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today,
  • Success: that’s the mystery. Virtue: that’s what’s inexplicable. To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits. You just have to bide your time. And once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished.
  • I am not saying that there is no hope of redemption. But it is much harder to extract someone
  • from a chasm than to lift him from a ditch. And some chasms are very deep. And there’s not much left of the body at the bottom.
  • Carl Rogers, the famous humanistic psychologist, believed it was impossible to start a therapeutic relationship if the person seeking help did not want to improve.67 Rogers believed it was impossible to convince someone to change for the better. The
  • none of this is a justification for abandoning those in real need to pursue your narrow, blind ambition, in case it has to be said.
  • Here’s something to consider: If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend for yourself?
  • You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place. Quite the opposite. You should choose people who want things to be better, not worse. It’s a good thing, not a selfish thing, to choose people who are good for you.
  • It is for this reason that every good example is a fateful challenge, and every hero, a judge. Michelangelo’s great perfect marble David cries out to its observer: “You could be more than you are.”
  • Don’t think that it is easier to surround yourself with good healthy people than with bad unhealthy people. It’s not. A good, healthy person is an ideal. It requires strength and daring to stand up near such a person.
  • RULE 4   COMPARE YOURSELF TO WHO YOU WERE YESTERDAY, NOT TO WHO SOMEONE ELSE IS TODAY
  • IT WAS EASIER FOR PEOPLE to be good at something when more of us lived in small, rural communities. Someone could be homecoming queen. Someone else could be spelling-bee champ, math whiz or basketball star. There were only one or two mechanics and a couple of teachers. In each of their domains, these local heroes had the opportunity to enjoy the serotonin-fuelled confidence of the victor.
  • Our hierarchies of accomplishment are now dizzyingly vertical.
  • No matter how good you are at something, or how you rank your accomplishments, there is someone out there who makes you look incompetent.
  • We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be. A very small number of people produce very much of everything.
  • People are unhappy at the bottom. They get sick there, and remain unknown and unloved. They waste their lives there. They die there. In consequence, the self-denigrating voice in the minds of people weaves a devastating tale. Life is a zero-sum game. Worthlessness is the default condition.
  • It is for such reasons that a whole generation of social psychologists recommended “positive illusions” as the only reliable route to mental health.69 Their credo? Let a lie be your umbrella. A more dismal, wretched, pessimistic philosophy can hardly be imagined:
  • Here is an alternative approach (and one that requires no illusions). If the cards are always stacked against you, perhaps the game you are playing is somehow rigged (perhaps by you, unbeknownst to yourself). If the internal voice makes you doubt the value of your endeavours—or your life, or life itself—perhaps you should stop listening.
  • There will always be people better than you—that’s a cliché of nihilism, like the phrase, In a million years, who’s going to know the difference? The proper response to that statement is not, Well, then, everything is meaningless. It’s, Any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters.
  • Standards of better or worse are not illusory or unnecessary. If you hadn’t decided that what you are doing right now was better than the alternatives, you wouldn’t be doing it. The idea of a value-free choice is a contradiction in terms. Value judgments are a precondition for action.
  • Furthermore, every activity, once chosen, comes with its own internal standards of accomplishment. If something can be done at all, it can be done better or worse. To do anything at all is therefore to play a game with a defined and valued end, which can always be reached more or less efficiently and elegantly.
  • We might start by considering the all-too-black-and-white words themselves: “success” or “failure.” You are either a success, a comprehensive, singular, over-all good thing, or its opposite, a failure, a comprehensive, singular, irredeemably bad thing.
  • There are vital degrees and gradations of value obliterated by this binary system, and the consequences are not good.
  • there is not just one game at which to succeed or fail. There are many games and, more specifically, many good games—
  • if changing games does not work, you can invent a new one. I
  • and athletic pursuits. You might consider judging your success across all the games you play.
  • When we are very young we are neither individual nor informed. We have not had the time nor gained the wisdom to develop our own standards. In consequence, we must compare ourselves to others, because standards are necessary.
  • As we mature we become, by contrast, increasingly individual and unique. The conditions of our lives become more and more personal and less and less comparable with those of others. Symbolically speaking, this means we must leave the house ruled by our father, and confront the chaos of our individual Being.
  • We must then rediscover the values of our culture—veiled from us by our ignorance, hidden in the dusty treasure-trove of the past—rescue them, and integrate them into our own lives. This is what gives existence its full and necessary meaning.
  • What is it that you actually love? What is it that you genuinely want? Before you can articulate your own standards of value, you must see yourself as a stranger—and then you must get to know yourself. What
  • Dare to be truthful. Dare to articulate yourself, and express (or at least become aware of) what would really justify your life.
  • Consult your resentment. It’s a revelatory emotion, for all its pathology. It’s part of an evil triad: arrogance, deceit, and resentment. Nothing causes more harm than this underworld Trinity. But resentment always means one of two things. Either the resentful person is immature, in which case he or she should shut up, quit whining, and get on with it, or there is tyranny afoot—in which case the person subjugated has a moral obligation to speak up.
  • Be cautious when you’re comparing yourself to others. You’re a singular being, once you’re an adult. You have your own particular, specific problems—financial, intimate, psychological, and otherwise.
  • Those are embedded in the unique broader context of your existence. Your career or job works for you in a personal manner, or it does not, and it does so in a unique interplay with the other specifics of your life.
  • We must see, but to see, we must aim, so we are always aiming. Our minds are built on the hunting-and-gathering platforms of our bodies. To hunt is to specify a target, track it, and throw at it.
  • We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better. If we did not see things this way, we would not act at all. We wouldn’t even be able to see, because to see we must focus, and to focus we must pick one thing above all else on which to focus.
  • The disadvantage to all this foresight and creativity is chronic unease and discomfort. Because we always contrast what is with what could be, we have to aim at what could be.
  • The present is eternally flawed. But where you start might not be as important as the direction you are heading. Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak.
  • Called upon properly, the internal critic will suggest something to set in order, which you could set in order, which you would set in order—voluntarily, without resentment, even with pleasure.
  • “Excuse me,” you might say to yourself, without irony or sarcasm. “I’m trying to reduce some of the unnecessary suffering around here. I could use some help.” Keep the derision at bay. “I’m wondering if there is anything that you would be willing to do? I’d be very grateful for your service.” Ask honestly and with humility. That’s no simple matter.
Javier E

'Billions,' 'Succession' and the Making of Wealth Porn - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-showtime-succession-hbo.html

wealth tv shows culture

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Shows like “Billions” and HBO’s “Succession,” a prickly drama about a Murdoch-like media dynasty that returns for its second season this summer, have to offer a convincing visual representation of the ultrawealthy, the 1 percent of the 1 percent. Jesse Armstrong, who created “Succession,” described a governing principle: “Let’s just be as truthful as we can.”
  • The design of these shows implies, more and less subtly, a critique of wealth itself. Come for the private jets, stay for the inevitable dehumanization.
  • But extremely rich people don’t always want their homes photographed and they may not wear couture.“When they hit the billion and above number, they’re no longer in a place where they have to impress anybody by their outward trappings,” said David Levien, one of the creators of “Billions.
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  • So each show retains a number of wealth consultants — some of them billionaires and some of them vendors who cater to billionaires — who advise on what uniforms household staff might wear or which artwo
  • Cost aside, one way these shows suggest wealth is less about the items themselves than how the characters react to them. In the second season of “Billions,” Bobby and Lara Axelrod board his-and-her private jets with no more fanfare than a quick goodbye kiss. The characters aren’t awed, so the camera isn’t either.
  • “People imagine that it’s going to bring some meaning to them or satisfy some need,” he said. However, “rich people often describe themselves as feeling dead inside.”
  • When even “Dynasty” unleashes a socioeconomic critique, it suggests suspicion of the very rich, an anxiety that they may not be like the rest of us. That anxiety might have merit. The 1980s — the era of the first “Dynasty” — and the present are periods associated with huge increases in wealth inequality.
  • “Rich people have become so different from the average person,” said Shamus Khan, a Columbia University sociology professor who researches the political influence of economic elites. “They’re of interest in the way that a zoo animal is of interest.”
  • “Succession” mostly steers clear of beauty shots. Armstrong told his team, “Let’s never try to persuade anyone or sell anyone on an element of this lifestyle.” The characters tend to treat wealth casually, even disdainfully, regifting a Patek-Philippe, stepping into a Sikorsky helicopter as if it’s one more town car.
  • The wealthy characters in these shows often choose money over family, community or moral integrity. The design — luxurious, but sometimes cold and unbeautiful — reflects that.
malonema1

How the Supreme Court is Expanding the Immigrant Detention System - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...555224

US crisis culture

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • A quarter-century ago, in 1994, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, on any given day, was holding somewhere around 5,500 immigrants in “immigration detention.”For fiscal year 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget documents projected an average daily population in detention of roughly 31,000. That increase—nearly six-fold in 25 years—made the Enforcement and Removal Operations division of ICE roughly the 13th largest prison system in the country. On its busiest days in FY 2017, ICE housed a population well above that.  
  • As of 2016, only about 10 percent of detainees were held in federal facilities at all; the remainder were housed in state, county, or city jails (25 percent) or private for-profit prisons (65 percent). Each of the local or private facilities is governed by an agreement with ICE governing inmate conditions, and the agreements aren’t uniform. Some require better conditions than others. Even ICE’s defenders do not seriously contest that ERO detention facilities are rife with poor physical conditions, inadequate medical care, and physical and sexual abuse of the inmates.
  • Justices Samuel Alito, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch, read the statute as forbidding bail hearings for the immigration inmates, and thus authorizing ERO to detain them for weeks, months, or even years. Two of the five, Thomas and Gorsuch, wrote separately to suggest that the inmates should not be allowed to challenge their detention in court until after their cases are complete and they are facing deportation. The five-justice majority opinion, without quite saying so, also suggested that the constitutional issue is really not of much importance at all. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. (Justice Elena Kagan recused herself, because she had authorized a pleading in the case when she was U.S. Solicitor General.)
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  • So the statutory issue in Jennings was whether these statutes, which do not mention bail, should be read as forbidding bail proceedings—or read against the background of the Constitution, which plainly regards bail as a fundamental right? For criminal proceedings, bail hearings are presumed; should immigration detention—which is civil—be an exception? Six of the circuits have said that bail hearings must be held if detention is “prolonged.” The Ninth Circuit, where Jennings originated, ordered that ICE provide bail hearings for its detainees every six months. The detainees would be entitled to release unless ICE could show by “clear and convincing evidence” that they were dangerous to the community or likely to flee.
  • In dissent, Breyer, joined by Ginsburg and Sotomayor, contended that the constitutional issues in this area are weighty. Though popular discourse increasingly denies this obvious fact, the immigrants immured in the ERO archipelago have constitutional rights. The Fifth Amendment says that “[n]o person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”—and from the founding to the present, “person” has included citizen and alien alike. Some of the immigrants in the class, having been halted at the border, are not, as a matter of immigration law, “in” the United States. But that’s a legal fiction for immigration purposes, Breyer noted:
manhefnawi

The Enslaved Native Americans Who Made The Gold Rush Possible - History in the Headlines - 1 views

www.history.com/...ho-made-the-gold-rush-possible

California Gold Natives Slavery Sutter Marshall

shared by manhefnawi on 13 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • the Anglo settlers who flocked to California declared war on the Native Californians who had come before them. But Forty-Niners weren’t the first white people to oppress or even enslave Native Americans in California. The very land on which Marshall spotted the gold was part of a vast empire built on the slave labor of native peoples
  • In order to acquire the land, he converted to Catholicism and became a Mexican citizen, and within a few years he had more than doubled his land holdings.
  • it was home to Native Americans who “found their homelands now the property of outsiders who viewed them as potential laborers
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  • Those native peoples presented both a threat and an opportunity to Sutter
  • local Nisenan people, and turned them into a militia, outfitting them with uniforms and weapons and training them to defend his land
  • With the help of his militia, he also enslaved them
  • did not hesitate to kill Native Americans who did not submit to hard labor
  • Native Americans weren’t just an economic powerhouse—they were currency. He traded native labor among local rancheros and to new settlers
  • Sutter’s Mill became ground zero for the Gold Rush of 1849. But even the discovery of gold was facilitated by Sutter’s enslavement and coercion of native peoples
  • the dirt there was dug by a group of Sutter-controlled Native Americans who knew about the gold, but did not value it
  • After the presence of gold became known, squatters and thieves overran Sutter’s ranch, destroyed his building, looted his wealth and stole his livestock
  • his claim to the lands granted to him in 1841 was declared invalid
  • But perhaps the biggest losers were the Native Americans of Gold Rush-era California
  • John Sutter had set the stage for their destruction—but his cruelty was just the beginning
knudsenlu

Is it still worth trying to come to America as an asylum seeker? I don't think so | Lui... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...m-seeker-refugees-human-rights

america asylum opinion US crisis culture

shared by knudsenlu on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • I am a refugee living in the United States and I know what it means to escape death. Still, I warn others not to come – they won’t be safe or welcome here
  • Don’t come here. If you are afraid for your life and you have no place to go, don’t pick this country. It is not safe for you here any more.
  • If you try to cross our borders, people in military uniform called border patrol agents, will arrest you, throw you in a freezing cage and subject you to all kinds of abuses. These agents who don’t speak your language will sit you down and interrogate you. It won’t matter if you didn’t understand their questions, they will write whatever they want in dozens of forms, make you sign them, and use them against you later as they try to deport you.
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  • You might be lucky and be among the very few who are released from immigration jail and allowed to live in our country while your asylum application is pending. This won’t mean that your immigration case will be over though. Your immigration case will not be solved for years, and even though you have a case for staying in this country, the government will make you wait for years before you get a final answer.
  • Then, something unexpected will happen. You will get sick or you will get very depressed. Maybe you will be sad because you miss your family. Because of how sick or sad you were, you will sleep in one day, miss a shift at work, and you will be fired. You will run out of money and while looking for jobs, one day you will jump the turnstile to get on a train for a job interview. To you, it was worth the risk, but you miscalculated.
  • You will get arrested and charged with a crime for the first time in your life. You will swear never to make a mistake again but it will be too late.
  • But let’s say you don’t get deported. If for some reason, and against all the odds, you find an immigration judge that listens to your story and understands your life is at risk if you return to your country, you will be granted permission to stay here. Then, you finally may feel that something good came your way.
  • I know you have heard so many wonderful things about this place. I am sure that you heard that we were a “nation of immigrants,” correct? Well, that’s a thing of the past. We even changed the mission of the government agency handling asylum applications so it is clear to you. We are now “committed to protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.” What values, you ask? Well, whatever we pick to justify that you are not welcome here.
  • I know. I know you will come because I am a refugee living in the United States and I know what it means to escape death. I am so ashamed that we will do this to you and I am angry because my new country has betrayed me and every other person who believed in it. This place is not what it used to be. Just know that.
Javier E

Washington Monthly | The 'Deep State' Strikes Back-Against Torture - 0 views

washingtonmonthly.com/...e-strikes-back-against-torture

torture trump policy

shared by Javier E on 05 May 18 - No Cached
  • the tell-tale hallmarks of the deep state are the accumulation of personal wealth via the revolving door, influence-peddling, and the more genteel forms of corruption. Ironically, then, Trump’s self-dealing kitchen cabinet pals, the constant revelations of the administration’s ethics problems, and its blatant public-be-damned attitude are indicative of a deep state on steroids.
  • It would seem in this case that Trump overcame his preference for nominating grossly unqualified political groupies in favor of a career official in order to dog-whistle to the Republican base that Bush-era torture is back and oversight is extinct.
  • Haspel’s prospects are complicated, however, by the fact that 109 retired generals and admirals have written a letter in opposition to her confirmation.
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  • These 109 retired officers, like their active-duty counterparts—who are of course obliged to hold their tongues regarding the administration’s political choices—know one thing by heart: torture is proscribed by the Geneva Convention, the U.S. Code, and the military’s own Uniform Code.
  • Aside from the strictures of law, they have a very pragmatic reason for opposing those who would advocate or practice torture being placed in command positions in our government. An America that tortures its enemies would not have a moral or practical leg to stand on if in the future a hostile nation or group declares U.S. personnel to be “unlawful combatants” and waterboards them.
katyshannon

N.S.A. Contractor Arrested in Possible New Theft of Secrets - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-leak-booz-allen-hamilton.html

contractor arrested possible theft secrets new york times politics US history crisis obama snowden NSA

shared by katyshannon on 06 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The F.B.I. secretly arrested a former National Security Agency contractor in August and, according to law enforcement officials, is investigating whether he stole and disclosed highly classified computer code developed by the agency to hack into the networks of foreign governments.
  • The arrest raises the embarrassing prospect that for the second time in three years, a contractor for the consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton managed to steal highly damaging secret information while working for the N.S.A.
  • In 2013, Edward J. Snowden, who was also a Booz Allen contractor, took a vast trove of documents from the agency that were later passed to journalists
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  • The contractor was identified as Harold T. Martin III of Glen Burnie, Md., according to a criminal complaint filed in late August and unsealed Wednesday
  • Mr. Martin, who at the time of his arrest was working as a contractor for the Defense Department after leaving the N.S.A., was charged with theft of government property and the unauthorized removal or retention of classified documents.
  • two dozen F.B.I. agents wearing military-style uniforms and armed with long guns stormed the house, and later escorted Mr. Martin out in handcuffs.
  • F.B.I. discovered thousands of pages of documents and dozens of computers or other electronic devices at his home and in his car, a large amount of it classified. The digital media contained “many terabytes of information,” according to the documents
  • also discovered classified documents that had been posted online, including computer code, officials said. Some of the documents were produced in 2014.
  • authorities cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Martin leaked the information, passed them on to a third party or whether he simply downloaded them.
Javier E

Wyatt Detention Facility guard hits ICE protesters with pickup truck in Rhode Island - ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...truck-guard-rhode-island-wyatt

ICE police brutality protests crisis

shared by Javier E on 15 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • The protesters were sitting on the pavement to block staff from parking at a Rhode Island prison that works with Immigration and Customs Enforcement when a black pickup truck swerved toward them. The protesters shouted as the driver laid on the horn, and the truck briefly stopped. And then, the driver hit the gas.
  • In a viral video captured by bystanders, the protesters screamed and jumped out of the way. Several were struck, according to organizers of the Wednesday night demonstration at the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I. Some were treated at a hospital, though none were severely injured.
  • The driver, protesters say, was a correctional officer employed by the privately run facility who was wearing a badge and a uniform — an assertion backed up by video of the incident. Local police officers working at the protest did not intervene, Anthony said, and the driver eventually walked into the prison after other guards pepper-sprayed the protesters. “It’s obvious that there was an assault that took place,” Anthony said. “We’re not sure what we can do now.”
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  • The group included children and one protester in a wheelchair, Anthony said. Before the truck could get through to the parking lot, though, protesters gathered on the other side of the gate, shouting “Shame!” Moments later, other guards from the prison rushed across the street to surround the protesters and then fired pepper spray.
  • After the demonstrators fled the pepper spray, the driver parked in the lot and then walked into the prison, Anthony said. Although Central Falls police were on the scene, they did not get involved, Anthony said, and officers later refused to take statements from protesters. Organizers are discussing what legal recourse they might have now.
  • Anthony said the incident hardened her group’s resolve to continue protesting ICE and prisons that work with the federal agency. “If this is the way this correctional officer is behaving in public when people are recording, it’s not hard to imagine the behavior is much worse behind the walls in the facility where no one can see what is happening,” she said.
Javier E

Opinion | Trump Is Politicizing the Pandemic. Governors Can Fight Back. - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ernors-states-coronavirus.html

pandemic governor trump federalism crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • because nearly all states must balance their budgets, they couldn’t use deficit spending for bailouts. They can’t print money as the Federal Reserve can. And they still don’t have the resources to protect their residents — which makes it risky for them to anger Mr. Trump
  • In January, U.S. intelligence agencies warned that the Chinese government was minimizing the outbreak, but state and local officials didn’t have that information and so could not counter the president when he waved off the threat.
  • In February, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pledged but failed to put in place a system of widespread testing, states and counties didn’t have the capacity to act on their own. They had neither the centralized apparatus to conduct blanket testing nor the authority to waive regulations over such testing enforced by the Food and Drug Administration, another source of federal power.
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  • “The governors, locally, are going to be in command,” he said on the same day Mr. Pence spoke of federalism’s virtues. “We will be following them, and we hope they can do the job.”
  • The vacuum left by the federal government forced states to compete for scarce equipment like ventilators, driving up their price and benefiting shady middlemen while causing fatal delays.
  • Unwilling to take the blame for shutting down the economy when he thought there was little public support for the move, he sparred with governors like Mr. Cuomo and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan while also hiding behind them.
  • The next task was undertaking the vast production and allocation of masks, other protective gear and ventilators. Instead of centralizing this task, President Trump said from the White House lectern, “Governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work.” He added, “You know, we’re not a shipping clerk.”
  • he shifted to using the governors for partisan gain. Last Friday, Mr. Trump said they “should be appreciative, because you know what? When they’re not appreciative to me, they’re not appreciative to the Army Corps. They’re not appreciative to FEMA.” He then said he told Mr. Pence not to call those who were unappreciative.
  • he made his point: Governors who criticized the president would put their states at risk of getting short shrift from the federal government.
  • Colorado, Maine and Massachusetts, led by two Democrats and a Republican critic of the president’s pandemic policies, received only small fractions of what they asked for while Florida got the delivery it requested — twice over.
  • Last week, the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers wrote to the National Governors Association asking for uniform directives with a single definition of “essential” businesses that can operate.
  • Mayors can assist, as the U.S. Conference of Mayors did last week by surveying its members and telling the public that almost 90 percent of cities did not have enough test kits or masks and other protective equipment for health care workers.
  • the governors, with their direct responsibility for the welfare of their citizens, have urgent reason to band together and do better.
brookegoodman

How has Bismarck escaped most of the blame for the first world war? | World news | The ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-escaped-blame-first-world-war

politics

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Before we leave the centenary year of the outbreak of war in 1914 there’s someone we should talk about. Everyone now knows about the famous Christmas truce and football matches. But this was a war that was meant to have been “over by Christmas” 1914, not dragging on for four blood-soaked years. Plenty share blame for that, but one major culprit who seems to have been conspicuous by his absence in 2014 deserves a name check: Otto von Bismarck.
  • What Germans got instead was a militarised monarchical autocracy sustained by rampant nationalism and supported by intellectuals of all kinds – sociologist Max Weber later repented his enthusiasm – who should have known better. Parliament was marginalised, the parties manipulated against each other, and Bismarck threatened to resign whenever he was seriously challenged. It was outrageous and it ended in the ruins of Berlin of 1945.
  • After its humiliations at the hands of Napoleon, 19th century Prussia’s was – even more than under Frederick the Great – a conscious process of self-aggrandisement. Plenty resisted the trend and Bismarck’s “iron and blood” exposition of his realpolitik ambitions in 1862 nearly got him fired before he started. He was not charismatic, soft-spoken, even hesitant, but utterly dominant over his king and even the powerful military, which privately mocked his weakness for uniforms. Try this interview with his biographer Jonathan Steinberg for a flavour of him. “This man means what he says,” Benjamin Disraeli concluded. Scary.
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  • Why does Bismarck escape blame as the chief architect of 20th-century Germany – and thus the man who created a militarised political machine that only he could handle? He used to get plenty of blame, but historical memory does funny things and the enormity of Hitler’s regime (he was “Vienna’s revenge on Berlin” wrote AJP Taylor) seems to have blotted out the significant past. When I ask Germans now they sometimes say: “Well, Bismarck is remembered mostly for the social security system he set up,” one designed to neutralise the appeal of socialism, still recognisable and admired today.
  • In any case there is a sense in which the first world war was indeed over by Christmas 1914, only Bismarck’s autocratic heirs couldn’t accept it. Unlike in 1870 and again in 1940 the Germans had failed to take Paris in another lightning war that summer. At great cost in lives the armies of the despised French Third Republic – shovelling troops up from the capital in buses and taxis – and Britain’s “contemptible little army” (Kaiser Bill’s phrase) held the line at the first battle of the Marne, just 30 miles north-east of Paris.
  • Moltke was replaced as chief of the German general staff three days later, but the war went on: four Christmases, including one truce, to go. The winners would be the ones with the deepest pockets, not with the biggest Krupp gun or the silliest helmets.
Javier E

Sports provide a refuge, but they blurred our vision on coronavirus - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...blurred-our-vision-coronavirus

virus pandemic sports

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Moving forward, sports leagues must use their platforms and become leaders in changing indifferent attitudes. That should include Olympic organizers, too. And they must do so with an unprecedented level of uniformity.
  • “Stop saying it’s just flu or severe flu,” Inslee read. “Please come and see our intensive care units in northern Italy. People can’t breathe, and we don’t have anywhere to put them. You [expletive] idiots.”
Javier E

The cult of Trump vs. the call of public service - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...t-trump-vs-call-public-service

trump service gop Democratic party values

shared by Javier E on 29 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The disturbing contrast between the values and culture of the Democratic and Republican parties was on horrifying display on Tuesday.
  • On one hand, you had a lovely, personal endorsement of former vice president Joe Biden from 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, followed by a substantive discussion of the unequal impact of the coronavirus. After Biden introduced her as “a woman who should be president of the United States right now,” Clinton remarked, “I wish he were president right now, but I can’t wait until he is.
  • On display was empathetic, data-driven leadership. The friendly reminiscing of their time in the Obama administration reminded us of a time when graceful, decent and cordial people populated government.
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  • The governor concluded that “we’re fortunate where we have many, many heroes in our midst, not because they have medals on their uniforms but because they have honor in their souls and they have strength in their character and they have dignity and pride in themselves and because they show up every day.” As Cuomo himself might say, how beautiful is that? That’s empathetic, engaged leadership.
  • In the Republican sphere, on the other hand, President Trump and his enablers displayed some of the worst of the worst behavior. The Post reports: “Vice President Pence on Tuesday visited the Mayo Clinic and spoke with patients and staff while not wearing a face mask, an apparent violation of the medical center’s policy during the coronavirus pandemic.” Apparently, he was told about the policy and chose to disregard it. (“The Mayo Clinic confirmed Tuesday afternoon in a now-deleted tweet that it had communicated its masking policy to the vice president and his team.”)
  • Trump does not like the idea of wearing a mask so a sniveling sycophant probably wouldn’t want to be seen in one, either. It is difficult to fathom someone so weak in character as to endanger others because of his boss’s vanity.
  • We’re doing a job the likes of which nobody’s ever done,” he insisted as the millionth case was recorded. He seemed to invent an “expert” who told him the virus would not come here so as to increase his image as a far-sighted, super-prepared leader. In fact, he was the one who said when we had 15 cases that the number would go down “close to zero.”
  • There you have it: Democrats addressing an unprecedented domestic crisis with thoughtfulness, reliance on the very best data they can find and human empathy and decency. Republicans engaging in reckless conduct, base dishonesty and self-congratulation
knudsenlu

Lindsey Graham's 'Religious War' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...544763

graham religion trump politics US

shared by knudsenlu on 02 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • “The one thing I like about President Trump, he understands that we’re in a religious war,”
  • And Trump is—you guessed it—“right to slow down who comes into this country.”
  • Graham’s comments illustrate one of the most fascinating dynamics of the Trump era: Trump exposes the character of the politicians around him
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  • GOP members of Congress who consider Trump an ignorant, narcissistic, lying, authoritarian bully (and according to Bob Corker, many do) face a choice between their principles and their jobs.
  • In May 2016, Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake of The Washington Post enumerated “The 10 Republicans who hate Donald Trump the most.” Graham came in number one.
  • Graham has become, as Michael Shear and Sheryl Gay Stolberg put it in The New York Times, the “Senate’s Trump whisperer.
  • Graham admitted in another interview, “I do better in South Carolina when I’m seen as helping him, ‘cause he’s popular.”
  • “if I don’t stand up for” the religious freedoms of Muslims, “you won’t stand up for mine.”
  • In September 2015, when Ben Carson said he could never support a Muslim for president, Graham told him “to apologize to American Muslims” for failing to recognize that “America is an idea, not owned by a particular religion.”
  • That December, when Trump responded to the attacks in San Bernardino by proposing a moratorium on Muslim immigration, Graham responded ferociously. “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” Graham told CNN. “He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for. ... He’s the ISIL man of the year.”
  • as he and Trump have grown chummier, Graham’s tone has changed. In his Fox interview, Graham twice applauded Trump for recognizing “that we’re in a religious war.” In other words, he applauded Trump for doing exactly the thing Graham has in the past denounced him for doing: defining the war against ISIS as a war against Islam
  • Graham later explained that, in his mind, this “religious war” is against not Islam per se but merely “a sect in Islam.” But there’s plenty of evidence that Trump doesn’t make such subtle distinctions. Trump said during the campaign, after all, that, “Islam hates us.” He called for a moratorium on all Muslim immigration
  • Graham is less public about a lot of the issues on which he once opposed Trump. And, as a result, American Muslims seem to have lost one of the few Republicans willing to defend their rights just when they need him most.
Javier E

Everybody lies: how Google search reveals our darkest secrets | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...crets-seth-stephens-davidowitz

google search social media research statistics

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Many people underreport embarrassing behaviours and thoughts on surveys. They want to look good, even though most surveys are anonymous. This is called social desirability bias.
  • An important paper in 1950 provided powerful evidence of how surveys can fall victim to such bias. Researchers collected data, from official sources, on the residents of Denver: what percentage of them voted, gave to charity, and owned a library card. They then surveyed the residents to see if the percentages would match. The results were, at the time, shocking. What the residents reported to the surveys was very different from the data the researchers had gathered
  • Then there’s that odd habit we sometimes have of lying to ourselves. Lying to oneself may explain why so many people say they are above average. How big is this problem? More than 40% of one company’s engineers said they are in the top 5%. More than 90% of college professors say they do above-average work. One-quarter of high school seniors think they are in the top 1% in their ability to get along with other people. If you are deluding yourself, you can’t be honest in a survey.
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  • on sensitive topics, every survey method will elicit substantial misreporting. People have no incentive to tell surveys the truth.
  • How, therefore, can we learn what our fellow humans are really thinking and doing? Big data
  • Think of Google searches. Remember the conditions that make people more honest. Online? Check. Alone? Check. No person administering a survey? Check.
  • I am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche.
  • How many American men are gay? This is a regular question in sexuality research. Yet it has been among the toughest questions for social scientists to answer. Psychologists no longer believe Alfred Kinsey’s famous estimate – based on surveys that oversampled prisoners and prostitutes – that 10% of American men are gay. Representative surveys now tell us about 2% to 3% are
  • About 2.5% of male Facebook users who list a gender of interest say they are interested in men; that corresponds roughly with what the surveys indicate.
  • There is clearly some mobility – from Oklahoma City to San Francisco, for example. But I estimate that men moving to someplace more open-minded can explain less than half of the difference in the openly gay population in tolerant versus intolerant states.
  • If mobility cannot fully explain why some states have so many more openly gay men, the closet must be playing a big role. Which brings us back to Google
  • about 5% of male porn searches are for gay-male porn. Overall, there are more gay porn searches in tolerant states compared with intolerant states.
  • one consequence of my estimate is clear: an awful lot of men in the United States, particularly in intolerant states, are still in the closet. They don’t reveal their sexual preferences on Facebook. They don’t admit it on surveys. And, in many cases, they may even be married to women.
  • It turns out that wives suspect their husbands of being gay rather frequently. They demonstrate that suspicion in the surprisingly common search: “Is my husband gay?” The word “gay” is 10% more likely to complete searches that begin “Is my husband...” than the second-place word, “cheating”. It is eight times more common than “an alcoholic” and 10 times more common than “depressed”.
  • On Google, there are 16 times more complaints about a spouse not wanting sex than about a married partner not being willing to talk. There are five-and-a-half times more complaints about an unmarried partner not wanting sex than an unmarried partner refusing to text back.
  • Google data also suggests a reason people may be avoiding sex so frequently: enormous anxiety, with much of it misplaced. Start with men’s anxieties. It isn’t news that men worry about how well endowed they are, but the degree of this worry is rather profound. Men Google more questions about their sexual organ than any other body par
  • Men conduct more searches for how to make their penises bigger than how to tune a guitar, make an omelette, or change a tyre. Men’s top Googled concern about steroids isn’t whether they may damage their health but whether taking them might diminish the size of their penis. Men’s top Googled question related to how their body or mind would change as they aged was whether their penis would get smaller.
  • Do women care about penis size? Rarely, according to Google searches. For every search women make about a partner’s phallus, men make roughly 170 searches about their own
  • Men’s second most common sex question is how to make their sexual encounters longer. Once again, the insecurities of men do not appear to match the concerns of women. There are roughly the same number of searches asking how to make a boyfriend climax more quickly as climax more slowly.
  • while it’s true that overall interest in personal appearance skews female, it’s not as lopsided as stereotypes would suggest. According to my analysis of Google AdWords, which measures the websites people visit, interest in beauty and fitness is 42% male, weight loss is 33% male, and cosmetic surgery is 39% male
  • you could call it progress that many people today feel they will be judged if they admit they judge other people based on their ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. But many Americans still do. You can see this on Google
  • African Americans are the only group that faces a “rude” stereotype
  • Nearly every group is a victim of a “stupid” stereotype; the only two that are not: Jews and Muslims.
  • The “evil” stereotype is applied to Jews, Muslims, and gay people but not black people, Mexicans, Asians, and Christians.
  • Muslims are the only group stereotyped as terrorists.
  • minutes after the media first reported one of the shooters’ Muslim-sounding names, a disturbing number of Californians decided what they wanted to do with Muslims: kill them. The top Google search in California with the word “Muslims” in it at the time was “kill Muslims”
  • In the days following the San Bernardino attack, for every American concerned with “Islamophobia”, another was searching for “kill Muslims”. While hate searches were approximately 20% of all searches about Muslims before the attack, more than half of all search volume about Muslims became hateful in the hours that followed it. And this minute-by-minute search data can tell us how difficult it can be to calm this rage.
  • Obama’s speech, in other words, was judged a major success. But was it?
  • In his speech, the president said: “It is the responsibility of all Americans – of every faith – to reject discrimination.” But searches calling Muslims “terrorists”, “bad”, “violent”, and “evil” doubled during and shortly after the speech.
  • Obama also said: “It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country.” But negative searches about Syrian refugees, a mostly Muslim group then desperately looking for a safe haven, rose 60%, while searches asking how to help Syrian refugees dropped 35%
  • Obama asked Americans to “not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear”. Yet searches for “kill Muslims” tripled during his speech. In fact, just about every negative search we could think to test regarding Muslims shot up during and after Obama’s speech, and just about every positive search we could think to test declined.
  • new data from the internet, offering digital truth serum, suggested that the speech actually backfired in its main goal. Instead of calming the angry mob, as everybody thought he was doing, the internet data tells us that Obama actually inflamed it.
  • Searches for “nigger jokes” are 17 times more common than searches for “kike jokes”, “gook jokes”, “spic jokes”, “chink jokes”, and “fag jokes” combined. When are these searches most common? Whenever African Americans are in the news.
  • Any theory of racism has to explain a big puzzle in America. On the one hand, the overwhelming majority of black Americans think they suffer from prejudice – and they have ample evidence of discrimination in police stops, job interviews, and jury decisions. On the other hand, very few white Americans will admit to being racist. The dominant explanation among political scientists recently has been that this is due, in large part, to widespread implicit prejudice. White Americans may mean well, this theory goes, but they have a subconscious bias, which influences their treatment of black Americans.
  • There is, though, an alternative explanation for the discrimination that African Americans feel and whites deny: hidden explicit racism. Suppose there is a reasonably widespread conscious racism of which people are very much aware but to which they won’t confess – certainly not in a survey
  • That’s what the search data seems to be saying.
  • this gender bias is not grounded in reality. About 28% of girls are overweight, while 35% of boys are. Even though scales measure more overweight boys than girls, parents see – or worry about – overweight girls much more frequently than overweight boys. Parents are also one-and-a-half times more likely to ask whether their daughter is beautiful than whether their son is handsome.
  • And then there is the phenomenon of Donald Trump’s candidacy. When Nate Silver, the polling guru, looked for the geographic variable that correlated most strongly with support in the 2016 Republican primary for Trump, he found it in the map of racism I had developed.
  • The primary explanation for discrimination against African Americans today is not the fact that the people who agree to participate in lab experiments make subconscious associations between negative words and black people; it is the fact that millions of white Americans continue to do things like search for “nigger jokes”
  • , I was able to use Google searches to find evidence of implicit prejudice against another segment of the population: young girls. And who, might you ask, would be harbouring bias against girls? Their parents.
  • Prior to the Google data, we didn’t have a convincing measure of this virulent animus. Now we do. We are, therefore, in a position to see what it explains. It explains why Obama’s vote totals in 2008 and 2012 were depressed in many regions. It also correlates with the black-white wage gap, as a team of economists recently reported. The areas that I had found make the most racist searches underpay black people.
  • Perhaps young boys are more likely than young girls to use big words or show objective signs of giftedness? Nope. If anything, it’s the opposite. At young ages, girls have consistently been shown to have larger vocabularies and use more complex sentences. In American schools, girls are 9% more likely than boys to be in gifted programmes. Despite all this, parents looking around the dinner table appear to see more gifted boys than girls.
  • What then are parents’ overriding concerns regarding their daughters? Primarily, anything related to appearance.
  • Parents are about twice as likely to ask how to get their daughters to lose weight as they are to ask how to get their sons to do the same
  • Parents are two-and-a-half times more likely to ask “Is my son gifted?” than “Is my daughter gifted?”
  • I did not find a significant relationship between any of these biases and the political or cultural makeup of a state. It would seem this bias against girls is more widespread and deeply ingrained than we’d care to believe.
  • Let’s return to Obama’s speech about Islamophobia. Recall that every time he argued that people should respect Muslims more, the people he was trying to reach became more enraged. Google searches, however, reveal that there was one line that did trigger the type of response Obama might have wanted. He said: “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbours, our co-workers, our sports heroes and, yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defence of our country.”
  • When we lecture angry people, the search data implies that their fury can grow. But subtly provoking people’s curiosity, giving new information, and offering new images of the group that is stoking their rage may turn their thoughts in different, more positive directions.
  • What’s your background?I’d describe myself as a data scientist, but my PhD is in economics. When I was doing my PhD, in 2012, I found this tool called Google Trends that tells you what people are searching, and where, and I became obsessed with it.
  • What would your search records reveal about you?They could definitely tell I’m a hypochondriac because I’m waking up in the middle of the night doing Google searches about my health. There are definitely things about me that you could figure out. When making claims about a topic, it’s better to do it on aggregate, but I think you can figure out a lot, if not everything, about an individual by what they’re searching on Google.
  • All this data I’m talking about is public
  • Does it change your view of human nature? Are we darker and stranger creatures than you realised?Yeah. I think I had a dark view of human nature to begin with, and I think now it’s gotten even darker. I think the degree to which people are self-absorbed is pretty shocking
  • When Trump became president, all my friends said how anxious they were, they couldn’t sleep because they’re so concerned about immigrants and the Muslim ban. But from the data you can see that in liberal parts of the country there wasn’t a rise in anxiety when Trump was elected. When people were waking up at 3am in a cold sweat, their searches were about their job, their health, their relationship – they’re not concerned about the Muslim ban or global warming.
  • Was the Google search data telling you that Trump was going to win?I did see that Trump was going to win. You saw clearly that African American turnout was going to be way down, because in cities with 95% black people there was a collapse in searches for voting information. That was a big reason Hillary Clinton did so much worse than the polls suggested.
g-dragon

The Terror - History of the French Revolution - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/ion-the-terror-1793-94-1221883

french revolution terror

shared by g-dragon on 19 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • In July 1793, the revolution was at its lowest ebb. Enemy forces were advancing over French soil, British ships hovered near French ports hoping to link up with rebels, the Vendée had become a region of open rebellion, and Federalist revolts were frequent.
  • thousands of provincial rebels operating in the capital ready to strike down the leaders of the revolution in droves.
  • Meanwhile, power struggles between sansculottes and their enemies had begun to erupt in many sections of Paris. The whole country was unfolding into a civil war. 
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  • While the Committee of Public Safety wasn't an executive government—on August 1st, 1793, the Convention refused a motion calling for it to become the provisional government; it was the closest France had to anyone being in overall charge, and it moved to meet the challenge with utter ruthlessness.
  • It also presided over the bloodiest period of the revolution: The Terror.
  • many French citizens
  • only the extreme use of the guillotine against traitors, suspects, and counter-revolutionaries would solve the country's problems.
  • They felt terror was necessary—not figurative terror, not a posture, but actual government rule through terror. 
  • The Convention deputies increasingly heeded these calls.
  • a demonstration for more wages and bread was quickly turned to the advantage of those calling for terror
  • Convention agreed, and in addition voted to finally organize the revolutionary armies people had agitated for over previous months to march against the hoarders and unpatriotic members of the countryside
  • The sansculottes had once again forced their wishes onto and through the Convention; terror was now in force.
  • Law of Suspects was introduced allowing for the arrest of anyone whose conduct suggested they were supporters of tyranny or federalism, a law which could be easily twisted to affect just about everyone in the nation.
  • the laws passed during the Terror went beyond simply tackling the various crises.
  • The Bocquier Law of December 19th, 1793 provided a system of compulsory and free state education for all children aged 6 – 13
  • universal system of metric weights and measurements was introduced
  • Homeless children also became a state responsibility, and people born out of wedlock were given full inheritance rights.
  • an attempt to end poverty was made by using ‘suspects’ property to aid the poor.
  • However, it is the executions for which the Terror is so infamous
  • The Committee of Public Safety's counter-offensive took the terror deep into the heart of the Vendée.
  • However, this early phase of the terror was not, as legend recalls, aimed at nobles, who made up only 9% of the victims; clergy were 7%. Most executions occurred in Federalist areas after the army had regained control and some loyal areas escaped largely unscathed. It was normal, everyday people, killing masses of other normal, everyday people. It was civil war, not class.
  • During the Terror, deputies on mission began attacking the symbols of Catholicism: smashing images, vandalizing buildings, and burning vestments.
  • The Committee of Public Safety grew concerned about the counter-productive effects, especially Robespierre who believed that faith was vital to order. He spoke out and even got the Convention to restate their commitment to religious freedom, but it was too late. Dechristianization flourished across the nation, churches closed and 20,000 priests were pressured into renouncing their position.
  • 14 Frimaire. This law was designed to give the Committee of Public Safety even more control over the whole of France by providing a structured 'chain of authority' under the revolutionary government and to keep everything highly centralized. The Committee was now the supreme executive and no body further down the chain was supposed to alter the decrees in any way
  • the law of 14 Frimaire aimed to institute a uniform administration with no resistance, the opposite of that to the constitution of 1791
  • It marked the end of the first phase of the terror
  • Robespierre, who had argued against dechristianization, had tried to save Marie Antoinette from the guillotine
  • He wanted a 'cleansing' of the country and committee and he outlined his idea for a republic of virtue while denouncing those he deemed non virtuous, many of whom, including Danton, went to the Guillotine.
  • began a new phase in the Terror, where people could be executed for what they might do, not had done, or simply because they failed to meet Robespierre's new moral standard, his utopia of murder.
  • The Republic of Virtue concentrated power at the Centre, around Robespierre
  • The Terror was now almost class based rather than against counter-revolutionaries.
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