Yes, but...
Dec. 3rd, 2019 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatSometimes I think my default setting is "yes, but what about this.." I am doomed to question everything. Today, I was doing it constantly from the moment the morning started before I had gotten my first cup of tea and oatmeal. One of my managers was informing me that I had to choose a number for the solicitation, and get a contract number generated once it was solicited. This went against everything I knew, I argued until I was hoarse, then gave up and chose a number for the solicitation and played along.
1. Saw this on my correspondence list tonight and I find my brain playing with it but not quite sure what to make of it.
"that you feel hurt - even deeply, profoundly hurt - does not necessarily mean that someone else has done something wrong." That was about fandom, then.
A decade later, the pernicious assumption that if-I-feel-bad-someone-must-have-done-something-wrong seems to be becoming ever more prevalent in every corner of our society. This is very, very disturbing.
Which in turn is in regards to...
* What is to be done about the problem of creepy men
and
* Fandom kerfuffles over differing reactions to stories.
I agree and disagree with the statement.
See, here's the thing -- the world is painful. Sometimes it just hurts to walk outside and get on the subway. Let's face it, in the immortal words of Alan Arkin, Life is Pain.
We may well be social creatures but we are also extremely selfish ones. Part of this is just basic evolutionary design. The socialization we seek is for selfish ends -- in part for self-preservation, like it or not we require each other and other creatures to survive.
That's not to say we can't be selfless at times or kind -- but that usually happens when we forget about ourselves or our wants or desires. When the self or ego disappears.
I was thinking back on my childhood and friendships. How I'd been hurt by various people. They didn't hurt me out of some cruel sadistic design, but merely because it happened to further their own ends. I was an obstacle in their way or in the way of what they wanted. It wasn't personal. It had nothing to do with me.
Most slights aren't personal. And most of the time, we, ourselves, are never seen -- not really, instead the other person is projecting something onto us and reacting to that, whether it be a storyline in their head, someone who slighted them, a desire, a fear...it doesn't matter.
Last night I did a kindness mediation. And what struck me about it -- was that the monk guiding the meditation (it's on an app) stated that kindness isn't as easy as it sounds. Because often in order to be kind we have to give up something of ourselves, some desire, want, or thought-pattern. We have to sacrifice something. Whether it be a seat on the subway, time to help someone pull a baby carriage up the steps, or to stand aside while someone enters a train and wait for the next one, or giving up a place in line....sometimes, it's as simple as smiling when we don't feel like smiling, or laughing at a joke that isn't funny. Or choosing to say hello to someone we can't stand.
I think, often I feel hurt or slighted, it is because I am stuck in myself, my point of view. The car that splashed me-- didn't do it on purpose, the person may be in a rush to get a sick child to a doctor or was worried about something that happened that day. Or the co-worker who gave me a nasty look, may not have been thinking of me at all -- but rather the contractor they just spent an hour arguing with over the phone until they wanted to throw the phone across the room.
Taking this further, the woman who turns away from the creepy man on the street may have been raped by a man who looked like him two years earlier. It's not about him, it's about her. Or maybe she's had bad experiences with similar men. Or she had a bad day and just doesn't want to be around anyone. It's not personal.
Or in fandom...it often got really personal when we fought over characters. It still does. I'm lurking in one fandom and participating in another. In both -- people get really upset when a favorite character is slighted, they take it personally. And really, who am I to judge? I remember all too clearly getting furious when my favorite characters got slighted on boards. "X is obviously a rapist, and since you like him, you are a rape sympathizer!" Which is illogical. Because what is obvious to one viewer isn't to another. And the world isn't quite that black and white, unfortunately. Also the poster who posted it -- was projecting their own trauma onto me. At that time, I can't say I reacted kindly. Instead I went after their favorite character and with precision and snarky wit decimated their fav and them. It did not end well. The kinder response and the brighter one, would have been to walk away.
But I took it personally and felt hurt. So, lashed out.
Emotion often clouds judgement. So does thought. I hope that I would have reacted better if it happened now. I think so.
Regarding the article about creepy men? While it is wrong to ostracize someone based on their looks -- unfortunately, men are privileged in our society. And our society tends to judge people based primarily on the aesethtic or looks. We're not trained to look much deeper or so I've discovered. I do. Because I've learned that looks can be deceiving. But I admittedly have to work at it at times. What I like about venues such as Dream Width and the fan boards, is I got to get to know people without that standing in the way. Often, when I met them in person they weren't at all what I saw in my head -- any more than I was what they saw in theirs. I've had people mistake me for a man -- although I think of shadowkat as a female avatar, many do not.
And we all have our own ingrained prejudices based on experience -- which in some respects I think is something we all need to question more than we do. Question our experiences and more importantly our memories of them. Not to mention our perceptions. Our minds lie to us. Make up stories. Twist facts. Embellish. And create storylines to entertain itself. I've learned through meditating how to ignore a lot of these storylines to let them float on by. Not all, of course. But a busy mind isn't necessarily a good thing.
Because women are more likely than men to experience physical and sexual threat in their daily lives, they are also more likely to judge others (usually men) to be creepy. Judgments of creepiness, however, are not necessarily reliable.
Conventional wisdom tells us to ‘trust our gut’, but researchers say that our gut is concerned more with regulating the boundaries of social mores than keeping us safe. In a 2017 Canadian study, female undergraduates were shown images of Caucasian male faces from three groups: emotionally neutral faces taken from an image bank; images judged ‘creepy’ in a pilot study; and images of criminals from America’s Most Wanted. They were then asked to rate the faces according to creepiness, trustworthiness and attractiveness. Across all three groups, there was a strong correlation between faces that participants considered trustworthy and attractive, and in some instances general attractiveness was negatively correlated with judgments of creepiness. Further, the faces taken from America’s Most Wanted were not rated as significantly more creepy than the neutral group. Participants made their creepiness assessments in seconds, and reported high degrees of confidence in their judgments.
Participants thought that, rather than describing behaviours, creepiness adhered to certain kinds of people and occupations. This is important.
Unkempt and dirty men, men with abnormal facial features, and men between the ages of 31-50 were all very likely to be rated creepy. Furthermore, creepiness was positively correlated both with the belief that the person held a sexual interest in the person making the social judgment, and with individuals who engaged in non-normative behaviours. This finding aligns with the McAndrew and Koehnke study, in which clowns, sex-shop owners and those interested in taxidermy were among the creepiest kinds of people.
So rather than reliably detecting danger, our internal ‘spidey sense’ often signals social difference or otherness. When we judge a situation or person creepy, we participate in shunning and social ostracism. Creepiness can prevent us from responding to the odd, the new or the peculiar with curiosity, interest and generosity of spirit.
The thing of it is -- men are scary. Particularly if you are four or five foot tall, small boned, and have breasts, a nice ass, and wear pretty things. I'm close to six foot, big boned, have breasts, no ass to speak of, and rarely wear pretty things -- and I find men scary at times, and I intimidate most of them. I live in an area in which 90% of my neighbors barely reach my shoulder in height. There are men and women in my area that come to my navel. I could step on them. It's astonishing to me. But men can and often are in certain situations - scary.
Why?
Ah. Because a man can beat and rape a woman in our country and get away with it.
Up until recently many of the law books had women listed as property. It is and always has been extremely difficult to prove rape, sexual harrassement, sexual violations, molestation. White men run productive and lucrative human trafficing rings where women are sold for sex to politicians and royalty and celebrities who look the other way. We have a President who has groped, manhandled, fondled, slurred, and most likely raped women without consequence.
Think about that for a minute.
Yes, men are scary.
But then ...People are scary. The world is scary.
The trick, sometimes I think, is not to think about it all too much and just be. And always be aware but for the grace of God go I.
So, you see? Yes, but...and I don't know. After writing that all out...I'm still not sure what I think about the statements above.
2. Can't Part with Your DVDs? You Aren't Alone
It’s not just cassettes. Vinyl has been exhumed in the past decade. Old red phone boxes in the UK are being refurbished to nostalgic effect. Tech companies are investing in “dumb phones” that only call and text. All the while, libraries of DVDs and CDs are still getting dragged from apartment to apartment, even when their players are starting to disappear from houses and cars.
This love of old stuff is growing, even as we throw out devices faster than ever. Electronic waste is the fastest-growing waste stream globally, and is expected to grow further, according to a 2017 United Nations report. Planned obsolescence — where companies design products to last only a few years, driving customers to toss devices and buy the latest model — encourages a culture of disposability. And yet, more and more objects are becoming magnets for nostalgia.
But why bring back something like the Walkman that’s generally assumed to be worse than its technological descendants? Paradoxically, it might be related to the sleekness of a software-dominated culture that has become increasingly anti-thing. As trends bend toward a sort of Marie-Kondo-style minimalism and things that used to be physical are increasingly digitized, some are yearning for yesterday’s junk. Ben Marks, general manager of Collectors’ Weekly, said, “I think there’s an interest in tangible goods in a way that there hadn’t been before we had so many digital goods.”
I admit it, I have three bags full of DVDs and CDS in my closet, and still more DVD's in my coffee table. But I no longer have a DVD player or a CD player. It's hilarious. I can't play the damn things, yet I still own them. At least the people in the article above can play them.
3. Latin Dictionary’s Journey: A to Zythum in 125 Years (and Counting)
Researchers in Germany have been working on the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae since the 1890s. They hope to finish in 2050, but that might be optimistic.
MUNICH — When German researchers began working on a new Latin dictionary in the 1890s, they thought they might finish in 15 or 20 years.
In the 125 years since, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (T.L.L.) has seen the fall of an empire, two world wars and the division and reunification of Germany. In the meantime, they are up to the letter R.
This is not for lack of effort. Most dictionaries focus on the most prominent or recent meaning of a word; this one aims to show every single way anyone ever used it, from the earliest Latin inscriptions in the sixth century B.C. to around A.D. 600. The dictionary’s founder, Eduard Wölfflin, who died in 1908, described entries in the T.L.L. not as definitions, but “biographies” of words.
The first entry, for the letter A, was published in 1900. The T.L.L. is expected to reach its final word — “zythum,” an Egyptian beer — by 2050. A scholarly project of painstaking exactness and glacial speed, it has so far produced 18 volumes of huge pages with tiny text, the collective work of nearly 400 scholars, many of them long since dead. The letters Q and N were set aside, because they begin too many difficult words, so researchers will have to go back and work on those, too.
“Its scale is prodigious,” David Butterfield, a senior lecturer in Classics at Cambridge, said in an email, adding that when the first publication appeared in 1900, “it did not go unnoticed that the word closing that installment was ‘absurdus.’”
It’s a monumental effort aimed at a small group of classicists, for whom the ability to understand every way a word was used is important not only for reading literature, but also understanding language and history.
But why Latin?
4. Religion is about emotion regulation and it's very good at it
[I don't know...maybe? I'm admittedly biased. I don't much like religion. Spirituality yes. Religion - I have on-going issues with.]
While Freud and Durkheim were right about the important functions of religion, its true value lies in its therapeutic power, particularly its power to manage our emotions. How we feel is as important to our survival as how we think. Our species comes equipped with adaptive emotions, such as fear, rage, lust and so on: religion was (and is) the cultural system that dials these feelings and behaviours up or down. We see this clearly if we look at mainstream religion, rather than the deleterious forms of extremism. Mainstream religion reduces anxiety, stress and depression. It provides existential meaning and hope. It focuses aggression and fear against enemies. It domesticates lust, and it strengthens filial connections. Through story, it trains feelings of empathy and compassion for others. And it provides consolation for suffering.
Emotional therapy is the animating heart of religion. Social bonding happens not only when we agree to worship the same totems, but when we feel affection for each other. An affective community of mutual care emerges when groups share rituals, liturgy, song, dance, eating, grieving, comforting, tales of saints and heroes, hardships such as fasting and sacrifice. Theological beliefs are bloodless abstractions by comparison.
Emotional management is important because life is hard. The Buddha said: ‘All life is suffering’ and most of us past a certain age can only agree. Religion evolved to handle what I call the ‘vulnerability problem’. When we’re sick, we go to the doctor, not the priest. But when our child dies, or we lose our home in a fire, or we’re diagnosed with Stage-4 cancer, then religion is helpful because it provides some relief and some strength. It also gives us something to do, when there’s nothing we can do.
***
Consider how religion helps people after a death. Social mammals who have suffered separation distress are restored to health by touch, collective meals and grooming. Human grieving customs involve these same soothing prosocial mechanisms. We comfort-touch and embrace a person who has lost a loved one. Our bodies give ancient comfort directly to the grieving body. We provide the bereaved with food and drink, and we break bread with them (think of the Jewish tradition of shiva, or the visitation tradition of wakes in many cultures). We share stories about the loved one, and help the bereaved reframe their pain in larger optimistic narratives. Even music, in the form of consoling melodies and collective singing, helps to express shared sorrow and also transforms it from an unbearable and lonely experience to a bearable communal one. Social involvement from the community after a death can act as an antidepressant, boosting adaptive emotional changes in the bereaved.
Religion also helps to manage sorrow with something I’ll call ‘existential shaping’ or more precisely ‘existential debt’. It is common for Westerners to think of themselves as individuals first and as members of a community second, but our ideology of the lone protagonist fulfilling an individual destiny is more fiction than fact. Losing someone reminds us of our dependence on others and our deep vulnerability, and at such moments religion turns us toward the web of relations rather than away from it. Long after your parents have died, for example, religion helps you memorialise them and acknowledge your existential debt to them. Formalising the memory of the dead person, through funerary rites, or tomb-sweeping (Qingming) festivals in Asia, or the Day of the Dead in Mexico, or annual honorary masses in Catholicism, is important because it keeps reminding us, even through the sorrow, of the meaningful influence of these deceased loved ones. This is not a self-deception about the unreality of death, but an artful way of learning to live with it. The grief becomes transformed in the sincere acknowledgment of the value of the loved one, and religious rituals help people to set aside time and mental space for that acknowledgment.
An emotion such as grief has many ingredients. The physiological arousal of grief is accompanied by cognitive evaluations: ‘I will never see my friend again’; ‘I could have done something to prevent this’; ‘She was the love of my life’; and so on. Religions try to give the bereaved an alternative appraisal that reframes their tragedy as something more than just misery. Emotional appraisals are proactive, according to the psychologists Phoebe Ellsworth at the University of Michigan and Klaus Scherer at the University of Geneva, going beyond the immediate disaster to envision the possible solutions or responses. This is called ‘secondary appraisal’. After the primary appraisal (‘This is very sad’), the secondary appraisal assesses our ability to deal with the situation: ‘This is too much for me’ – or, positively: ‘I will survive this.’ Part of our ability to cope with suffering is our sense of power or agency: more power generally means better coping ability. If I acknowledge my own limitations when faced with unavoidable loss, but I feel that a powerful ally, God, is part of my agency or power, then I can be more resilient.
Because religious actions are often accompanied by magical thinking or supernatural beliefs, Christopher Hitchens argued in God Is not Great (2007) that religion is ‘false consolation’. Many critics of religion echo his condemnation. But there is no such thing as false consolation. Hitchens and fellow critics are making a category mistake, like saying: ‘The colour green is sleepy.’ Consolation or comfort is a feeling, and it can be weak or strong, but it can’t be false or true. You can be false in your judgment of why you’re feeling better, but feeling better is neither true nor false. True and false applies only if we’re evaluating whether our propositions correspond with reality. And no doubt many factual claims of religion are false in that way – the world was not created in six days.
5. IT's a Miracle - Helsinki's Radical Solution to Homelessness
Finland is the only EU country where homelessness is falling. Its secret? Giving people homes as soon as they need them – unconditionally.
It's probably worth keeping in mind that Finland's population is the State of New York, if that. So their homeless population to start out with was way below New York City or Istanbul or London's.
And considering how cold it is up there -- I'd hope they would put people in homes, or they'd be dead.
Sorry, I don't think it is productive to compare what a country that is so incredibly different in size, population, climate, politics, demographical makeup, and history is doing to ours or others. It's akin comparing growing apples to well grapefruit or pineapple. It has to be different, you can't grow an apple and a pineapple the same way. Or say comparing cooking steak to pork, or chicken to duck.
Yet people keep doing it. My brother once told me we should have the same political electoral system as Ireland, and I thought, eh...but Ireland has a smaller population and isn't a huge continent with 50 different state governments, and constitutions plus a Federal one.
6. The Self Help Movement That is Upending American Christianity
(Yes, but..see #1, where I talk about how human beings are inherently self-centered and selfish, this article appears to well...continue to push that thesis, albeit unintentionally. The self-help movement doesn't appear to see how selfish it truly is and why that is problematic. The problem with the self-help movement is ..it's a wee bit too centered on rediscovering the self as if the self was an actual entity that could be lost. Sorry, I've embraced Buddhism a little. Western culture focuses more finding the self and analyzing it to death, Eastern culture focuses more on letting go of the notion of self entirely through meditation and yoga.)
While the Enneagram is sometimes reduced to a “personality test” like the (largely discredited) Myers-Briggs system, that’s not quite accurate. For one thing, there is no test to conclusively determine one’s dominant type in Enneagram. (Online tests abound, but are largely considered untrustworthy by experts.) For another, types are determined by motivations, not actions, so you cannot tell a person’s type by how they behave. A person dominant in Type One might stay in an unfulfilling relationship because they believe it’s the right thing to do, for example, while a person dominant in Type Four might fear they could never find another partner who would accept them with their flaws.
But perhaps most importantly, the function of the Enneagram is not to prescribe a set of traits that can be used to fashion or describe an identity — as with Myers-Briggs and many other personality-typing systems. With the Enneagram, the personality is just a set of coping mechanisms built around a person’s true self. To find one’s type is not the end point, but the beginning of a journey of self-discovery.
This approach to thinking about oneself is a striking departure from the rigid moralism that draws stark lines between “good” and “bad” that Christians such as Case have been steeped in. It allows — even encourages — worshippers to embrace their whole selves.
To practice the Enneagram is to lovingly engage with one’s flaws, following them as breadcrumbs to rediscovering the best in you. Practitioners told me about their “shadow” selves — their imperfections as the shadow of their goodness, rather than signs of an intrinsic badness: “Your shadow is the shadow of a gift that you hold that is good, that was inherently good from the beginning,” says Stephanie Spencer, a Christian and Enneagram coach who has been practicing the system since 2015. “And you’re trying to get back to that goodness.”
[So, we enter the cult of self?]
1. Saw this on my correspondence list tonight and I find my brain playing with it but not quite sure what to make of it.
"that you feel hurt - even deeply, profoundly hurt - does not necessarily mean that someone else has done something wrong." That was about fandom, then.
A decade later, the pernicious assumption that if-I-feel-bad-someone-must-have-done-something-wrong seems to be becoming ever more prevalent in every corner of our society. This is very, very disturbing.
Which in turn is in regards to...
* What is to be done about the problem of creepy men
and
* Fandom kerfuffles over differing reactions to stories.
I agree and disagree with the statement.
See, here's the thing -- the world is painful. Sometimes it just hurts to walk outside and get on the subway. Let's face it, in the immortal words of Alan Arkin, Life is Pain.
We may well be social creatures but we are also extremely selfish ones. Part of this is just basic evolutionary design. The socialization we seek is for selfish ends -- in part for self-preservation, like it or not we require each other and other creatures to survive.
That's not to say we can't be selfless at times or kind -- but that usually happens when we forget about ourselves or our wants or desires. When the self or ego disappears.
I was thinking back on my childhood and friendships. How I'd been hurt by various people. They didn't hurt me out of some cruel sadistic design, but merely because it happened to further their own ends. I was an obstacle in their way or in the way of what they wanted. It wasn't personal. It had nothing to do with me.
Most slights aren't personal. And most of the time, we, ourselves, are never seen -- not really, instead the other person is projecting something onto us and reacting to that, whether it be a storyline in their head, someone who slighted them, a desire, a fear...it doesn't matter.
Last night I did a kindness mediation. And what struck me about it -- was that the monk guiding the meditation (it's on an app) stated that kindness isn't as easy as it sounds. Because often in order to be kind we have to give up something of ourselves, some desire, want, or thought-pattern. We have to sacrifice something. Whether it be a seat on the subway, time to help someone pull a baby carriage up the steps, or to stand aside while someone enters a train and wait for the next one, or giving up a place in line....sometimes, it's as simple as smiling when we don't feel like smiling, or laughing at a joke that isn't funny. Or choosing to say hello to someone we can't stand.
I think, often I feel hurt or slighted, it is because I am stuck in myself, my point of view. The car that splashed me-- didn't do it on purpose, the person may be in a rush to get a sick child to a doctor or was worried about something that happened that day. Or the co-worker who gave me a nasty look, may not have been thinking of me at all -- but rather the contractor they just spent an hour arguing with over the phone until they wanted to throw the phone across the room.
Taking this further, the woman who turns away from the creepy man on the street may have been raped by a man who looked like him two years earlier. It's not about him, it's about her. Or maybe she's had bad experiences with similar men. Or she had a bad day and just doesn't want to be around anyone. It's not personal.
Or in fandom...it often got really personal when we fought over characters. It still does. I'm lurking in one fandom and participating in another. In both -- people get really upset when a favorite character is slighted, they take it personally. And really, who am I to judge? I remember all too clearly getting furious when my favorite characters got slighted on boards. "X is obviously a rapist, and since you like him, you are a rape sympathizer!" Which is illogical. Because what is obvious to one viewer isn't to another. And the world isn't quite that black and white, unfortunately. Also the poster who posted it -- was projecting their own trauma onto me. At that time, I can't say I reacted kindly. Instead I went after their favorite character and with precision and snarky wit decimated their fav and them. It did not end well. The kinder response and the brighter one, would have been to walk away.
But I took it personally and felt hurt. So, lashed out.
Emotion often clouds judgement. So does thought. I hope that I would have reacted better if it happened now. I think so.
Regarding the article about creepy men? While it is wrong to ostracize someone based on their looks -- unfortunately, men are privileged in our society. And our society tends to judge people based primarily on the aesethtic or looks. We're not trained to look much deeper or so I've discovered. I do. Because I've learned that looks can be deceiving. But I admittedly have to work at it at times. What I like about venues such as Dream Width and the fan boards, is I got to get to know people without that standing in the way. Often, when I met them in person they weren't at all what I saw in my head -- any more than I was what they saw in theirs. I've had people mistake me for a man -- although I think of shadowkat as a female avatar, many do not.
And we all have our own ingrained prejudices based on experience -- which in some respects I think is something we all need to question more than we do. Question our experiences and more importantly our memories of them. Not to mention our perceptions. Our minds lie to us. Make up stories. Twist facts. Embellish. And create storylines to entertain itself. I've learned through meditating how to ignore a lot of these storylines to let them float on by. Not all, of course. But a busy mind isn't necessarily a good thing.
Because women are more likely than men to experience physical and sexual threat in their daily lives, they are also more likely to judge others (usually men) to be creepy. Judgments of creepiness, however, are not necessarily reliable.
Conventional wisdom tells us to ‘trust our gut’, but researchers say that our gut is concerned more with regulating the boundaries of social mores than keeping us safe. In a 2017 Canadian study, female undergraduates were shown images of Caucasian male faces from three groups: emotionally neutral faces taken from an image bank; images judged ‘creepy’ in a pilot study; and images of criminals from America’s Most Wanted. They were then asked to rate the faces according to creepiness, trustworthiness and attractiveness. Across all three groups, there was a strong correlation between faces that participants considered trustworthy and attractive, and in some instances general attractiveness was negatively correlated with judgments of creepiness. Further, the faces taken from America’s Most Wanted were not rated as significantly more creepy than the neutral group. Participants made their creepiness assessments in seconds, and reported high degrees of confidence in their judgments.
Participants thought that, rather than describing behaviours, creepiness adhered to certain kinds of people and occupations. This is important.
Unkempt and dirty men, men with abnormal facial features, and men between the ages of 31-50 were all very likely to be rated creepy. Furthermore, creepiness was positively correlated both with the belief that the person held a sexual interest in the person making the social judgment, and with individuals who engaged in non-normative behaviours. This finding aligns with the McAndrew and Koehnke study, in which clowns, sex-shop owners and those interested in taxidermy were among the creepiest kinds of people.
So rather than reliably detecting danger, our internal ‘spidey sense’ often signals social difference or otherness. When we judge a situation or person creepy, we participate in shunning and social ostracism. Creepiness can prevent us from responding to the odd, the new or the peculiar with curiosity, interest and generosity of spirit.
The thing of it is -- men are scary. Particularly if you are four or five foot tall, small boned, and have breasts, a nice ass, and wear pretty things. I'm close to six foot, big boned, have breasts, no ass to speak of, and rarely wear pretty things -- and I find men scary at times, and I intimidate most of them. I live in an area in which 90% of my neighbors barely reach my shoulder in height. There are men and women in my area that come to my navel. I could step on them. It's astonishing to me. But men can and often are in certain situations - scary.
Why?
Ah. Because a man can beat and rape a woman in our country and get away with it.
Up until recently many of the law books had women listed as property. It is and always has been extremely difficult to prove rape, sexual harrassement, sexual violations, molestation. White men run productive and lucrative human trafficing rings where women are sold for sex to politicians and royalty and celebrities who look the other way. We have a President who has groped, manhandled, fondled, slurred, and most likely raped women without consequence.
Think about that for a minute.
Yes, men are scary.
But then ...People are scary. The world is scary.
The trick, sometimes I think, is not to think about it all too much and just be. And always be aware but for the grace of God go I.
So, you see? Yes, but...and I don't know. After writing that all out...I'm still not sure what I think about the statements above.
2. Can't Part with Your DVDs? You Aren't Alone
It’s not just cassettes. Vinyl has been exhumed in the past decade. Old red phone boxes in the UK are being refurbished to nostalgic effect. Tech companies are investing in “dumb phones” that only call and text. All the while, libraries of DVDs and CDs are still getting dragged from apartment to apartment, even when their players are starting to disappear from houses and cars.
This love of old stuff is growing, even as we throw out devices faster than ever. Electronic waste is the fastest-growing waste stream globally, and is expected to grow further, according to a 2017 United Nations report. Planned obsolescence — where companies design products to last only a few years, driving customers to toss devices and buy the latest model — encourages a culture of disposability. And yet, more and more objects are becoming magnets for nostalgia.
But why bring back something like the Walkman that’s generally assumed to be worse than its technological descendants? Paradoxically, it might be related to the sleekness of a software-dominated culture that has become increasingly anti-thing. As trends bend toward a sort of Marie-Kondo-style minimalism and things that used to be physical are increasingly digitized, some are yearning for yesterday’s junk. Ben Marks, general manager of Collectors’ Weekly, said, “I think there’s an interest in tangible goods in a way that there hadn’t been before we had so many digital goods.”
I admit it, I have three bags full of DVDs and CDS in my closet, and still more DVD's in my coffee table. But I no longer have a DVD player or a CD player. It's hilarious. I can't play the damn things, yet I still own them. At least the people in the article above can play them.
3. Latin Dictionary’s Journey: A to Zythum in 125 Years (and Counting)
Researchers in Germany have been working on the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae since the 1890s. They hope to finish in 2050, but that might be optimistic.
MUNICH — When German researchers began working on a new Latin dictionary in the 1890s, they thought they might finish in 15 or 20 years.
In the 125 years since, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (T.L.L.) has seen the fall of an empire, two world wars and the division and reunification of Germany. In the meantime, they are up to the letter R.
This is not for lack of effort. Most dictionaries focus on the most prominent or recent meaning of a word; this one aims to show every single way anyone ever used it, from the earliest Latin inscriptions in the sixth century B.C. to around A.D. 600. The dictionary’s founder, Eduard Wölfflin, who died in 1908, described entries in the T.L.L. not as definitions, but “biographies” of words.
The first entry, for the letter A, was published in 1900. The T.L.L. is expected to reach its final word — “zythum,” an Egyptian beer — by 2050. A scholarly project of painstaking exactness and glacial speed, it has so far produced 18 volumes of huge pages with tiny text, the collective work of nearly 400 scholars, many of them long since dead. The letters Q and N were set aside, because they begin too many difficult words, so researchers will have to go back and work on those, too.
“Its scale is prodigious,” David Butterfield, a senior lecturer in Classics at Cambridge, said in an email, adding that when the first publication appeared in 1900, “it did not go unnoticed that the word closing that installment was ‘absurdus.’”
It’s a monumental effort aimed at a small group of classicists, for whom the ability to understand every way a word was used is important not only for reading literature, but also understanding language and history.
But why Latin?
4. Religion is about emotion regulation and it's very good at it
[I don't know...maybe? I'm admittedly biased. I don't much like religion. Spirituality yes. Religion - I have on-going issues with.]
While Freud and Durkheim were right about the important functions of religion, its true value lies in its therapeutic power, particularly its power to manage our emotions. How we feel is as important to our survival as how we think. Our species comes equipped with adaptive emotions, such as fear, rage, lust and so on: religion was (and is) the cultural system that dials these feelings and behaviours up or down. We see this clearly if we look at mainstream religion, rather than the deleterious forms of extremism. Mainstream religion reduces anxiety, stress and depression. It provides existential meaning and hope. It focuses aggression and fear against enemies. It domesticates lust, and it strengthens filial connections. Through story, it trains feelings of empathy and compassion for others. And it provides consolation for suffering.
Emotional therapy is the animating heart of religion. Social bonding happens not only when we agree to worship the same totems, but when we feel affection for each other. An affective community of mutual care emerges when groups share rituals, liturgy, song, dance, eating, grieving, comforting, tales of saints and heroes, hardships such as fasting and sacrifice. Theological beliefs are bloodless abstractions by comparison.
Emotional management is important because life is hard. The Buddha said: ‘All life is suffering’ and most of us past a certain age can only agree. Religion evolved to handle what I call the ‘vulnerability problem’. When we’re sick, we go to the doctor, not the priest. But when our child dies, or we lose our home in a fire, or we’re diagnosed with Stage-4 cancer, then religion is helpful because it provides some relief and some strength. It also gives us something to do, when there’s nothing we can do.
***
Consider how religion helps people after a death. Social mammals who have suffered separation distress are restored to health by touch, collective meals and grooming. Human grieving customs involve these same soothing prosocial mechanisms. We comfort-touch and embrace a person who has lost a loved one. Our bodies give ancient comfort directly to the grieving body. We provide the bereaved with food and drink, and we break bread with them (think of the Jewish tradition of shiva, or the visitation tradition of wakes in many cultures). We share stories about the loved one, and help the bereaved reframe their pain in larger optimistic narratives. Even music, in the form of consoling melodies and collective singing, helps to express shared sorrow and also transforms it from an unbearable and lonely experience to a bearable communal one. Social involvement from the community after a death can act as an antidepressant, boosting adaptive emotional changes in the bereaved.
Religion also helps to manage sorrow with something I’ll call ‘existential shaping’ or more precisely ‘existential debt’. It is common for Westerners to think of themselves as individuals first and as members of a community second, but our ideology of the lone protagonist fulfilling an individual destiny is more fiction than fact. Losing someone reminds us of our dependence on others and our deep vulnerability, and at such moments religion turns us toward the web of relations rather than away from it. Long after your parents have died, for example, religion helps you memorialise them and acknowledge your existential debt to them. Formalising the memory of the dead person, through funerary rites, or tomb-sweeping (Qingming) festivals in Asia, or the Day of the Dead in Mexico, or annual honorary masses in Catholicism, is important because it keeps reminding us, even through the sorrow, of the meaningful influence of these deceased loved ones. This is not a self-deception about the unreality of death, but an artful way of learning to live with it. The grief becomes transformed in the sincere acknowledgment of the value of the loved one, and religious rituals help people to set aside time and mental space for that acknowledgment.
An emotion such as grief has many ingredients. The physiological arousal of grief is accompanied by cognitive evaluations: ‘I will never see my friend again’; ‘I could have done something to prevent this’; ‘She was the love of my life’; and so on. Religions try to give the bereaved an alternative appraisal that reframes their tragedy as something more than just misery. Emotional appraisals are proactive, according to the psychologists Phoebe Ellsworth at the University of Michigan and Klaus Scherer at the University of Geneva, going beyond the immediate disaster to envision the possible solutions or responses. This is called ‘secondary appraisal’. After the primary appraisal (‘This is very sad’), the secondary appraisal assesses our ability to deal with the situation: ‘This is too much for me’ – or, positively: ‘I will survive this.’ Part of our ability to cope with suffering is our sense of power or agency: more power generally means better coping ability. If I acknowledge my own limitations when faced with unavoidable loss, but I feel that a powerful ally, God, is part of my agency or power, then I can be more resilient.
Because religious actions are often accompanied by magical thinking or supernatural beliefs, Christopher Hitchens argued in God Is not Great (2007) that religion is ‘false consolation’. Many critics of religion echo his condemnation. But there is no such thing as false consolation. Hitchens and fellow critics are making a category mistake, like saying: ‘The colour green is sleepy.’ Consolation or comfort is a feeling, and it can be weak or strong, but it can’t be false or true. You can be false in your judgment of why you’re feeling better, but feeling better is neither true nor false. True and false applies only if we’re evaluating whether our propositions correspond with reality. And no doubt many factual claims of religion are false in that way – the world was not created in six days.
5. IT's a Miracle - Helsinki's Radical Solution to Homelessness
Finland is the only EU country where homelessness is falling. Its secret? Giving people homes as soon as they need them – unconditionally.
It's probably worth keeping in mind that Finland's population is the State of New York, if that. So their homeless population to start out with was way below New York City or Istanbul or London's.
And considering how cold it is up there -- I'd hope they would put people in homes, or they'd be dead.
Sorry, I don't think it is productive to compare what a country that is so incredibly different in size, population, climate, politics, demographical makeup, and history is doing to ours or others. It's akin comparing growing apples to well grapefruit or pineapple. It has to be different, you can't grow an apple and a pineapple the same way. Or say comparing cooking steak to pork, or chicken to duck.
Yet people keep doing it. My brother once told me we should have the same political electoral system as Ireland, and I thought, eh...but Ireland has a smaller population and isn't a huge continent with 50 different state governments, and constitutions plus a Federal one.
6. The Self Help Movement That is Upending American Christianity
(Yes, but..see #1, where I talk about how human beings are inherently self-centered and selfish, this article appears to well...continue to push that thesis, albeit unintentionally. The self-help movement doesn't appear to see how selfish it truly is and why that is problematic. The problem with the self-help movement is ..it's a wee bit too centered on rediscovering the self as if the self was an actual entity that could be lost. Sorry, I've embraced Buddhism a little. Western culture focuses more finding the self and analyzing it to death, Eastern culture focuses more on letting go of the notion of self entirely through meditation and yoga.)
While the Enneagram is sometimes reduced to a “personality test” like the (largely discredited) Myers-Briggs system, that’s not quite accurate. For one thing, there is no test to conclusively determine one’s dominant type in Enneagram. (Online tests abound, but are largely considered untrustworthy by experts.) For another, types are determined by motivations, not actions, so you cannot tell a person’s type by how they behave. A person dominant in Type One might stay in an unfulfilling relationship because they believe it’s the right thing to do, for example, while a person dominant in Type Four might fear they could never find another partner who would accept them with their flaws.
But perhaps most importantly, the function of the Enneagram is not to prescribe a set of traits that can be used to fashion or describe an identity — as with Myers-Briggs and many other personality-typing systems. With the Enneagram, the personality is just a set of coping mechanisms built around a person’s true self. To find one’s type is not the end point, but the beginning of a journey of self-discovery.
This approach to thinking about oneself is a striking departure from the rigid moralism that draws stark lines between “good” and “bad” that Christians such as Case have been steeped in. It allows — even encourages — worshippers to embrace their whole selves.
To practice the Enneagram is to lovingly engage with one’s flaws, following them as breadcrumbs to rediscovering the best in you. Practitioners told me about their “shadow” selves — their imperfections as the shadow of their goodness, rather than signs of an intrinsic badness: “Your shadow is the shadow of a gift that you hold that is good, that was inherently good from the beginning,” says Stephanie Spencer, a Christian and Enneagram coach who has been practicing the system since 2015. “And you’re trying to get back to that goodness.”
[So, we enter the cult of self?]
no subject
Date: 2019-12-04 03:47 am (UTC)~ I have often felt a pang of hurt when a woman has 'crossed the road' to avoid me. It's pointless to be abgry about it; she doesn't know me from Adam. She doesn't know I've never hit anyone in my life; she doesn't know I've never wanted to be a man; never felt like a man; never thought of myself as a man. I'm stuck with how I look; some of which is being mis-diagnosed for thirteen years; wish I was a woman, but sometimes feel cursed by looking so 'male'.
My beard is there not because I want to look more masculine, but because, I think now, it seems a bizarre concept for me to need to shave. A couple of months ago, as I was changing to leave the house, I had the weirdest sensation I was missing something; so much I could almost feel the weight of the breasts I have never had.
What am I going to do? Confirm her fear of me by chasing after to try and explain all that?
Best just to feel regret that you live in a world where fear rules; even in my case, so much of how we react and what we do. ~
kerk
no subject
Date: 2019-12-04 05:00 am (UTC)Just goes to show times change. In 1900 Latin was still a central pillar of education in the western world, and the most important language for a huge chunk of Christianity. Now Latin fluency is rarely required of students and rarely heard even in Catholic Churches around the world. Take a 150 years to do a thorough job and your target market may shrink to next to nothing... It will still be a wonderful achievement, but unless you're a Latin specialist, you probably wouldn't care if you ever saw it done.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-04 01:24 pm (UTC)LOL! Yep, they took too long. It would have been far more useful in the early 1900s, in the 21st Century? No one uses it. Back then Latin was the universal language, now, English is.