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6. Shame, Disgust, Humiliation

Mar-23-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The shadow emotions, the ones we don’t show, don’t talk about, often don’t admit to ourselves, are the ones which may have the most to teach us. Starting with a marvellous TED talk, we shed some light on three shadows. Take a look… and they’ll grow less scary.

* Brené Brown: Listening to shame Video on TED.com (Thanks Erin!)

Shame is an unspoken epidemic, the secret behind many forms of broken behavior. Brené Brown, whose earlier talk on vulnerability became a viral hit, explores what can happen when people confront their shame head-on. Her own humor, humanity and vulnerability shine through every word.

Brené Brown studies vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame.

* Humiliation by Wayne Koestenbaum review, The Guardian

Humiliation is always a reminder of our embodied being – it involves flesh and fluids and unwanted (or shamefully desired) intrusions. Koestenbaum recalls many instances of his own body’s abject eruption, from childhood accidents such as sneezing on his hand at school to deadpan anecdotes from his erotic life: “Sitting beside a playwright, I began ejaculating, and at just that instant an urban planner walked into the room.” This last (delightfully context-free) anecdote points to the book’s first key insight: humiliation requires, or at least imagines, a trio. While one may burn with shame alone, or suffer embarrassment in the presence of one other, humiliation’s “infernal waltz” is danced by victim, protagonist and witness: “The scene’s horror – its energy, its electricity – invokes the presence of three.”

With fame, of course, the triad structure remains but the witnesses multiply, and some of Humiliation is devoted to persons whose celebrity is or was largely a matter of having their bodies exposed, or speculated on in more than one sense.

* Disgust’s Evolutionary Role Is Irresistible to Researchers New York Times

Disgust is the Cinderella of emotions. While fear, sadness and anger, its nasty, flashy sisters, have drawn the rapt attention of psychologists, poor disgust has been hidden away in a corner, left to muck around in the ashes.

No longer. Disgust is having its moment in the light as researchers find that it does more than cause that sick feeling in the stomach. It protects human beings from disease and parasites, and affects almost every aspect of human relations, from romance to politics.

Disgust was not completely ignored in the past. Charles Darwin tackled the subject in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” He described the face of disgust, documented by Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne in his classic study of facial expressions in 1862, as if one were expelling some horrible-tasting substance from the mouth.

“I never saw disgust more plainly expressed,” Darwin wrote, “than on the face of one of my infants at five months, when, for the first time, some cold water, and again a month afterwards, when a piece of ripe cherry was put into his mouth.”

His book did not contain an image of the infant, but fortunately YouTube has numerous videos of babies tasting lemons.

Jan. 6th, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 1

Jan-06-2012 | Comments (0)

1. 2011 Retrospective (text)

Bird’s Eye: Janus is the Roman God of beginnings and transitions, the God for whom January is named. He has two faces, one to look forward, one to look back. We start with looking back at some of the high/low lights of the year. The first story is about the Occupy movement, which gave so many of us hope. A huge mashup of lists follows – everything from best Jewish Twitters of the year to 9 funniest autocorrects – as well as books, films, TV shows, etc etc etc. We single out Canada’s environmental failure, aptly delineated by Maude Barlow, and end with Neil Gaiman’s good wishes, (formatted exceedingly badly, imho.)

* Compassion Is Our New Currency Rebecca Solnit Tom Dispatch (Thanks, Amy!)

Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed — and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names, and obliging the media and politicians to do the same.

The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based. Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas. The amiable-looking elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.”

* The Best And Worst Of Everything In 2011: A Mega, Meta MashupAdam Penenberg

We hacked through dozens of year-end lists–and, yes, checked them twice–to bring you our curated best and worst of 2011. Here’s the mother of all roundups that you will find online, offline, and everywhere else. Each line is taken from those other year-end lists.

* The biggest story of 2011 for me? Canada’s failure on climate change Maude Barlow, Rabble

The biggest story of 2011 for me was the national and international attention given to the environmental dangers of Canada’s tar sands, and the failure of the Harper government to meet our obligations to combat climate change. Until this year, most criticism of Canada’s climate policy was restricted to Canadian and some international environmentalists. But three events of 2011 caused Canada’s energy and climate policies to come under intense scrutiny here in Canada and around the world.

* Neil Gaiman’s New Year Wishes

6. Outside the Lines

Jan-06-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: After taking Ron Paul seriously, let’s wade further into the swamp of unacceptability to ask a few more uncomfortable questions. Despite at least one unfortunate phrase, Pellissier’s article raises very interesting questions, and the discussion that follows is also fascinating. Like many, I was hugely educated by Peggy McIntosh’s classic article on “White Privilege”, so I’m fascinated at the deconstruction of it in the current CounterPunch. David Lindorff challenges our fear of hitchhiking, and Louis CK challenges the standard way of selling albums, and wins, bigtime.

* Why is the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews so high? Hank Pellissier, Ethical Technology

Ashkenazi Jews, aka Ashkenazim, are the descendants of Jews originally from medieval Germany, and later, from throughout Eastern Europe. Approximately 80% of the Jews in the world today are Ashkenazim…
Their median IQ is calculated at 117 in From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (2000), published by Cambridge University Press. This is 10 points higher than the generally-accepted IQ of their closest rivals—Northeast Asians—and almost 20% higher than the global average. … Here is a brief list of Ashkenazi accomplishments in the last 90 years.

Nobel Prizes: Since 1950, 29% of the awards have gone to Ashkenazim, even though they represent only 0.25% of humanity. Ashkenazi achievement in this arena is 117 times greater than their population.

Hungary in the 1930s: Ashkenazim were 6% of the population, but they comprised 55.7% of physicians, 49.2% of attorneys, 30.4% of engineers, and 59.4% of bank officers; plus, they owned 49.4% of the metallurgy industry, 41.6% of machine manufacturing, 72.8% of clothing manufacturing, and, as housing owners, they received 45.1% of Budapest rental income. Jews were similarly successful in nearby nations, like Poland and Germany.

USA (today): Ashkenazi Jews comprise 2.2% of the USA population, but they represent 30% of faculty at elite colleges, 21% of Ivy League students, 25% of the Turing Award winners, 23% of the wealthiest Americans, and 38% of the Oscar-winning film directors.

The important question is… Why is the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews so high? Is the reason genetic, environmental, cultural, educational? A unique combination of several?

Here are eight theories….

* Complicating “White Privilege” » Paul Gorski Counterpunch

I dove into the white privilege discourse as part of my training as an anti-racism educator in the mid-1990s, just a few years after my white educator peers had started shuffling through their knapsacks. The shuffling often occurred back then, as it does today, in white caucus groups, organized dialogues among white educators. During these dialogues we more or less took turns pouring the contents of our knapsacks onto the floor before encouraging each other to “own” whatever came out, taking responsibility for racism. Rarely did we get around to talking about what it meant to be an anti-racist or for racial justice. Rarely did we use those dialogues to grow ourselves into more powerful change agents. This, I think, persists as a problem in white caucusing and other forms of race dialogues today: too much conversation about how hard it is to be a white person taking responsibility for white privilege; way too much thinking that the dialogue, itself, is the anti-racism rather than what prepares us for the anti-racism.

…Here, then, is the rub: We, in the white privilege brigade, often, and somewhat generically, in my opinion, like to say that racism is about power. That word, power, might be the most often-spoken word in conversations about white privilege. Rarely, though, do we speak to the nature of power beyond the types of privilege so eloquently expounded upon by Peggy. This is where critical race theory, with its frameworks for deconstructing racism, has flown past the white privilege discourse. Critical race theorists centralize the fundamental questions too often left unasked in conversations about white privilege: What, exactly, does power mean in a capitalistic society? Why, in a capitalistic society, do people and institutions exert power and privilege? What are they after?

* America, Land of the Fearful, is No Place to Hitch-Hike Dave Lindorff NationofChange

Yesterday, I hitch-hiked to the gym. If I tell that to any of my friends, they look at me like I’m crazy. Yet if I had said the same thing 40 years ago, it would have been like saying, “I just drove over to the store” or “I just had lunch.” No one would have batted an eye.

….Are things crazier today? No! They are safer. That’s what is so weird about people’s unwillingness to give a hitcher a ride these days. All the crime statistics show that crime is about where it was in the ‘70s (total crime in 2009 was the same as in 1968, with homicides down to the lowest rate since 1964, while violent crime in general has been falling since 1990 and is now at the level it was in 1973). What’s way up is fear. We have a media that live and breathe crime reporting, and always as lurid as possible. The more gruesome the story, the better. And we have a government that is all about generating fear — fear of crime, fear of immigrants, fear of terrorists, fear of poor people, fear of the 99%, fear of hitch-hikers, you name it.

* The Results Of Louis Ck’s Experiment (Who’s Louis CK?)

The experiment was: if I put out a brand new standup special at a drastically low price ($5) and make it as easy as possible to buy, download and enjoy, free of any restrictions, will everyone just go and steal it? Will they pay for it? And how much money can be made by an individual in this manner?

It’s been 4 days. A lot of people are asking me how it’s going. I’ve been hesitant to share the actual figures, because there’s power in exclusive ownership of information. What I didn’t expect when I started this was that people would not only take part in this experiment, they would be invested in it and it would be important to them. It’s been amazing to see people in large numbers advocating this idea. So I think it’s only fair that you get to know the results. Also, it’s just really cool and fun and I’m dying to tell everybody. I told my Mom, I told three friends, and that wasn’t nearly enough. So here it is….

…It’s been about 12 days since the thing started and yesterday we hit the crazy number. One million dollars. That’s a lot of money. Really too much money. I’ve never had a million dollars all of a sudden. and since we’re all sharing this experience and since it’s really your money, I wanted to let you know what I’m doing with it. People are paying attention to what’s going on with this thing. So I guess I want to set an example of what you can do if you all of a sudden have a million dollars that people just gave to you directly because you told jokes.

5. “Ding-Dong, the Hitch is Dead”

Dec-23-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The Romans had a phrase, “De mortuis nil nisi bonum.” (of the dead, speak nothing but good). But the recently departed Chris Hitchens was never one to let either truth or taste impede a clever line, so. Amidst the tedious choruses of praise for Hitchens’ unwillingness to ever not say what he was thinking, a few of his contemporaries describe him somewhat differently.

* Regarding Christopher Katha Pollitt, his colleague for 20 years at The Nation

So many people have praised Christopher so effusively, I want to complicate the picture even at the risk of seeming churlish. His drinking was not something to admire, and it was not a charming foible. Maybe sometimes it made him warm and expansive, but I never saw that side of it. What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying, often toward people who were way out of his league—elderly guests on the Nationcruise, interns (especially female interns). Drinking didn’t make him a better writer either—that’s another myth. Christopher was such a practiced hand, with a style that was so patented, so integrally an expression of his personality, he was so sure he was right about whatever the subject, he could meet his deadlines even when he was totally sozzled. But those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting? The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phrasing? Forgive the cliché: that was the booze talking.

So far, most of the eulogies of Christopher have come from men, and there’s a reason for that. He moved in a masculine world, and for someone who prided himself on his wide-ranging interests, he had virtually no interest in women’s writing or women’s lives or perspectives. I never got the impression from anything he wrote about women that he had bothered to do the most basic kinds of reading and thinking, let alone interviewing or reporting—the sort of workup he would do before writing about, say, G.K. Chesterton, or Scientology or Kurdistan. It all came off the top of his head, or the depths of his id. Women aren’t funny. Women shouldn’t need to/want to/get to have a job. The Dixie Chicks were “fucking fat slags” (not “sluts,” as he misremembered later). And then of course there was his 1989 column in which he attacked legal abortion and his cartoon version of feminism as “possessive individualism.” I don’t suppose I ever really forgave Christopher for that.

* What’s With All The Adulation?Glen Greenwald Salon

I rarely wrote about Hitchens because, at least for the time that I’ve been writing about politics (since late 2005), there was nothing particularly notable about him. When it came to the defining issues of the post-9/11 era, he was largely indistinguishable from the small army of neoconservative fanatics eager to unleash ever-greater violence against Muslims: driven by a toxic mix of barbarism, self-loving provincialism, a sense of personal inadequacy, and, most of all, a pity-inducing need to find glory and purpose in cheering on military adventures and vanquishing some foe of historically unprecedented evil even if it meant manufacturing them. … Hitchens was obviously more urbane and well-written than the average neocon faux-warrior, but he was also often more vindictive and barbaric about his war cheerleading.

The blood on his hands — and on the hands of those who played an even greater, more direct role in all of this totally unjustified killing of innocents — is supposed to be ignored because he was an accomplished member in good standing of our media and political class. It’s a way the political and media class protects and celebrates itself: our elite members are to be heralded and their victims forgotten. One is, of course, free to believe that. But what should not be tolerated are prohibitions on these types of discussions when highly misleading elegies are being publicly implanted, all in order to consecrate someone’s reputation for noble greatness even when their acts are squarely at odds with that effort.

* Do Not Judge Public Figures On How “Nice” They Are Ian Welsh

I don’t, personally, think Hitchens was brilliant most of the time, but let’s say he was. So what? He helped commit the same war crime Nazis were hung for. In a just world, he would have been hung or locked up for life, alongside Henry Kissinger, whom he hated and George Bush, whose policies he helped push.

Contemptible. If you knew him personally, I can forgive your love of him, I have loved evil people. But an intellectual has the responsibility to separate those personal feelings from judgement. Hitchens was an evil man. Helping kill large numbers of people in an unprovoked war is not just a war crime, it is, as was noted at Nuremburg, the crime from which all war crimes come — every rape, every death, every person who lost their home, every person tortured with power drills in Iraq, every dead child—those are Hitchens legacy.

The refusal to hold people responsible for the entirely forseeable results of policies they work hard to enable is also evil. It is at the root of why you no longer have functioning democracies.

1. Wikileaks: The Empire Strikes Back

Dec-17-2010 | Comments (0)

* Bird’s Eye: There’s a long and well-received piece on the nature of the Anonymous defence against the Wikileaks attackers in the Tikkun Daily Blog, coming out of last week’s Tikkunista. But this week, the Empire struck back. Bradley Manning, believed to be the original source of the current leaks, is being tortured by the US to make him crack. (Worth noting: before a trial!) Assange (who was also held in solitary for 23.5 hours a day) is out, but under electronic surveillance. Naomi Wolf puts the rape charges into a historical perspective; Gwyn Dwyer into political perspective.

* The Inhumane Conditions Of Bradley Manning’s Detention – Glenn Greenwald – Salon

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months — and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait — under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture….From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day — for seven straight months and counting — he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions.

For reasons that appear completely punitive, he’s being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. …In sum, Manning has been subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America’s Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado: all without so much as having been convicted of anything. And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig’s medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.

* State Department Warns Students Against Discussing WikiLeaks on Facebook, Twitter

A State Department official warned students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs this week that discussing WikiLeaks on Facebook or Twitter could endanger their employment prospects. The official, a former student of the school, called the career services office of his alma mater to advise students not to post links to WikiLeaks documents, nor to make comments on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, as “engaging in these activities would call into question [a student's] ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government,” he was quoted as saying in an e-mail sent to students by the career services office on Tuesday.

* The Accusations against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange Gwynne Dyer The Straight

The definition of rape in Sweden is no longer restricted to coercion, but includes any infringement of another person’s “sexual integrity”. Accusations of rape have consequently increased fourfold in the past 20 years, and Sweden now has the highest per capita rate of reported rapes in Europe. But does anybody really believe that there are more rapists in Sweden than anywhere else?

Swedish courts are clearly unhappy about the politicians’ meddling with the law: they are only delivering about as many convictions for rape as they did 20 years ago. If Assange ever faced a Swedish court, he would almost certainly be found not guilty.

* Naomi Wolf: J’Accuse– Insult to Rape Victims Worldwide Huffington Post

How do I know that Interpol, Britain and Sweden’s treatment of Julian Assange is a form of theater? Because I know what happens in rape accusations against men that don’t involve the embarrassing of powerful governments.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is in solitary confinement in Wandsworth prison in advance of questioning on state charges of sexual molestation. Lots of people have opinions about the charges. But I increasingly believe that only those of us who have spent years working with rape and sexual assault survivors worldwide, and know the standard legal response to sex crime accusations, fully understand what a travesty this situation is against those who have to live through how sex crime charges are ordinarily handled — and what a deep, even nauseating insult this situation is to survivors of rape and sexual assault worldwide. … That is not the State embracing feminism. That is the State pimping feminism.

[One response in comments: “Meanwhile, there's a WikiLeaks cable that details how US contractor DynCorp sold child prostitutes to Afghan police officers as part of a bacha bazi party. Real, actual evidence of sexual crimes with victims who could not possibly consent. Where's the Interpol red notice?"]

6. Wise People

Dec-10-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: As we look through the list of possible inclusions for items in Tikkunista (which passed the 1000 mark this week), it’s a challenge to see the meta-patterns that bind different elements together. These are three people whom I’ve long admired for their insight and skill at communicating profound truths through their writing, talking and singing (OK, only Leonard in that category. Some might argue against even that But you’ll be intrigued and moved by all of these.

* The Green Bough: How Do We Know? Oriah Mountain Dreamer

How do we know what we think or feel we know? How do we know if the sense of a seemingly clear “Yes!” or “No!” is the voice of intuitive-instinctual wisdom or if it’s what Jungians would call one of our “complexes”- clusters of emotionally charged and emphatically clear aspects of our unconscious, usually clustered around old wounds. How can we tell when we are tapping into the trustworthy instinctual-intuitive wisdom of psyche (soul-heart knowing) and when we are being driven by the emotionally skewed perspective of unconscious and unhealed wounds?

I do not have any foolproof checklist, but I have found a few clues, indicators that might help us discern when we may be “off” about what we think/feel we know….

* Leonard Cohen, Interviewed by Jian Ghomeshi Q, CBC (Thanks, Gabe)

* Salman Rushdie, interviewed by George Stroumboulopoulos CBC (Thanks, Wilder)

4. Doonesbury Turns Forty

Nov-12-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Garry Trudeau started the comic strip Doonesbury as an undergraduate at Yale, and things just kept going. Fans follow Doonesbury for its unique blend of political commentary and evolving characters who age, marry, parent, and die. To celebrate (or help you catch up) we offer a triple header: an interview with Trudeau, an overview of Doonesbury’s major characters, and a pair of recent Sunday strips

* Garry Trudeau: ‘Doonesbury quickly became a cause of trouble’ The Guardian

Out of the blue, Trudeau, at the tender age of 21, was invited to turn the strip into a syndicated newspaper feature, an extraordinary privilege given the national exposure and the almost tenure-like terms it offered – with contracts lasting 20 years. “I had given no consideration to a career in cartoons,” Trudeau says now. “I thought I was on track to become a graphic designer. So I asked for a one-year contract. My editors howled with laughter.”

You could say that was the first Doonesbury joke, and readers have been howling with laughter ever since. And not just laughing. They’ve been frowning, shouting, crying, blushing – the full gamut of emotions – as a result of a strip that broke the mould of the comic page and shattered countless conventions. Over the last four decades Doonesbury has established itself as so much more than a traditional cartoon. It is a soap opera, a tragedy, a comedy, an investigative agency, a liberal political commentary, a scourge of pomposity and corruption, a humanitarian exercise, all rolled into one.

* The Story of a Generation Garry Trudeau The Atlantic

DOONESBURY BEGAN LIFE as a simple sports strip. It featured a single character—B.D., a knuckleheaded college quarterback who presided over a team of talented but infantile subordinates. The narrow focus worked fine as a campus one-off in the Yale Daily News, but a few weeks in, there arrived an offer of national syndication. To court the attention of that larger audience, I was encouraged to broaden the strip and assemble a diverse cast of peer characters.

It was an opportune time to do so. In 1970, many banners were afield, many movements afire. The young had upended society. And since so much of the action was playing out on college campuses, I decided to stick with the undergraduate scene I knew. At first, the core characters in Doonesbury stayed put, happily hunkered down at Walden, the cozy commune that housed them. After more than a decade, I finally hit the reset button, dislodging the cast from its bucolic surroundings and sending the characters off into a world more responsive to the passage of time. The tribe fanned out across the country, and their lives were repopulated with mates, friends, associates, and (whoa!) children. Thereafter, I tracked their quotidian lives as they played out against a shimmering scrim of cultural and political context. Despite the strip’s reputation for perishable topicality, the 14,000 strips that compose Doonesbury thus far aren’t really about the defining moments of the modern age; they are, rather, a loosely organized, crowd-sourced chronicle about how it felt to live through them.

* Two Recent Doonesbury Sunday Strips

– Republican Tax Cuts

– Succeeding in Music

9. Famous People Back When

Oct-29-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Sometimes famous people get arrested and they have mug shots taken. Sometimes they looked different back in high school. Sometimes Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs them. All three possibilities for your viewing pleasure below.

* A Short History of Mug Shots Slate

Dreyfus, Emma Goldman, Trotsky, Johnny Cash etc

* Yearbook Photos That Musicians Wish We’d Never Seen

Avril Levine, Eminem, Tina Turner, Jim Morrison etc

* Henri Cartier-Bresson (Thanks, David!)

Camus, Sartre, Capote, and many unknowns

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Jan. 6th, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 1

5. “Ding-Dong, the Hitch is Dead”

6. Wise People

9. Famous People Back When

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