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4. Revisiting the Holocaust

May-04-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: No revisionism here, but a look at three very different ways the Holocaust has been cited in the past weeks. In the Guardian, there is a long and fascinating piece about Claude Lanzmann, who made the 9½ hour film “Shoah”. It is an essential read. In Israel, Haaretz newspaper attacks the misuse of Holocaust imagery to demonize political opponents, correctly observing that it cannot be both a unique horror in history, and a one-size-fits-all analogy. And we have a review of Shalom Auslander’s new book,Hope: A Tragedy, which is getting a lot of buzz. If you missed “Death Camp Blues” his powerful Moth podcast about his visit to Auschwitz, it’s also highly recommended.

* Claude Lanzmann: The Man Who Stood Witness For The World The Observer

Lanzmann is a witness of his time. He is one of the few people still living who can testify at close range to the epic events by which the second half of the 20th century is defined and measured.

During the second world war, he was a teenage guerrilla in the French resistance. In its aftermath, he was among the first western writers to probe communist East Germany, the USSR, Chairman Mao’s China and even North Korea, where he fell in love. He lived and worked among that Left Bank, leftwing existentialist avant-garde around his close friend Sartre, and was for many years the lover, travelling companion and confidant of De Beauvoir. He accompanied fighters of the Algerian revolution in desert redoubts under bombardment by the French air force, befriended both its leaders and General de Gaulle, only to be tear-gassed on the streets of the Latin Quarter during the événements of May 1968. He “embedded” himself (as we would say today) with the Israeli armed forces as deeply as is possible without actually joining the IDF, or Tsahal, as he calls them, by their Hebrew name.

But most famously of all, Lanzmann researched, directed and conducted the searing interviews for what is arguably the greatest film of all time, and certainly the most ambitious: the nine-and-a-half hour – “it could have been much longer”, he says – Shoah, which, more than any archive project, history book or attempt on film, remains the definitive and inimitable record for all time of the most appalling catastrophe in history.

*Israeli Politicians, Left And Right, Must Lay Holocaust To Rest Haaretz (Thanks David!)

When the Shoah is invoked by Benjamin Netanyahu to make the claim that “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany,” the victims of the Shoah are forgotten, not remembered.

Peter Beinart, the American left-leaning Jewish and Zionist journalist, recently lambasted Netanyahu – and other elements of the Israeli right – for instrumentalizing the Shoah for blatant political purposes. This is a familiar accusation. What exposes its cynicism is its inherent contradiction: One cannot claim at one and the same time that the Shoah occupies a singular place in the history of the “crimes and horrors of humanity,” and yet use it as a one-size-fits-all analogy, whenever politically convenient (Ahmadinejad, however dangerous and appalling, is not Hitler ). The same tendency to use the Shoah as a political analogy to scare and condemn can be found in many political persuasions, not all of them on the right. But there is more: In incessantly invoking the Shoah for political purposes of the moment, as is often done in Israel, we are stirring the victims of the Shoah from the quiet of their death, turning them into phantoms and specters, and in effect ordering them to haunt the living, with no rest.

What is a phantom? A phantom is a dead person who haunts us because she did not get proper burial, and has been conjured from the dead to serve the needs of the living. Its spectral presence, caught between the realms of the dead and the living, makes it scary. Phantoms are very good instruments of fear because they are the dead who never go away.

* Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander reviewed by Naomi Alderman (who’s she?) The Guardian

Jews watch Holocaust films differently: we’re looking for advice. When should those schmucks have left the country? What do you do if you have to hide? How do you survive in a concentration camp? It constantly surprises my non-Jewish friends that I don’t feel, as they do, that this event is in the past. That I wonder if they’d hide me if the economy went really bad and people started voting for Nick Griffin. My non-Jewish friends are shocked when they suggest that I could move to (cheap, artsy) Berlin and I say “No, can’t. Too many ghosts of dead Jews.” The thing might be over for you, but it’s still alive for us.

In Shalom Auslander’s funny and acerbic new novel, Hope: A Tragedy, the Holocaust is still alive in the most real way possible. His hero, Kugel (a Dickensian name – kugel is a bland, puddingy Jewish potato dish), an ineffectual worrier with a troubled, overbearing mother, moves his wife and son into a new house only to find the elderly Anne Frank living in the attic.

Is she the real Anne Frank? Yes, it becomes clear, she’s not an apparition, she’s the real woman, grown old hiding in attics. When she tried to tell the world she was still alive, the publisher of her diary – 32m copies sold and counting, as Hope repeatedly reminds us – told her to stay dead. Frank herself is now hideous, deformed – as you would be. “They were survivors,” says Auslander elsewhere in the novel of superficially adorable chipmunks Kugel sees on his walks in the wood, “and survival wasn’t pretty.”

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.

4. A Post-Black, Post-Jewish, Post-National World?

Sep-30-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The bird’s eye does glaze over, we confess, when it encounters “critical theory”, “a form of self-reflective knowledge involving both understanding and theoretical explanation to reduce entrapment in systems of domination or dependence, obeying the emancipatory interest in expanding the scope of autonomy and reducing the scope of domination.”(Thanks, Wikipedia) Here are three pieces, two reviews of a book and an essay. The book reviews focus on arguments it is time to move beyond such divisions as Jewish/non-Jewish or black/non-black; Orwell’s essay argues it’s time to move beyond nationalism. The Atzmon piece is as challenging (intellectually, emotionally, spiritually) to me about what it means to be Jewish as anything I’ve seen. Responses to it are particularly welcomed.

* Interview with Gilad Atzmon, author of The Wandering Who: A study of Jewish Identity Politics Eric Walberg

Gilad Atzmon is a world citizen who calls London his home. He was born a sabra, and served as a paramedic in the Israeli Defense Forces during the 1982 Lebanon War, when he realised that “I was part of a colonial state, the result of plundering and ethnic cleansing.” He has wandered far since then, become a novelist, philosopher, one of the world’s best jazz saxophonists, and at the same time, one of the staunchest supporters of the Palestinian cause, supporting the right of return and the one-state solution…. Atzmon denies that there is even such a concept as “anti-Semitism”, stating that “‘anti-Semite” is an empty signifier. “You are either a racist which I am not, or have an ideological disagreement with Zionism, which I have.” When railed against as an anti-Semite, Gilad quotes the witticism: “While in the past an ‘anti-Semite’ was someone who hated Jews, nowadays it is the other way around, an anti-Semite is someone the Jews hate.”

“Jewish anti-Zionists who criticise Israel for being racist, also operate in Jews-only, racially-exclusive political cells. I realised then that we need a new ideological instrument that would attempt to explain it all. I guess that this is when I started to differentiate between Jews (the people), Judaism (the religion) and Jewish-ness (the ideology). In my work, I avoid the first two categories, I only deal with ideology — the racially-driven supremacist and exclusive philosophy known as Chosen-ness. Zionism is just one face of Jewish-ness. Jewish anti-Zionism is clearly another face. John Zorn and his Jewish Radical Music is another, promoting a racially-driven pseudo-cultural ethos.”

* Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? Touré New York Times

Post-blackness entails a different perspective from earlier generations’, one that takes for granted what they fought for: equal rights, integration, middle-class status, affirmative action and political power. While rooted in blackness, it is not restricted by it, as Michael Eric Dyson says in the book’s foreword; it is an enormously complex and malleable state, Touré says, “a completely liquid shape-shifter that can take any form.” With so many ways of performing blackness, there is now no consensus about what it is or should be. One of his goals, Touré writes in “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now,” is “to attack and destroy the idea that there is a correct or legitimate way of doing blackness.” Post-blackness has no patience with “self-appointed identity cops” and their “cultural bullying.”

* “Notes on Nationalism” George Orwell

By “nationalism” I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled “good” or “bad.” But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By “patriotism” I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseperable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

January 14th, 2011 :: Year 8, Issue 2

Jan-21-2011 | Comments (0)

Followups

* Claiming Loughner for the Other Side A pointed peck by Sparky the Penguin in the “This Modern World” cartoon

* The Endangered Tiger Mom. Amy Chua’s WSJ advice on raising kids went viral last week (remember, you heard it here first!). Notable reactions include Chua in the New York Times, backing off a bit. “In retrospect, these coaching suggestions seem a bit extreme,” she writes in the book after describing how she once threatened to burn her daughter’s stuffed animals if she did not play a piano composition perfectly. “On the other hand, they were highly effective.”. Betty Mingliu leads her reaction with, “Parents like Amy Chua are the reason why Asian-Americans like me are in therapy”, and (old friend) Larry Solomon gets called out by Philip Weiss for pointing out that Jews have won more Nobel Prizes than the Chinese, and suggesting maybe that’s why Chua married a Jewish man.

8. The Boomerang Effect: When the Universe Strikes Back

Nov-05-2010 | Comments (1)

Bird’s Eye: The Boomerang Effect^© occurs when you throw something at someone and it comes back and hits you in the face. Three examples will serve to get the idea across. Yesterday a foolish editor at Cooks Source Magazine explained, very patronizingly, to a woman that it was legal to plagiarize her work because it was on the internet, which has no copyright rules. The Internet responded, full force. Off to the Maldives, where a video of a wedding ceremony turned out to contain much cursing of the bride and groom, who (???) had opted for a ceremony in a language they didn’t understand. But when they posted the ceremony on Youtube, people translated for them, and a hearty debate ensued. And Zadie Smith has a short, short story (under 1000) words about lending money to a friend. Like all of her work, it’s well worth a read.

* Today’s Web Justice Driveby: Cooks Source Magazine - Boing Boing

Cooks Source Magazine editor Judith Griggs is getting a lesson in journalism via the internet today. In 2005 LJ user Illador posted a piece called a “Tale of Two Tarts.” Then she found out through friends that Cooks Source had apparently lifted the piece. They published it uncredited after doing some editing to the original. After making reasonable requests for rectifying the matter, Monica got this from the editor:

But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!

The Cooks Source Facebook page is alight with flames this morning.(And 58 other recently discovered examples of their plagiarism are here)

* Maldives Hotel Apologises Over Marriage Blessing Abuse The Guardian

The Maldivian foreign minister issued a grovelling public apology today to a Swiss couple who thought they were being blessed at an idyllic beach ceremony but were in fact being referred to as “swine” and “infidels” in the local tongue. Police are investigating after a staff member at the Vilu Reef resort substituted marriage renewal vows with a stream of extreme sexual and religious slurs in the local Dhivehi language.

The public relations disaster unfolded after someone uploaded a video of the ceremony on YouTube, threatening the Muslim-majority country’s reputation as one of the world’s most exclusive tourist destinations. “You are swine,” the unwitting couple were told. “The children that you bear from this marriage will all be bastard swine. Your marriage is not a valid one. You are not the kind of people who can have a valid marriage. One of you is an infidel. The other, too, is an infidel and, we have reason to believe, an atheist, who does not even believe in an infidel religion.”

The Exploited Maldives ‘Celebrants’ Are The Victims Here, Not The Swiss Couple | William Sutcliffe The Guardian

Thirty-two years after Edward Said published Orientalism, the debate he started, about the west’s patronising and glib pseudo-appreciation of “eastern mysticism”, has acquired a delicious 21st-century twist. This eight-minute video says it all. Jaded atheist westerners who want something “spiritual” in their lives think they can find it by hopping on a charter plane eastwards. A renewal of the marriage vows – a ceremony whose avowed purpose is to inject a spark of interest into a flagging project – can be spiced up with a sprinkle of spirituality, in much the same way that a dull meal can be livened up with a pinch or two of Tesco curry powder.

* The Trials Of Lending Money To A Friend Zadie Smith The New Yorker

We did our exams. We went to university. Christine fell pregnant. But she had her baby and carried on: finished her degree, qualified as a teacher, had another child, continued being remarkable. Whenever I was in England, we would meet. She told me of her grownup life, and I marvelled. I told her of my latest mishap. When I fell out of my bedroom window, when my flat burned down, when I dropped the house phone and my cell phone in water on the same day (toilet, vase), when I electrocuted myself cleaning a light switch—Christine extended me the charity of believing that it was because my mind was on higher things that I made a mess of everything else, an explanation my own family discounted circa 1987.

4. And One State to Rule Them All

Oct-22-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: What do Germany and Israel have in common? (No, besides that.) Both are currently defining the single right way to be a citizen, which excludes the others, be they immigrants or Palestinians. First we have the facts, and then analysis, starting with Germany.

* Merkel Says German Multi-Cultural Society Has Failed - Yahoo! News

Germany’s attempt to create a multi-cultural society has failed completely, Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the weekend, calling on the country’s immigrants to learn German and adopt Christian values.

Merkel weighed in for the first time in a blistering debate sparked by a central bank board member saying the country was being made “more stupid” by poorly educated and unproductive Muslim migrants.

“Multikulti”, the concept that “we are now living side by side and are happy about it,” does not work, Merkel told a meeting of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party at Potsdam near Berlin.“This approach has failed, totally,” she said, adding that immigrants should integrate and adopt Germany’s culture and values. We feel tied to Christian values. Those who don’t accept them don’t have a place here.”

* Against Merkel Juan Cole Informed Comment

German Chancellor Angela Merkel over the weekend declared “multiculturalism” dead in her country and demanded that labor immigrants be assimilated, through German language and German culture.

This sort of discourse has a long and ugly history in Germany and it derives from a set of mistaken premises. An important strand of modern German political philosophy has tended to see the state as weak and fragile, and as easily toppled by criticism, dissent, and difference. The opposite has tended to be true in the past two hundred years–governments most often are much stronger than society and are hard to challenge.

* Israeli Cabinet Approves Loyalty Oath for Non-Jews Tikun Olam

I’m actually heartened by the formulation of the loyalty oath which the rightist Israeli cabinet approved today. It compels only non-Jews to swear loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state and doesn’t make the same demand of new Jewish citizens. This makes the proposal, almost guaranteed of approval in the Knesset even more racist than it was when it enjoined every new citizen to swear allegiance to the Jewish state. This in turn almost guarantees the law will be overturned by the Supreme Court. If the Court does not reject the law then Israel is sliding down the slippery slope to a racialist state.

I was contemplating using the term “fascist” or even stronger but thought better of it given that there are those ready to pounce on the use of such strong terms, but a sitting member of the Israeli cabinet beat me to it:

Isaac Herzog, a Labor member of the cabinet, said the amendment was one of a series of steps in recent years that “borders on fascism. Israel is on a slippery slope.”

Even a Likud stalwart like Reuven Rivlin, Knesset speaker, sees the evil in this proposal, which he says is:

“…Provocative and [could] serve as a weapon for the enemies of Zionism.”

Gee, dya think?

* The State of Bla-Bla- Bla Uri Avnery Counterpunch (note: scroll down past ad)

Will Germany enact a law that demands that every Turk aspiring to citizenship swear allegiance to the “German Federal Republic, the Nation-State of the German People”? Sounds like a ridiculous idea. Will the US Senate adopt a law that would compel every candidate for citizenship to swear allegiance to “The United States of America, the Nation State of the…” Of whom? “The American People”? “The Anglo-Saxon People”? “The Christian People”? An absurd idea.

But the Knesset is about to enact a law that demands from every non-Jew who desires Israeli citizenship to swear allegiance to “The State of Israel, the Nation-State of the Jewish people”. It seems that our benighted law-makers do not see anything questionable about this. What do we have here? What is the reason for this gaping lack of self-confidence?… Is this public in the grip of a deep inner anxiety? Does it need a daily dose of tranquilizers in the form of recognition of its state, the State of Bla-Bla-Bla?

IF I were asked to swear allegiance to the “Nation-State of the Jewish People”, I would have to respectfully decline. Perhaps by then a law will be in force that will cancel the citizenship of Israelis who refuse this demand, and I shall be demoted to the status of permanent resident devoid of civil rights.

October 8th, 2010 :: Year 7, Issue 33

Oct-08-2010 | Comments (0)

Why Tikkunista?

“I’ve been putting Tikkunista out into the world for seven years, and from time to time I wonder why I do….” Your editor ‘s thoughts about this magazine.

Followups

* NiqaBitch(The Guardian) Just when you thought the niqab ban story had no more legs, it goes burlesque. Two French women have taken it upon themselves to register their opposition to the niqab ban in France by covering their faces but baring their legs in miniskirts. The duo, who call themselves NiqaBitch, have posted a video where they stop traffic and turn heads and sashay in heels down the streets of Paris….Somehow, the trite juxtaposition isn’t as lowbrow as one would think. Like a good advertisement, it makes a clear, simple, powerful point…. the public’s reaction is less unfriendly than usual because it’s clear the two women are not wearing the burqa for religions reasons, which highlights the Islamophobic aspect of opposition to the niqab. At one point a policewoman asks for a picture. Once the law comes into effect, she will be obliged to fine them. It proves that covering up per se is not the point. It’s what it entails, and what value judgements we then make based on that – a tenuous position indeed from which to legislate against any form of dress.

* A fascinating China Matters post focusses on the political tensions raised by China’s rapid assent up the world power rankings. A lot of matches are flying around the Chinese tinderbox. Fortunately, most parties involved seem more interested in scoring political points than making a genuine and risky effort to push back China. However, as the example of Sarajevo tells us, sometimes wars happen when nations become prisoners of their own posturing. So it’s worthwhile to take a careful and critical look at what’s happening in China’s backyard with U.S. allies Japan and South Korea and wannabe regional partner Vietnam, and the political circus surrounding valuation of the RMB.

* Things you don’t need to do. Abseiling into a live volcano certainly belongs on that list. Watch , and avoid. Via boingboing. “Lava lakes are extremely rare, extremely beautiful and obviously extremely hot. One of the most spectacular is in the crater of Marum volcano on Vanuatu in the South Pacific. You’d either have to be extremely brave or extremely crazy to try abseiling down towards one…”

6. How the Human Mind Works

Sep-10-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s-Eye: A fascinating (and looong) NY Times article looks at evidence that language shapes how we think. Some sample topics are differences in how bridges are perceived between languages in which “bridge” is masculine as opposed to feminine. In some languages all directions are based on cardinal directions, and people are always oriented and aware of which way they’re facing. An eye opener. By contrast, half a million “OKCupid” users described themselves, and someone did a look at the phrases different groups (by race) used most often. Then they analyzed writing level, by race, and by religion (Protestants are the lowest in literacy; atheists the highest). Funny and fascinating. And reassuringly, we find proof that aging does increase wisdom, though that might be due to the Darwin effect, I suppose.

* Does Your Language Shape How You Think? The New York Times

The idea that your mother tongue shapes your experience of the world may be true after all. Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. …When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

* The REAL ‘Stuff White People Like’ « OkTrends

We selected 526,000 OkCupid users at random and divided them into groups by their (self-stated) race. We then took all these people’s profile essays (280 million words in total!) and isolated the words and phrases that made each racial group’s essays statistically distinct from the others’.

For instance, it turns out that all kinds of people list sushi as one of their favorite foods. But Asians are the only group who also list sashimi; it’s a racial outlier. Similarly, as we shall see, black people are 20 times more likely than everyone else to mention soul food, whereas no foods are distinct for white people, unless you count diet coke.

* Does Age Really Bring Wisdom? The Washington Post

What constitutes wisdom? Ipsit Vahia, a geriatric psychiatrist at the University of California at San Diego, says it “involves making decisions that would be to the greater benefit of a larger number of people” and maintaining “an element of pragmatism, not pure idealism. And it would involve some sense of reflection and self-understanding.”

These qualities appear age-related. A recent University of Michigan study on aging and social reasoning tested people in three age groups, the oldest being 60 and older. Presented with a fictional geopolitical conflict, participants specified what they thought would happen and why. Igor Grossman, a social psychologist and lead researcher on the study, and his team sorted the answers into six categories of “wisdom-related thinking,” including searching for compromise, admitting uncertainty and finding flexibility. The oldest group earned the highest wisdom score in each category.

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4. Revisiting the Holocaust

4. A Post-Black, Post-Jewish, Post-National World?

January 14th, 2011 :: Year 8, Issue 2

October 8th, 2010 :: Year 7, Issue 33

Why Tikkunista?

6. How the Human Mind Works

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