#like yes doctor who has ALWAYS explored topical and political issues | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

Visit Blog

Explore Tumblr blogs with no restrictions, modern design and the best experience.

Fun Fact

US Tumblr user growth rate is estimated to slow down to 4.1%.

#like yes doctor who has ALWAYS explored topical and political issues

mermaidsirennikita · 3 years

Note

You recently mentioned a podcast that did a episode (or episodes?) on princess Diana, can you tell me the name of it I can't seem to find that post? Also any podcasts you are listening to that you recommend? Tnx!

Yes, for sure!

The podcast is You’re Wrong About--they do a 5 part series on Diana, but cover a hugely varied range of topics and people. The general premise is that Mike and Sarah are close friends and also journalists, and each episode will have one research a topic and then basically debunk the general preconceptions society has about the subject. They talk a lot about political topics or recurring media issues... Off the top of my head, I’d recommend the series on Diana, but also their ongoing O.J. Simpson series (which has recently had new episodes uploaded), the 2 parter on Tonya Harding, the Anna Nicole Smith episode, and their series on Jessica Simpson’s memoir... Lol it’s a very varied podcast but if you’re interested in misunderstood women, it’s great.

I read a lot of romance novels and listen to podcasts that kind of tackle romance as a genre and offer recommendations. Heaving Bosoms, in which two close friends Erin and Melody keep their friendship alive by reading and recapping romance novels together, is HILARIOUS. Their chemistry is great and you never have to read the book to enjoy their recaps, which I enjoy. The other romance novel podcast I love is Fated Mates, which is done by Sarah MacLean, a bestselling historical romance novelist, and Jen Prokop, a romance critic. It’s also very funny and makes me think a lot about media that is made for female consumption. I also get a ton of book recommendations off that podcast, as they kind of go topic by topic versus book by book.

If you like true crime, gotta recommend All Killa No Filla--it’s done by Rachel Fairburn and Kiri Pritchard-McLean, two English comediennes and friends who basically run down a serial killer every episode. They detail the crimes very frankly, but always provide warnings and are frankly hilarious. But the interesting thing is that I never feel as if they lose their empathy or are exploitative, and you can tell that they make a real effort to learn and be respectful of people (I don’t like My Favorite Murder, but I like this, for context). For example, in early episodes (from like 5 years ago) they use the term “prostitutes” a lot, and have since discussed why that’s incorrect and have switched to “sex workers”.

In terms of True Crime, I would also recommend Over My Dead Body, which is a Wondery podcast that kind of devotes different seasons to different vendetta type crimes that gradually explode. This actually covered the Tiger King story way before Netflix ever did (and imo, covers it better). But there’s also another season about a pair of lawyers divorcing--it’s just good.

Dr. Death is really good. There are two seasons, and both are about different doctors that committed gross medical malpractice. It’s a great look at the fucked up conditions in the American medical system that allow these doctors to get away with horrible crimes. Bad Batch is another Wondery podcast with a similar topic; but it’s less about singular doctors and more about companies that produce stem cells and one instance in which people were horribly injured by their greed and incompetence. There’s also The Drop Out, which is about the Elizabeth Holmes scandal.

The Secret Room is a weird but fun little indie podcast in which the host basically listens to people telling their secrets that can range from like, “I was in a BDSM master/slave relationship for seven years” to “my family was prominent in the KKK”.

You Must Remember This is a podcast on Old Hollywood and the various secrets therein. Different seasons focus on different topics--my favorite is Jane and Jean, with contrasts the life of Jane Fonda to that of Jean Seberg. Fun fact: the podcast host is Karina Longworth, who is married to Rian Johnson.

I really like Jonathan Van Ness’s Getting Curious podcast. He explores different topics and interviews experts about basically anything and everything. Kind of like You’re Wrong About, it’s a good shot of information about just about everything.

Hope you can find something fun here! :)

#Anonymous

7 notes · View notes

firelord-frowny · 4 years

Text

So like?? I’m still a baby as far as my familiarity with the Star Trek franchise, and so far, I’ve only really delved into TNG, DS9, and Voyager, but holy WOW, I haven’t ceased to be amazed by the incredible scope of topics and concepts and the boldness with which it dives head first into social issues that most shows, even by today’s standards, wouldn’t touch with a 40-lightyear-long pole.

The Star Trek Franchise has always had a reputation for being ~progressive~ and inclusive in addition to just being straight up beautifully written, and so here’s my dumb lil list of reasons why I think folks should watch Star Trek:

~Female~ characters are characters who happen to be female. Their femaleness is by no means ignored, but it’s also not The Point of their presence in the overall storylines. Women are captains and admirals and doctors and hailed scientists, and it’s not considered unusual or impressive. They aren’t “shattering stereotypes” or “proving men wrong.” They’re simply brilliant, powerful, and authoritative, and no one questions it. On the rare occasion that gender-based discriminatiton is mentioned, it’s usually within a context of “back on Acient Earth when humans were dumb as hell.”

The same is true for characters of color. Though the casts are still overwhelmingly white, characters of color are present, important, and respected. They’re engineers and scientists and security specialists. Also?? Off the top of my head, races/ethnic groups that have been represented as more than just background characters have included black folks, south asian folks, east asian folks, native americans, and I’m suree that doesn’t cover it. Also?? Actors of color also get to play aliens! Idk, I just think that’s cool, considering how people like to pitch a fit any time a black person is cast as a vampire or an elf or an alien or a native of a completely made up country in a world that does not exist.

A healthy, openly affectionate relationship between a black dad and his black son! This happens in Deep Space 9, specifically, between the main character, Captain Sisko, and his son, Jake. Their relationship is BEAUTIFUFL, and honestly, DS9 is worth watching for that reason alone.

Portrayals of masculinity are SO!!! HEALTHY!!! Male characters can be strong and tall and brave and protective of their families, all without also being gross jerks while they’re at it. And?? There are male characters who are more ~effeminate~ and literally no one cares. They’re short or thin or not physically imposing and they like to do soft, quiet things like drink tea or play the flute or sew clothing. They’re still respected and admired and their skills are valued and no one insinuates that they need to “man up.”

Likewise, when a woman is brash and loud and physical and strong and confident, no one tells her to “act like a lady.”

For the most part, human society has evolved beyond money, poverty, and violence. Earth is a unified planet, rather than a bunch of little angry countries yelling at each other. Humans almost unanimously view bigotry, discrimination, poverty, etc, as being primititve and repugnant. These values are obvious in how the human crew experience the various situations and alien cultures they encounter.

Since humankind is “beyond” issues like racism or sexism or religious discrimination and whatnot, the show examines these issues by having the crew struggle to navigate social issues between other alien cultures. They have this concept called the “prime directive” which more or less states that under no circumstances should they interfere with the development of less “advanced” civilizations, and it’s interesting to see them struggle to balance “minding their own business” with “maybe don’t let this planet commit genocide against that planet.”

Despite humankind’s and the Federation’s supposed high moral code, we still see many instances where their choices and actions are questionable, if not outright wrong, and we get to see all the philosophical and literal chaos it stirs up within the galaxy

Romance is rarely a Main Storyline, and even when it’s just a significant subplot, the parties involved always have more to love about each other than just He’s Hot and She’s Hot.

Healthy romantic relationships are shown in interracial couples, as well as couples where both peeps are black. DS9 even brings up some same-sex love and lust, though unfortunately it never lingered on the subjects for long.

Heavy Topics addressed include: transracial (transspecies, really) adoption, the validity of terrorism as a political tactic (yes, the bombing and killing kind), parents whose children die, children whose parents die, slavery, suicide, assisted suicide, religion and faith, lack of religion and faith, the definition of “life”, rights to self determination, bodily autonomy, capital punishment, torture, war and violence in the context of culture... the list is almost literally endless.

Cute/Funny topics addressed include: Humor and what makes things Funny, two Opposite Characters getting into wacky shenanigans together, trying to find the perfect gift for a loved one, miscommunication and how it causes hilarious chaos to ensue.

Basically, Star Trek leaves no stone unturned and deeply explores a lot of topics that I know are important to lots of peeps in my social circles here on tumblr, so like. If you’re running out of shit to do to pass the time while you hide from the plague, I deeeeefinitely recommend Star Trek. You can pretty much start with any series in no particular order, though once you start a series you’re usually best off watching the episodes in that series in order.

7 notes · View notes

ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is · 5 years

Text

MBTI, Mental Health, and Uncertainty

This is a long post but I think it might be one of my most important ones, and I hope you can take the time to read it.

In light of a couple recent questions I want to address mental health in a different way than in the PSA post. I do still stand by that post! But it was intended to be more along the lines of providing succinct encouragement with clear steps, rather than a means of providing deeper context.

MBTI is an unreliable way (at best) to deal with mental health. It was not designed for it. It has a few aspects that are useful in a limited way, which is honestly how I feel about MBTI at large - it is one tool in a very large toolbox, and it’s not necessarily the best one at that, and plenty of people get along fine without using it at all. (in fact if you’re not up to reading the rest of this post consider this paragraph my main point and the rest all elaboration on that theme).

On a larger scale, a lot of Tumblr advice is a terrible way to deal with mental health. I recognize I’m offering advice here on Tumblr but in general my statement re: all things mental health is that stigma, accessibility, and poor clinicians are all serious barriers to good mental health information and treatment, but that doesn’t mean that the more accessible options of “randoms on the internet” or “psychological theories with a strong internet presence” are a viable substitute.

I think a personal example may be helpful here, so: I have some very severe food allergies. I’ve had them my whole life. And I do fully believe that they’ve shaped aspects of my personality. In some ways, they’ve made me more cautious and desiring of control over my environment. They’ve pushed me to explore things like cooking. They’ve required me to become someone who plans ahead, who advocates for herself, and who’s comfortable saying a firm “no” to intended hospitality. They’ve given me some areas of anxiety. They’ve made me a faster reader. They’ve arguably contributed to my sense of humor.

If I could push a button and get rid of my allergies, I would, without question, because they are often a source of stress and inconvenience. But they did contribute to me as a person, and had I grown up and developed without them, I would probably be different in some ways - and I have no idea how exactly I’d be different. Would I be as fast a reader or as detail-oriented if I didn’t have to read ingredients lists at a glance? Maybe - I was a bookish kid. Would I be as responsible and assertive? Possibly - I’m an oldest child, I was always on the stubborn and independent side. But really, who knows?

I went to a doctor when I was in grad school for a check-up and a top-up of my epi-pen prescription. I said I hadn’t had to use the epi-pen in years. He mentioned that he had a friend with the same allergy who had a reaction once every year or so because he was a little scattered and a huge socializer and people-pleaser, and so he often had reactions to baked goods around the holidays - baked goods that I would unequivocally politely turn down. Same condition. Wildly different responses.

Mental illnesses or conditions are highly analogous to this experience - if they’re debilitating and unpleasant, even if they’ve caused you to develop in positive ways, you’ll be glad for those benefits but you may wish you could flip a switch and get rid of them.

But other conditions might be so central to your identity that you genuinely would not be you without them, and the issues that arise are because your identity is not well-accommodated in your environment

And while I can speculate on which sorts of conditions fall into which bucket (most people with depression would put it in the first; autism, for many autistic people, is in the second; this is a huge topic I can’t do justice here but you can even see this categorization in my language). But in the end, it’s a case-by-case choice dependent on the person with that condition. For more on the nature of ‘abnormal’ conditions and self-conception I highly recommend the Oliver Sacks essay “Witty Ticcy Ray” specifically, and his essay collections The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars. But if you can’t get to those my point is that people’s relationships with things that affect their cognition are complex and deeply personal.

So coming back to MBTI. Is MBTI the reason why I am vigilant and others with allergies are less so? Well, we don’t entirely know where type comes from, but maybe. Maybe it’s my upbringing, maybe it’s my inherent self, maybe it’s something else. We don’t know. I don’t know.

With mental illnesses, there’s a second factor. Allergic reactions are physiological and predictable- doesn’t matter what kind of person you are, if you eat the thing you can’t eat, your body will initiate the immune response. But when your illness or condition also affects your cognition, MBTI isn’t just a reason for how you respond to the condition. Your type, or at least your personality that you attempt to categorize into a type, is both influenced by and feeds into the outward signs of said condition. The outward signs of mental illnesses are themselves diverse! The PHQ-9 survey, a very common depression screening tool, doesn’t require that you display every single possible symptom - just a certain amount of them together (and even then it’s just a starting point for an individual follow-up. So we don’t know what’s ‘you’ and what’s the condition and what’s the combination thereof and even if you and the effects of said condition can really be seen as separate entities.

What this means practically is that figuring out how personality type, in any system, impacts mental health is an astronomically hard task, because both type and mental illness are best described as collections of a sufficient number of coexisting patterns of thought and behavior, not an absolute yes/no. If you’re trying to figure out yourself, again, MBTI is one of many tools and should not be your only point of reference - it’s a good starting point but at some point you’re going to have to leave it and jump into the vast unknown of what the self truly is (I feel very cheesy typing this but funnily enough I think Jung would back me up here). But only you can really do that. I certainly can’t do it for you.

Something that I think a lot of people forget is the origin of MBTI. MBTI was developed using Jung’s idea of cognitive functions as a starting point, and the catalyst was Myers and Briggs (her mother) noticing that Myers’s husband (an ISTJ) was really different from them (both high Ne users) in terms of personality. They took a theory because it matched what they observed in real life. I am unsurprisingly in favor of this. You want to know how people act? Interact with them! You can sum up larger trends in a theory, but it will always be a simplification of the infinitely complex truth. You can’t know how MBTI will make any one person act with any certainty - you can only guess.

Similarly, things like loops and grips are a bit of a one-way street. MBTI theorists observed that certain patterns of stress behavior tended to crop up more frequently in individuals of the same type and came up with names for them and a theory to describe why they may occur. This does not mean that the same behaviors cannot exist in people of other types. This does not guarantee that a person of a certain type and under stress will fall into a loop, a grip, or really do any specific action at all. As I have said many times and will say again, mental illness and stress have real, measurable neurochemical effects and people will ‘self-medicate’ (eg: seeking endorphin-releasing activities when unhappy), and type doesn’t enter into it (which is also why I think the advice to look at your stress behavior is not particularly good).

Finally, even if you are in a loop or grip, if you’re having a difficult time, a decent therapist will probably give you advice that isn’t out of line with MBTI recommendations, because there’s more than one way to come to the same conclusion! A lot of advice is broadly applicable - start with small steps and be gentle with yourself, for example. Play to your strengths - and you don’t need to know MBTI to know what you’re good at. You need to have a general sense of who you are and MBTI is a way to categorize who you are, not a way to do that initial self-discovery.

In conclusion: I know I sound like a broken record, but if you’re interested in human behavior at large please, please treat MBTI as one of many aspects of it. If you have the opportunity to take a class or do some serious reading about neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, sociology, or basic statistics I recommend it, and whether or not you can do those things, interact with people! Sitting behind a computer screen theorizing how an archetype that must necessarily describe literally hundreds of millions of people is not really a helpful exercise! “Go outside” isn’t a threat to be read in the tone of ‘get off my lawn’; it might be said in a mildly exasperated way but it is meant as an invitation to a vast resource that you are not using to its fullest.

#mbti #long post

23 notes · View notes

kootenaygoon · 4 years

Photo

So, I didn’t understand how Ed landed these stories.

It was the early months of 2016 and the Star newsroom was at its most productive. The four of us functioned like the spokes of a journalism wheel, content with our particular niches, but it was Ed who covered the broadest variety of topics. He was routinely publishing meaningful features that explored emotionally and politically fraught topics like sexual assault, environmental protests and the continuing clamour over an oil spill in the Slocan Valley. He was old school, gruff, and ploddingly efficient.

He biked to work every day. One morning I leafed through the pile of stories to copy-edit and found one that caught my attention. It featured a local doctor, Joel Kailia, who was scrambling to meet the demands of an ever-growing population of addicts. I’d been covering cannabis thoroughly but knew that a major gap in our reporting was with the remainder of the drug scene. More specifically, the fentanyl proliferation that was leading to a record-breaking number of overdoses all across the province. It was a story I wanted to tell, but didn’t know how to. I’d been re-reading Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari and I was beginning to feel a new clarity about my beliefs surrounding addiction.

“I didn’t even know there was a methadone clinic in Nelson,” I yelled over at Ed, holding up the story. “Where is it?”

He swivelled on his medicine ball, frowned for a moment, then described its location. The story said their were privacy concerns for the people accessing their medicine.

“This story is crazy,” I said. “So do they get the methadone for free then, or what?”

He smiled. “Why, do you need some?”

After the issue was put to bed, I thought about Ed’s story. He had powerfully humanized the methadone users, giving them a voice. You wouldn’t guess it immediately from his demeanour, but he was an intensely compassionate and somewhat radical guy. The style of journalism he was practicing was the type I aspired to, if I could get my shit together. I wondered how he had even heard about Kailia in the first place, how he’d figured out that particular angle for the story.

“I have a buddy who lives on the Downtown Eastside now, actually,” I told him. “He was a heroin addict for a bunch of years and now they give him methadone in a little cup of orange juice every morning.”

“Oh yes, it’s the same thing here.”

“It’s crazy to me, though, that we’re weaning them off one drug to just replace it with another one. I mean, I talked to my friend and he said there’s no plan for him to even wean off methadone, if he doesn’t want to. It’s basically a free version of heroin.”

Ed squinted, thought about that while he bounced on his ball. We chatted about the healthcare aims involved in methadone, the logistics of how it was prescribed and dispensed. Eventually I returned to the copy edit, only to turn around and effusively read a quote from Kailia out loud. “We still think they are making a choice in engaging in this behaviour, and I can see from the work I have done that addiction is not a choice. Even us, we feel stigmatized and isolated working in the addiction field. We have all been affected by addiction. By turning toward it and working together, I think that is how people get better.” Ed nodded. “It’s really important, the work he’s doing. And it’s saving lives. This fentanyl thing won’t be going away any time soon.”

After our conversation, I began to play with the idea of writing a column about fentanyl, methadone and addiction in general. The world of drugs has always held an intoxicating sway over me, and it’s been a passion subject since my younger siblings were adopted. Their biological parents had lost custody due to hardcore drug abuse. I started typing up my thoughts, including anecdotes from Chasing the Scream and some personal anecdotes while calling attention to Ed’s story on Kailia. I centred it all around Billie Holliday, the doomed singer and heroin addict hounded to death by Harry Anslinger.

“Will, you didn’t properly attribute this,” Ed said, annoyance in his voice. “You’ve lifted whole quotes from my story and included them here.”

I turned in my chair, surprised at his reaction. “I explain at the top of that passage that I’m calling attention to your story, your work.”

He shook his head. “No, I think we should be putting my name in there every time you’re using information from my story.”

“You know how repetitious that will sound? Your name will be in there like 4 or 5 times in just a few paragraphs.”

He took a deep breath through his nose. I watched him closely, concerned I’d stepped on his toes professionally. I meant this whole column as a professional compliment, but he didn’t seem to be taking it that way. I could tell that I routinely tested his patience, that he thought I was a braggart and an attention seeker. Our paths didn’t overlap that much, but when they did I felt self-conscious that I was wearing on his patience with my unprofessional conduct, impulsive decision-making and general recklessness. He was old enough to be my father, and it felt like I was disappointing him.

He sighed. “Okay, if you get my name into the intro paragraph and then work it in two more times, I’ll be satisfied.”

The Kootenay Goon

0 notes

ifitzpatrick · 7 years

Text

Doctor Who: Thin Ice Review

Writer: Sarah Dollard Director: Bill Anderson Starring: Peter Capaldi, Pearl Mackie

There are many things I continue to love about Doctor Who. I love when it addresses topics that you would never see in another show. In a very clever way, the writing touches upon something so slyly that you have to double take and go “WHOA, THEY DID THAT.” Thin Ice addressed something that I have been dying to know since Ten and Martha, something that I also kind of side eye when it comes to Doctor Who. That’s right folks, I’m talking about race.

Thin Ice was devilishly clever, mixing suspense, humor and humanity in one sweet hour that leaves you satisfied. Written by Sarah Dollard, who wrote Face the Raven, Sarah tells a story that doesn’t shy away from the history, but also critiques, analyzes it and punches it in the face! Thin Ice focus on The Doctor and Bill traveling to London, 1814. They were supposed to get back to the University right after the events of Smile, just in time to have tea with Nardole, but that doesn’t exactly go as planned. The Tardis gears them towards the Frost Fair, a festival over the frozen Thames. However, there’s something weird afoot when people start disappearing through the ice. Bill and the Doctor discover what’s really going on underneath the surface.

Bill Anderson joins Doctor Who in his directorial debut on the show in Thin Ice. He does an amazing job in directing this episode, especially in the underwater scene when Bill and The Doctor first lay eyes on what’s below. The whole sequence was definitely gnarly and plays with your perception, which takes skill. He’s going to be a great addition to the regular rotation of Doctor Who directors if this episode is anything to go by. One of the marvellous things Anderson accomplishes in Thin Ice is its colors. It’s laced in greys and blues, perfect for the dreary episode that literally is dealing with ice and death, in addition to the everlasting greyness of Regency England and the attitudes it holds. Those colors only become significantly lighter once everything is cleared up, which very much says something about the writing and directorial movement throughout the episode.

Pearl Mackie and Peter Capaldi continue to shine as they dive more into their student/teacher relationship, becoming closer and learning more about each other everyday. Or better yet, Bill learning more about the Doctor everyday. I adore this dynamic between them. It’s different for the Doctor and his companion in the best of ways because the Doctor is teaching her about stuff that she wouldn’t be able to find in books, only in life experiences and the choices that youmake. That becomes very important when Bill has to make the decision whether or not to save humanity. The Doctor can’t make that choice, he needs an order from her because they are herpeople and that’s her Earth. We’ve seen the Doctor do that before in Face the Raven, but the end result felt much more natural here. It’s also brilliant to see Bill and the Doctor bicker and fight with each other, but know that they’re pulling the best out of each other and with a smirk and a silly face, everything’s okay between them.

Besides the brilliance of the acting and directing, the one thing I pay attention closely to is the writing for Doctor Who. It’s honestly my favorite part for so many reasons, but we won’t get into that because I’ll keep you here all day. One of those important themes that Thin Ice addresses regards race. I know I’ve said this before, but I put it last purposely because it’s a big part of the episode that needs to be shouted from the rooftops. Sarah Dollard’s writing is just… oh man, I would hug her if I could. Thin Ice has addressed something I’ve always thought the show should address when you bring a POC into a time period where slavery or something else might be of concern. Bill steps off the Tardis and immediately knows it, saying, “It’s 1814. *points to herself* Melanin. Slavery is still totally a thing.” The acknowledgement that she is in a place where there is slavery made me smile so wide. The Doctor knowing that he has nothing to worry about just says, “Oh.” Even a bit later, a small conversation The Doctor and Bill have as they watch wrestlers and Bill’s observing everyone.

Bill: “Interesting.” The Doctor: “What is?” Bill: “Regency England. Bit more black than they show in the movies.” The Doctor: “So was Jesus. History’s a whitewash.“

So brilliant. Just like the conversation Bill and The Doctor have as they meet a very ‘important’ ‘man’ about information of what’s underneath the ice. The Doctor gives her a small lesson on her temper and then says, “Passion fights, but reason wins.” The guy (I don’t even want to say his name, he’s an a**hole) changes his charming demeanor for the Doctor as he looks over to Bill, who is sitting in a lone chair by herself and smiling politely. He then proceeds to say, “Who-Who let this creature in here?! On your feet, girl, in the presence of your better!” The Doctor, once the man turns back to him, punches him dead in the face because of his disrespectful tone and manner towards Bill. Passion both fights and wins.

I point these scenes out because these are the most important moments inside this episode. Yes, there is a greater scheme of things, the monster underneath the ice, but these are the moments of Doctor Who that completely get to me. Race has never really been addressed, especially with companions Martha and Mickey on board with the Tenth Doctor. It’s always been an issue that remains unspoken, but Sarah addressed it in a way that the audience would have talked about it. She writes it as a matter of fact instead of something to be glossed over and ignored in the story. I’ve always wanted to see that in an episode and I’m so happy that Sarah wrote it so everyone could see it. So, thank you Sarah, seriously, thank you.

Before we close out this review, we have to talk about the last scene, don’t we? Yeah, I wasn’t going to let you guys go without talking about that. After Nardole gives Bill and The Doctor their tea, he goes down to check on the vault. We’re still so curious about what’s happening inside that vault and it seems like it might be a bit til we get that answer. Yet, when Nardole goes down to check on the vault, four knocks hit the door. FOUR KNOCKS. So, if we want to create a bit of a theory (you know I f*cking do), we can probably theorize that:

1) The Doctor’s time is set to end soon 2) The Master knocks four times.

Billy helped me realize that The Master also knock four times. I keep realizing that I’m excited about the return of a certain character seen in the series ten trailer. I’ve also realized we are RIDICULOUSLY excited for future Doctor Who episodes.

The Verdict: Watch It! Series ten of Doctor Who is shaping up to be such a delight and Thin Ice isn’t an episode you’ll want to miss. The atmosphere and dialogue within this episode progresses Doctor Who far, but there’s still so much to be explored with these two characters.

Also, I’m pretty sure the Doctor just confirmed some stuff about Jesus.

#doctor who #thin ice #tv review #reviews

1 note · View note

funface2 · 5 years

Text

Column: Was a joke about putting kids in the microwave funny? Yes – Los Angeles Times

I think I’ve done everything at this paper except cover sports.

I’ve been a feature writer, a culture writer, a national reporter, a section editor. I’ve covered mass shootings, hurricanes, political campaigns, presidential conventions, Oscars, Emmys and film festivals.

I’ve written travel stories, obituaries and celebrity profiles.

But my favorite post is columnist, an assignment I’ve had at this paper, on and off, since 1992. It is a dream job.

Your work is to help make sense of this messy, beautiful world. You get to tell readers what you think, and why. You try to persuade, engage, enlighten and inform. All of it is an honor.

I am not immune to criticism, but I have a very thick skin. You may call me a bedbug, or worse. It won’t hurt my feelings and I won’t try to get you fired.

When I wrote for the California section, a recurring complaint from readers is that my political views had no place in the news pages.

“You should be on the opinion page,” they would say.

I have good news for the critics: The Los Angeles Times has finally put me in my place.

My first Times column ran in the old feature section — “View,” which became “Life & Style” before its final incarnation as “Southern California Living.” All those format and name changes were, in retrospect, a harbinger of the newspaper industry woes to come. Try as we might, we would find no magic formula to increase readership and advertising. The digital revolution upended all of that.

In the early days, I explored what many people would call women’s issues: sexual assault and abuse, reproductive rights, domestic violence, workplace discrimination and of course, parenting. They aren’t really women’s issues, of course. They are human issues, but my male counterparts here never seemed especially interested in those topics, so I had a lot of running room.

I also wrote about my personal life, hoping that my struggles and joys would resonate with readers, or at least keep them entertained. The greatest compliment I ever got was when readers told me they’d clipped my column and taped it to their fridge. (Does anyone do that anymore?)

Nora Ephron’s admonition — “everything is copy” — was my motto.

You soon learn, however, that everything cannot be copy; in the interest of marital harmony, for example, I gave my then-husband veto power over anything I wrote about him. He exercised his power judiciously.

My daughter, thankfully, was fair game. She couldn’t read yet.

When she was 3, I wrote about her intense tantrum phase, a shock because she’d been an angelic 2-year-old. I consulted her wry pediatrician, Harvey Karp, who would later go on to fame as the best-selling author of the “Happiest Baby” series of parenting books.

Karp always had the answers. Unlike 2-year-olds, who are clueless about their place in the universe, he explained, 3-year-olds have started to grasp that they are tiny and powerless, which creates anxiety, which can lead to outbursts.

He gave me a few tips, then added: “If all that fails, you simply have to go to the next step.”

“Which is?” I asked.

“Putting them in the microwave.”

The deluge of outraged mail accusing me (and Karp) of advocating child abuse confirmed what my English professor father had always warned: Unless you are a writer the caliber of Jonathan Swift, satire is very difficult to pull off.

I still think that microwave joke was funny, though.

Like the politics of so many urban, coastal Californians, mine are left-of-center.

Here are a few things I believe:

The job of government is to improve people’s lives. Corporations run the show. Gay and transgender people deserve equal rights. Racism, misogyny and patriarchy must be smashed, but never will be.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision was a disaster. Freedom of speech is seriously endangered on college campuses.

You can hate the way Israel treats Palestinians and not be an anti-Semite.

Republicans only care about deficits when Democrats are president. If Sarah Palin had looked like Margaret Thatcher, she never would have made it out of the Alaska governor’s mansion.

I do not consider the label “secular humanist” an insult; it is entirely possible to be a moral and ethical person without relying on religion, or believing in God.

President Trump is a cold-hearted con man who is not just ill-suited to the presidency, but dangerous to the world order. I hold with New Yorker editor David Remnick, who, shortly after Trump was elected, said the whole thing felt like a “hallucination.” Still does.

We do not need a wall on our southern border, we are not being invaded by Mexicans and Central Americans, and separating children from their parents who are seeking a better life is betrayal of the principles on which this country was founded.

No one should own military-style weapons; if you want to shoot an assault rifle, join the Army. When it comes to the American epidemic of mass shootings, mental illness, ideology and alienation may play a part. But the availability of these guns is the irreducible cause.

I pray every day for the good health of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford are heroes.

Over time, my thinking on some issues has evolved.

After covering the abortion wars for many years, including the 2009 assassination of Kansas late-term abortion doctor George Tiller, I no longer couch abortion as something that is tragic but necessary. It’s not tragic; it’s a social good. It allows women to control their lives.

I accept that vaccines have injured a vanishingly small number of children, but I am appalled by parents who place their feelings and fears above science. Gov. Gavin Newsom should sign the new state bill that puts greater scrutiny on medical exemptions.

I don’t stop talking to people just because they disagree with me. I have spent endless hours in conversation with people who sincerely believe abortion is murder or that vaccines are poison.

One last thing: I will not argue with you about tacos. There are already enough people at this newspaper doing that.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Source link

Bài viết Column: Was a joke about putting kids in the microwave funny? Yes – Los Angeles Times đã xuất hiện đầu tiên vào ngày Funface.

from Funface https://funface.net/funny-news/column-was-a-joke-about-putting-kids-in-the-microwave-funny-yes-los-angeles-times/

0 notes

swissforextrading · 6 years

Text

Empathy vs. the Machines

We recently welcomed two experts to Pier 17 for an informal conversation about the implications of new technology on ethics and empathy: Dr. Jodi Halpern, MD, PhD, is the UC Berkeley Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities, and Jonathon Keats is the principal artist behind Mental Work, whom The Atlantic has called a “multimedia philosopher-prophet.” Together, they explored how empathy can broaden the conversation around the impacts of tech and science — part of our SciComm Studio series inspired by the Mental Work showroom, and our continuing work exploring the emergent future of intelligent machines. We’ve condensed that conversation into key highlights below. On Philosophy Keats: I’ve chosen the job title ‘experimental philosopher’ because I don’t know exactly what it means. I decided to study philosophy because I wanted to do what I imagined philosophy to be as a child — going around being a pest. When I learned that isn’t really what academic philosophy is about, I chose to do philosophy on my own terms. I wanted to have conversations that weren’t limited to five other people with the same specialization, and I wanted to ask open-ended questions. The one mechanism I smuggled out of academia is the thought experiment. Essentially, it’s a way to coerce your opponent into agreeing with you by luring them into an absurd position. The coercion didn’t make much sense in my case, because coercion isn’t exactly open-ended, so I decided to take ‘thought experiment’ literally. I decided to see if I could undertake experiments out in the world, where I didn’t have a conclusion in mind. Instead the idea was to create absurdist alternate realities that people could experience together, in which everyone would be sufficiently disoriented to reconsider their opinions. Every project I’ve done has, in one way or another, engaged that methodology. ‘Experimental philosopher’ is a very old job title actually, dating back many centuries to before the advent of professional philosophy. I’m motivated by curiosity, in ways that don’t allow me to focus on a single subject, but to mix them in irresponsible and mutually enlightening ways. Halpern: I think we’re incredibly aligned! I also came to philosophy — I’m a psychiatrist, and studied philosophy of mind. My whole life has been about studying empathy. I was really shocked, in medical school, at how doctors were detached from the feelings of their patients. I became very interested in detachment, and took on every skill I could to attack the idea that you had to be detached. I studied the role of emotions in the beliefs we hold, and how to understand each other person’s distinct world and developed a model of engaged curiosity. Philosophy & Technology Halpern: Before modern science, before Descartes and the earliest sketches of the modern scientific method, in ancient philosophy, science and philosophy were sort of the same thing. Regarding our topic, both asked how one person could understand another person’s mind. Both took engaged curiosity to be central. In Aristotle, there’s this parable of a man staring at the stars and being so absorbed that he fell into a well. His curiosity was a motivation in and of itself. Today, research often has to be so immediately practical — to get grants and so on — that we lose touch with what science originally was. Keats: To me, science has become much more operational. It seems that science can benefit from considering why we’re undertaking the investigations that we are, and one way we can do so is by exploring alternatives — positing possible worlds. And what I say about science is also applicable to technology. Mental Work, specifically, is about exploring what might happen if we were to become cyborg. We’ve already allowed machines into our lives in so many ways without much thought; perhaps by taking a leap into the future and imagining how the future might manifest, we might be able to ask what kinds of technology we might want. Defining Empathy Halpern: In the clinical context, empathy is about certain moments of genuinely therapeutic interactions. Traditionally, it’s about being “understood.” I’m a bit critical of too narrow a definition of understanding, but there’s something transformational about being understood in a richer sense. What’s therapeutic about it — so far, this is my view — depends upon one person experiencing and internalizing another’s engaged curiosity. There are limits. Doctors always say “I know how you feel,” and that’s a bad thing to say because you don’t really know how other people feel. Each person is a world unto themselves. You can’t get all of the particulars of their individual experience. Keats: For me, empathy is related to theory of mind: The ability to appreciate that you can’t know what someone else is experiencing, and that what you are experiencing may not be identical to what someone else is experiencing. This is one of the great political challenges of our time. We seem to be losing whatever empathy we may once have had, and what’s coming into the world in place of empathy is xenophobia — an inability to appreciate how someone else might think, an inability to value what you can’t know. I’m investigating these questions in a new project called Intergalactic Omniphonics. Half a millennium ago, there was a Copernican revolution in the sciences that not only changed astronomy, but also taught us that we can run an experiment on Earth that can tell us about the entire universe. More generally, Copernicanism teaches us that there’s nothing special about where we are in space or time. But there had never been an equivalent revolution in culture. By ‘Copernican’, I’m referring to the act of decentering — where you don’t see yourself, your tribe, or your nation as the center of everything. To explore that idea, I’m making musical instruments that are potentially accessible to anyone in the universe — including aliens from other galaxies — and challenging our assumptions of what music is: the sensory, cognitive, and experiential assumptions we make as humans. What if you don’t have ears? What if we use gamma rays instead of sound? I’ve even invented a cello that modulates gravitational waves. Bridging divides is not about saying “I know how you feel,” but having an experience together. That’s the essence of empathy. Art & Philosophy Keats: I believe that philosophy and science — like most every discipline — have moved toward greater and greater specialization. That’s completely understandable and legitimate at one level: as you build knowledge, you get to a stage where any given individual isn’t going to be versed in all of it. The arts are the exception to this rule. Everything and anything can be art now. That can be detrimental, but also opens up enormous potential to explore any topic using any methodology. Art is a space that facilitates philosophy as philosophy needs to be done. The freedom given by the art world needs to be taken as a challenge to pursue curiosity in the most encompassing and inviting ways possible. Empathy vs. the Machines Halpern: We ask, can we empathize with machines, and can machines empathize with us? We can empathize with machines, yes. We can make a very simple stick figure that evokes empathy. There’s no question. But can they have empathy for us? I have two hours on YouTube on this question. Right now, we obviously don’t have AI, but in principle? I don’t rule it out. But the real question for me isn’t whether we can create therapeutic relationships with machines, but should we? AI psychotherapy, for example. The problem for me is if this machine-human interaction replaces transformational empathy between two human beings. There should be a co-vulnerability, a co-mortality. So now some people have heard my work and want to create a mortal AI! Keats: Can a machine be empathetic? Can an animal or any other organism? I think it relates to the issue of humans treating humans as special and privileged. Being open to the possibility of an empathetic machine can induce us to question our own self-importance. There’s also the matter of how machines can make people more empathetic to other people — machines as a mediators of relationships. In the past, I’ve often been inspired by philosophical instruments, mechanisms that can be used to confront complex ideas through interaction with a physical object. For instance, philosophical instruments were an inspiration for Mental Work. Ideally, what happens with a philosophical instrument is that people confront ideas together, leading to a relationship or conversation that can be generative of empathy through co-exploration of who we are. Technology & Empathy Halpern: Descartes, from the beginning, was really a technologist. There was this idea that the purpose of engineering science was to design solutions to problems. When it comes to ethics, experts often focus too much on utilitarian questions, which are focused on outcomes–the catastrophic, unintended consequences. But for most people, ethics is more about our rights and duties to each other. Not just the outcome, but how we treat each other along the way. We don’t have to wait 5 years to see what happens. We can look at how it changes the way we treat each other right now. A professor at Yale spoke to me, and said, you know, you could foresee this recent use of social media to silo people politically— the companies said the internet would make the world more socially connected, and this would bring people together and end tribalism. Well, the same was said about the telegraph and the radio. Each time we thought we finally had a tool to unite people across differences, but we didn’t ask the right questions. Both technologies actually worsened tribalism, helping stir up conflicts that lead to world wars. We keep making the same mistakes, imbuing technology with magical powers to change how we treat each other. Keats: Mental Work was inspired in part by my wariness about the Industrial Revolution, and how society took up industrialization without thinking through the consequences. Arguably we’re now on the verge of a Cognitive Revolution. In the Industrial Revolution, the machine could do what the body could do, but more powerfully and quickly. We’re approaching an era where the human mind may likewise be challenged by AI and rising computational power. So how do we navigate change and prepare for the future in a way that is as informed as possible? I want to make the connection between the Industrial Revolution and the Cognitive Revolution explicit with Mental Work. We can avoid the worst and most obvious mistakes by fabricating possible worlds to experience together — foundations for reflecting on where we’re going before we get there. We can negotiate the future we want, rather than settling on the one arrived at by default. Keep up to date with ideas, insights and events by signing up for our monthly newsletter. --- Mental Work installation photo by Astra Brinkmann for swissnex San Francisco. https://nextrends.swissnexsanfrancisco.org/empathy-vs-the-machines/ (Source of the original content)

#swissforextrading

0 notes

shanayakhubchandani-blog · 6 years

Text

FULL DRAFT!

In a time where parents are paying more attention to the way their oddlers and young children play and learn, there is debate regarding the way in which conventional toys affect their health and well being. Despite the fact that over one billion barbie dolls have been sold and played with worldwide and the fact that Barbie dolls have been played with and cherished by a multitude of girls from a variety of backgrounds for years and years, there is a sudden realisation amongst “millennial moms” and the media that she is setting up young children with unrealistic and unhealthy body expectations. So, although there is a widespread belief that young girls playing with Barbie dolls could actually be inimical to the perception of their self image in the future, there is reason to believe this is just an overthought and that the new generation of parents giving their children technology to play with instead is far more deleterious to their long term health.

In the Western World, there is a propensity to follow trends and everybody wants to be give their children the trendiest, most current toys. However, young girls have been playing with dolls for a while and although the vast number of dolls have evolved over time, the concept of playing remains the same. Children have their dolls and their doll house and use their imaginations to create scenarios in which the dolls partake in. It is easy to get carried away in these games and fantasise into very unrealistic situations, which is one of the most beautiful parts of having a young, impressionable mind. Barbie has been a key toy in many lives for a long time; “I can still remember the pure, sweet, unadulterated joy I felt the day my mother surprised us with the dream house. At the time, it felt like a dream come true.” (Living dolls. (little Black girls' development of self-esteem can be impacted by the kinds of dolls they are given to play with) - Randolph, Laura B.) In 1975, a study looking at the different types of toys in 1-6 year old girls and boys bedrooms was carried out, to find that “Boys had more spatial-temporal toys” (Characteristics of Boys' and Girls' Toys - Judith E. Owen Blakemore, Renee E. Centers) and “Girls’ rooms contain more dolls, dolls houses and domestic items”. This lead to “Boys’ toys are more likely to provide feedback to children than are girls’ toys. For example, toys such as slot car racers, radio-controlled cars, or electric trains respond to a child’s manipulation of the controls” Characteristics of Boys' and Girls' Toys - Judith E. Owen Blakemore, Renee E. Centers). So, boys toys being responsive means they have a reason to be pushing buttons and playing with things, whereas with dolls, most of the fun is left up to the child’s imagination. Though there is some reason to believe that whilst playing with dolls, girls start to compare their dolls lives to their own life, thus rendering a competition between the child and her doll, leading to the girl wondering why she doesn't look like the doll, and can't live life like the doll. For example, “The fact is, we know why little girls have always loved Barbie. Because she has everything little girls dream of--a Corvette, a beach house, a handsome boyfriend. But that's not the problem and has never been. The problem, as women have been saying for years, has never been about what Barbie has. It's about what Barbie doesn't have, which is anything remotely close to realistic body measurements.” Randolph willingly accepts the fact that imagination and playing with the doll itself isn't an issue, more so the aesthetics barbie possesses.

Though it may seem that young girls aspire to look and act like Barbie, Mattel, the company who created her has recently been doing a lot to change the preconceived idea of a Barbie doll as a blonde, skinny girl who just stays in her house all day. They stated "We want Barbie to represent a lifestyle brand for girls, not just a brand of toys,” (Barbie Girls Rule - Edut Ophira ) because they are aware that the average American child has…….. dolls, thus rendering Barbie a considerable part of their childhood. Mattel has certainly put a lot of effort creating dolls to be ‘more relatable’ to young girls in the sense that dolls suddenly now aspire to be doctors, and train horses, aiming to stray away from the image of just being a pretty doll. Despite this, there is still a concern that due to world’s conception of Barbie for the past 59 years, “ads telling girls they can "be anything" or "become [their] own hero" are only wrapping the Mattel message--buy our products now!--in a vaguely girl-positive package”. With from this critique, there is still hope that Mattel’s efforts to push for the comprehension of Barbie career dolls can be a success. Barbies careers are in the fields of education, medicine, military, politics, public service, science and engineering, transportation, arts and business, giving children a huge choice of dreams and futures to explore. The dolls in those fields are even more varied as we have Disney’s Caribbean Resort Greeter Barbie, to TV Chef Barbie to Veterinarian Barbie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbie%27s_careers). When the dolls come with a set of outfits and props appropriate to their career, it makes the playing experience more responsive, as instead of just being lackadaisical and prancing around as a Princess, the dolls have work to do, which leads to inspiring the children to gain more information about the career their doll has, hopefully by reading books. Another reason to prove that barbie is in fact not harmful to self image, is the new sized barbie and barbie dolls of different races alleviate most of the conventional unrealistic beauty concerns the media has about the doll. “Yes, it was a big deal when Mattel created P a host of other professional dolls that provide little girls with positive images. But this body makeover thing? This is major. Large. Huge in the extreme. In fact, if the reaction of my Sister-friends is any indication, since the news that the plastic princess is getting plastic surgery hit the papers, for women everywhere, it's been party time.” (Living dolls. (little Black girls' development of self-esteem can be impacted by the kinds of dolls they are given to play with) - Randolph, Laura B.) The fact that black barbie dolls were not released until 1980 highlights her position as “ a gendered, racialized icon of contemporary commodity culture” (Dyes and dolls: multicultural Barbie and the merchandising of difference) but gives us hope that she is moving with the times. Mattel’s marketing strategy for the release of different raced Barbie dolls was extremely strategic and arguably more financially driven than ethically. Product Manager Deborah Mitchell stated "now, ethnic Barbie lovers will be able to dream in their own image" ” (Dyes and dolls: multicultural Barbie and the merchandising of difference) but Mattel was also very aware that "Hispanics buy about $170 billion worth of goods each year, [and] blacks spend even more." , so creating Hispanc and Black dolls would only bring them more rand more revenue. Though these efforts are strong, ******* points out “If I could line up across the page the ninety "different" colors, cultures, and other incarnations in which Barbie currently exists, the fact of her unrelenting sameness (or at least similarity) would become immediately apparent.” (Dyes and dolls: multicultural Barbie and the merchandising of difference) There is no doubt that “Blonde bombshell Barbie is so much more than a pretty face. She's a multimillion-dollar empire; and Mattel estimates that three Barbies are sold every second” (Larger, brainier and more diverse: Barbie's radical makeover). After years of stereotypical perfection of a “pink-lipsticked smile plastered on her plastic face, her hair remained immaculate, and stress never took its toll on her skin, but in recent years, Barbie had let herself go.” , Mattel changed not only her face, but her body proportions, which seemed to be a contentious topic amongst the concerned parents. A study was carried out in which young girls were asked a series of questions and assessed to see how badly their dolls and the desire to physically replicate their dolls affected their self esteem and image of themselves. The findings were that ““Girls exposed to Barbie reported lower body esteem and greater desire for a thinner body shape than girls in the other exposure conditions. However, this immediate negative impact of Barbie doll was no longer evident in the oldest girls. These findings imply that, even if dolls cease to function as aspirational role models for older girls, early exposure to dolls epitomizing an unrealistically thin body ideal may damage girls' body image, which would contribute to an increased risk of disordered eating and weight cycling.” (Does Barbie make girls want to be thin? The effect of experimental exposure to images of dolls on the body image of 5- to 8-year-old girls.) So, the paranoid belief that playing with barbie dolls causes eating disorders has proven to be fairly untrue.

Although parents nowadays are unimpressed with the old fashioned connotations of barbie doing nothing and adding no value to their child’s life, Mattel has gone above and beyond to assure them that barbie is for all different races. all different sizes, and has an almost endless amount of dreams.

0 notes

konvolutes · 7 years

Link

So much good stuff by CEU colleague Mariya Ivancheva, but this bit on CEU is a wonderful self-critical history of the institution.

Mariya: Interestingly, between the time you asked me the questions and the time I answer them, things have changed dramatically for CEU – the Hungarian government of Victor Orbán targeted CEU with a bill that challenged the very operation of the university within the Hungarian polity. Despite an outpouring of international and national solidarity, including from very conservative Hungarian institutions and actors, and a 10.000 strong bilingual rally in Budapest on April 2, 2017, the bill passed the National Assembly on April 4th without much discussion, through a fast track procedure, and with over 75% vote of Fidesz MPs. Now, let us be clear, Orbán and his political allies have long shown they have no mercy for vulnerable populations — they have criminalized the homeless, caged and barb-wired refugees, and imposed disciplining workfare measures for the unemployed, while also not opening up new jobs, homes or futures. Universities and individual academics in Hungary have also long been under threat and exposed to growing repression and precarization, without much support from us in the international scholarly community.

What is really crucial in this instance is that Fidesz is not aiming for the “low-hanging fruit”, for the most vulnerable and precarious. It is targeting one of the strongholds of liberal thought (in both senses of “liberal,” but particularly in the European sense in terms of the institution’s senior management and branding). And this time, it seems no petitions, statements from political figures, op-ed-s in leading world media, and who-knows-what diplomatic bargaining behind the scenes can stop the reaction. How this battle will be decided seems to be less and less about CEU itself. On the one hand, the stakes are higher now that the Hungarian academics and students – in much more precarious situation income-wise and also in terms of their vulnerability to the Hungarian state power than most people at CEU – have stepped in firm support of the university. So the CEU community is not alone in this but the responsibility is also higher. On the other hand, the bigger question is whether the liberal establishment still holds any institutional leverage, or whether the future before us is rather that of existent and upcoming Orbáns, Putins, Trumps, and Erdoğans of this world…

But knowing how this same liberal establishment has acted when it was their time to save the homeless, the unemployed and the refugees, I wonder if it is their support that CEU should be eliciting … What steps will we take, as students and academics, to make sure that next time they come for another vulnerable group, we are there to support it with our own bodies, not half-heartedly and tongue-in-cheek-ly as it has too often been thus far? And yes, I ask this as self-criticism as well… Dark days…

But back to your question. The similarities between CEU and EUI that you mention are true, indeed, but there are differences worth exploring – perhaps a PhD thesis that someone else can write one day. The design of the two institutions was quite different. Unlike EUI’s endowment through EU funds and the understanding it would produce knowledge and expertise for the European Union, CEU was a privately endowed university. It was not initially designed to be limited to just one campus…The story goes that millionaire philanthropist George Soros conceived the idea of CEU after visiting the Interuniversity Center in Dubrovnik, which held summer schools including neo-Marxist social theorists from both East and West. Initially, those who developed the idea pictured the first campus in Dubrovnik, with more to open across the region. Yet the war in former Yugoslavia started, the building of the Interuniversity Centre was destroyed, its summer school practices were interrupted, and the Western Balkans became a non-viable context for a new university. So the first campuses opened in Central Europe, which was more politically stable and more acquiescent to demands by international organizations for a transition to liberal democracy and the free market.

Budapest and Prague were the two first campuses. Later the Prague campus closed, and some of its programs opened in Warsaw, but by the early 2000s the Budapest campus remained the only one in function. CEU had two key characteristics in that era. First, its faculty included many former dissident intellectuals from East-Central Europe – liberal intellectuals who entered politics in the 1990s but then withdrew either into academic or into expert careers. Second, for the first fifteen years, CEU’s mission statement said that CEU was to train the new generation of political decision-makers in the post-socialist world. So there was this understanding that through short-term post-graduate degrees, students from the region would absorb Western liberal ideas about democracy, law and order and free market society, and then they would go back home to implement these ideas in their own countries.

I entered CEU in 2006 at a very specific time, when all these three components – the multiple campuses, the dissident core of faculty, and the idea of CEU as training ground of post-socialist political elites – had been taken off the ‘menu’. Under the late Rector, Yehuda Elkana, the university adopted a new identity: that of a research-intensive university that competes for global ranking and produces globally relevant scholarship, moving outside the narrow focus on regional political and social processes. The focus on 1 year MA programs gradually declined, while doctoral programs and research-intensive 2 year MA degrees were expanded, sometimes in consortia with other European universities. This helped satisfy the requirements of the Bologna Process, and of national and international accreditation processes.

So then, with few exceptions – faculty members recruited at the university were increasingly those who could live up to the ever more demanding and geographically uprooting standards of an international academic career. Thus, former dissidents were marginalized within the university. The student profile and career trajectories were changing as well. By the time I entered the university, the majority of the students were also not aiming at a political career, but were decided to stay in academia or work for the public sector. These were, more often than not, children of professional classes from the region: people ‘downclassed’ income-wise either during state socialism or at some or another point after 1989. Many of us had stayed completing a first degree in our home country, and could not afford an MA or PhD abroad unless fully funded. At that point in time, both Western and Eastern European public universities were increasingly introducing fees – so CEU became one of the only universities which offered a scholarship to most MA students and fully-funded PhD programs.

When I arrived, the Department of Sociology had just been moved from Warsaw and all its faculty had been dismissed. It had reopened as a Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology in Budapest, attracting scholars with geographical and topical expertise far beyond the region and with degrees from top American and European universities. Instead of emphasizing regional expertise and policy-oriented knowledge, students got introduced to debates on neoliberal capitalism, globalization, international urban and rural development, memory and religious studies, and this ranged across sites as distant as the US, Latin America, Africa, and South East Asia.

Entering this department at this time has been extremely formative for me in many ways. In the first class I audited, one of my professors, Don Kalb, described himself as ‘crypto-Marxist’ and spoke against capitalism. That was a shock for someone like myself, coming from a liberal personal and intellectual upbringing in post-socialist Bulgaria. Other faculty were no less radical in their statements and political lines, excavating concepts of class, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, bourgeois state, political resistance, revolution, and further notions that the post-socialist universities in the region have swept under the rug of the ‘transition to liberal democracy’. During my Masters’ degree, I was one of the students who initially rebelled against what I thought was an uncritical acceptance of Marxist theory and the dismissal of the department’s regional focus. I initially saw it as diminishing the local relevance of CEU for the region and the region’s relevance for CEU students after graduation.

Yet, in a steep learning curve, I was soon to realize how the new approach — coupled with sensitivity to issues of gender, race, and a more refined contemporary world-systemic reading of concepts such as class and capital — gave us critical tools to explain our Eastern European reality. This was a reality that we as students and intellectuals of the periphery, in what Alexander Kiossev has called auto-colonising gestures, simply discarded and looked down upon as ‘shameful’, ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘backward’. Staying at CEU for my PhD, I was one of the first students of the department to leave East-Central Europe as a field-site and focus on Latin America. In my PhD thesis I used Marxist theory, comparative historical sociology, and political anthropology to critically examine Venezuela, a new socialist regime in the making. Although I’ve shifted fieldsites subsequently to Ireland and now to South Africa, East-Central Europe has remained always my key intellectual and political context, which I speak back to through my scholarship and activism, e.g. through the political platform LeftEast, where I am a member of the editorial collective. But I have also realized the importance of breaking through geographical divides in knowledge production, in search of comparable or contrasting historical processes.

The new cohorts who have entered CEU’s PhD program in Sociology and Anthropology after the economic crisis in 2008 often come with already shaped Marxist political thinking. Perhaps this is a combination of their getting degrees abroad with the opening up of Eastern European academia to this Marxist theoretical legacy, which was condemned or left in oblivion for two decades. Many of us – regardless of the geography of our field-site – have been using our scholarship for applied interventions in political and social struggles in the region. And it is, interestingly, precisely CEU – a privately endowed, elitist institution – which, through its generous funding and open intellectual atmosphere, has allowed a lot of quite radical debates to take place. Even though portraits of liberal thinkers as Karl Popper and Ernest Gellner still hang in the halls, to remind us of its past and the strife of its senior management.

But for me – as I recent said to an academic in the region decrying CEU as an outpost of neoliberalism – CEU is as any other university, a site of struggle. I prefer to have Popper and Gellner listening to student defences – where neo-Marxist and second-wave feminist thinkers are not even the most radical authors cited – and rolling in their graves. As an unintended outcome – perhaps of what Nicolas Guilhot has called Soros’s dialectical thinking – CEU has allowed the majority of people who call themselves Left in the region to emerge from its halls as faculty or students, without political repression. So when defending it today, it is not the institution as an uncriticizable bloc that need to defend. Rather, we need to defend our right to carry on challenging it from within, against the whim of an autocrat to just close it overnight.

On autonomy in the university

Eli: I loved your problematization of academic “autonomy” (particularly in “The Discreet Charm of University Autonomy” and in your joint paper on academic freedom with Kathleen Lynch). This has been a major issue in French higher education as well, where “autonomy” has been construed in very deeply opposed and ideologically laden fashions — new autonomy for institutional management has come very much at the expense of the collective autonomy of the traditional scholarly disciplines. What’s been the reaction to your efforts to produce a more politicized, feminist, anti-racist, “caring” notion of autonomy, or to show how it can in fact end up becoming a conservative tool (as in the anti-revolutionary “autonomous” universities in Venezuela)? Do you think that recent anti-precarity efforts, like #precanthro, can help revitalize the notion of autonomy in spite of the uncertain economic underpinnings of the current academy?

Mariya: So, in both papers, the main thesis – seen through my fieldwork in Venezuela, and through processes happening in traditional academic institutions in Western countries such as Ireland – was that current debates on academic autonomy speak only of autonomy from the state, but not of autonomy from the market. So, while academic autonomy and freedom are especially treasured in struggles against authoritarian regimes, often movements which demand them are much less alert about market processes that enter higher education. Thus even in liberal regimes, academics demand autonomy from the state, but often to avoid regulation and public responsibility, not to get a respite against market forces. In liberal market regimes, academic autonomy often becomes a way to perpetuate privilege and refuse public responsibility. This is especially visible in Venezuela, where it was used by anti-Chavista academics to entrench themselves in the traditional higher education system, and to refuse reform and massification.

And then, not to flog a dead horse, but to bring my own cherished alma mater, it was sad to see that when the CEU senior management came to struggle against Viktor Orbán, they did not underline their extended service to the community and the relevance of their programs, but rather their international ranking and their standing on the prestige market. And this while the university community – CEU but not only – has been put under increasing pressure to (self-) monitor its ‘research excellence’ through meaningless or narrow quantifiable criteria. There’s pressure on permanent academics to fundraise and publish-or-perish. There’s pressure on temporary research and teaching staff to follow these incentives and work almost for free. And there’s pressure on students to be happy they are given an education despite the often outdated and colonial curricula, and the demands to pay fees that put especially ‘nontraditional’ students at risk of ever growing debt. So academic autonomy is already under massive threat from the market, but the only threats we notice are the ones from the state even in instances when it tries to regulate against the market… Of course, if we discarding the relevance of academic autonomy, we deny the struggles of academics working in repressive regimes. But hyperbolizing and extending it beyond proportion contributes to keeping the university in its own elite confines. So then, what autonomy do we want? How can we achieve another as you put it, politicized, feminist, anti-racist, “caring” notion of autonomy — or I would add, a decolonized one? It’s a challenge, but a worthy one.

#academe #bookshelf #CEU #higher education #Central Europe #Hungary

0 notes

philosphim-best-comments · 7 years

Text

William's recipe for a peaceful world.

Skirmishes in the Natural War.

Dedicated to and Refuge provided by EJP.

The Dialogue:

Arises from a series of written discussions with Elinor concerning the concept of "female archetypal violence".

William's volley:

We discussed the behavior and social learning environment of girls approximately 12-16 years old. It is in this period women learn how to use inclusion and exclusion power. The atmosphere is one in which belonging has a high premium. Groups (cliques) become one of the important means for self-identification which also parallels the maturing need for individualization. This skill is one that involves the power and the judgment of exclusion and inclusion. The skill is learned in a highly competitive arena not dissimilar to the physical arena which is the natural gauntlet of the male. Many women feel that this brings out the worst in the female nature.

In the terms of "female archetypal theory" the underlying situation which inspired this dialogue can represent itself as an example of the “tooth mother”. The tooth mother is a seducer who invites the victim into the web with a promise of intimacy or closeness and then does the sidestep or disappearing act when there is a test of the relationship. The seductive nature of the promise of belonging or inclusion is then paired with a slight of hand disappearance or perhaps denial or rejection when the chips are finally called in (or when the boundaries are tested). Women learn during that period (12 to 16 years old) the power which excluding and including can bring and the exhilaration of remaining above the chaos and disappointment that it produces. In the abstract this seems interesting but not very significant. However both of these are true and the lack of significance is the most important.

Elinor's response:

As to whole heartedly agreeing with your premise -- chunks of it yes. But I guess my effort is towards introducing the female perspective. Not with the intention of saying female violence does not occur, because I do agree with that premise, but helping to make the argument more sound. Been thinking about the use of the word "war". My hesitation comes from my [discussions with male friends] . The idea of "war" crops up in all sorts of contexts. For example, the aging male body and being at "war" with it. Family struggles -- feeling it's not "controllable" and therefore losing the "war". I think the term "war" is particularly connected to male identity wrapped up in "performance" and "being in control".

For women, the metaphor of "war" for one's connection to the world (and one's body) seems wrong. The idea of controlling what is happening to you and in the world around you -- don't think that's a female concept. I'm thinking of Tolstoy and his book War and Peace. It was many many years ago that I read it, but from what I can remember, what impressed me.... His discussion of Napoleon, he was successful -- he didn't just lay out a plan and expect his troops to fall into line. He was more of a weather analyst -- figuring out which way the winds were blowing, where there would be weather trouble spots, and then attempting to maneuver his troops through and around that. Although I've picked an iconic male and a "war" to illustrate a female perspective -- still think that shows how women navigate the world. My point here is -- if the word "war" is strongly tied to a male perspective, if we want to achieve balance in this discussion, i.e. include female perspective, then what would be another word that describes the places where male /female interaction occur? Got my thinking cap on.

Next response:

Male vantage point: (as expressed by [william]) "The tooth mother is the seducer who invites the victim into the web with a promise of intimacy or closeness and then does the sidestep or disappearing act when tested. The seductive nature of the promise of belonging which is then paired with a slight of hand disappearance or perhaps denial or rejection when the chips are called in... In the abstract this seems interesting but not very significant. I will be arguing that both of these are true and the lack of significance is the most important."

In the war between men and women, men may very well be oblivious to this particular power exercised by women. From a male perspective, women magically and rewardingly appear, and at the next moment, punishingly disappear. In the teenage world of young women this exercise of power is made painfully explicit to the victim. In the sphere of male/female engagement, this exercise of inclusion/exclusion remains discreet, less identifiable and therefore less likely to garner an immediate physically violent response.

William:

1. It seems that what you (Elinor) said is not incompatible with the following scenario.

2. Women between ages 12 - 16 learn the art of inclusion/exclusion.

3. his art is very effective against males who had none of this training or perhaps aptitude.

We have an example of how nasty this power is in somebody we know well. During teenage years they got passed around as a prize in the exclusion/inclusion war zone. Women don't fair well in the war zone and men get slaughtered.

Elinor's thoughtful conclusion:

I would add: both sexes pass through a "trial by fire" period. Both brutal and both often wounding the participants. For men it's a trial of who is the strongest, most straight (accusations of being gay) Etc. For women it's who can be most popular, be included in cliques, can wield the sword of banishment most effectively. Add to the male trial: who can administer a physical beating and come out on top.

Post discussion:

Talking to the victim who was at the core of this discussion has yielded some more thoughts. He remarked that before we had an in depth discussions of this he had felt victimized but that had been lost to the feeling that he had really been the author of his own misfortunes. When he felt that he had been responsible for his own demise he stopped thinking about what had been done to him. I pointed out that he was in the hands of experts at this craft. The boundary dissolution was aided by people trying to master that craft. It is kind of analogous to saying to a female, who has been victimized by more powerful male thugs, that the real answer is to work on strength and fighting skills and that alone provides a real solution to the issues. This culturally does not seem adequate and thus we have a set of laws and customs that try to protect females from the male advantage. So the equivalent would be to tell males to become better navigators in the realm of inclusion/exclusion politics. This is not likely helpful. This is only really learned and honed by the gauntlet of growing up in the female realm during those formative years.

Just as men had to for the good of culture and civilization reign in their superior physical prowess it is incumbent on females to examine their own power and find the appropriate way to protect the planet from it.

In the next section I will attempt to build the conceptual framework in which the above discussion lives.

The Concepts

“Male Archetypal Violence” (MAV) (60% of the time employed by males)1 is overt. Wars, battles, royalty, the military receive most of their powers from this type of violence. The amount written on this is often called history. “I had no chance they just...” can be said by the victim.

“Female Archetypal Violence” (FAV) (60% of the time employed by females) is much less known and even lesser understood. The victim often says “I knew better but...” This essay will first define then attempt to build a scaffolding on which future thought can be hung. Then make a convincing case of the importance of this issue and finally issue various apocalyptic pronouncements. (I.E. Pursuit of this issue might lead to world peace through the evolution of civilization based on the cultural integration of this violence).

"Hello World". A computer landmark which designates a certain place in a process. This place might be a completion, close to a completion or even fairly close to the beginning. It generally signifies that your environment has been correctly setup so now work can be done. The setup can be difficult and therefore this can be quite an accomplishment. Or this can be quite a matter of fact stage with all the important work to follow. In my case this essay represents 45 years of preparation without a promise of success. This particular one is atypical in that this, is the latest stage, and represents a completion and perhaps closure.

"Hello World"

[A dream] I was in a study/dining hall of a place like Oxford or Cambridge. This was a beautiful sun lit room with stodgy furnishings. Many chairs, table crowded the floor space but the room had marvelous high ceilings such that the overall impression was spaciousness. There was a Chinese scroll unfurled on the floor. It was very long and passed by many chairs. As I was trying to roll it up the doctor (Johnston) was holding the far end and shaking it, making it very hard for me to accomplish the roll up. I was quite irritated.

The present chapter started with a meeting with a psychiatrist (the doctor from dream). I was trying to choose one for my son. Since I was to pay for it I was trying to assess this recommended doctor. I happen to throw out that I also could use some help with a topic which from time to time had become important to my life. The doctor said that he had thought and wrote about similar things and that we might try some sessions.

The topic that I brought originally sounded like: I believe that there are types of violence that men suffer from, at the hands of women, that are not well described or understood but have a profound effect upon them and that they have very little defense against. This state of affairs exists both because of men's pride and nature. This is little explored to the detriment of men and their relationship with females and the world. It had always appeared to me that generally men lost in the relational world and would resort to the destruction of the relationship in lieu of struggling with the violent forces that resided therein. I presented this to the doctor saying that I wanted to explore this topic, that I was susceptible to this form of violence, and that if he could help me clarify this situation and make progress towards the writing down of my thoughts that that would provide the basis for a therapeutic relationship. I was shocked by how much writing and work the doctor had done on topics that were related to my central concerns. I had in my life not found anyone besides myself who had done any analysis of related topics. In my opinion the doctor had developed a framework in which my felt sense of the situation found a home. I felt exhilarated and optimistic that finally I would make some progress towards my life goal. (Which is) the destruction of the conceptual universe by freeing men's thought from their dependence on female acceptance (inclusion)2. Of course, this has not yet happened and I may be deluded as to the importance of these concepts. However this is a voyage I have decided to take.

Definitions and Scaffolding

"In the same way that present cultural energetics blind us to the positive power of the receptive, they also shield us from its less savory aspects. When we think of violence, we most readily imagine physical or psychological assault. Yet there is unquestionably as much potential violence and deception in the receptive[female archetypal violence] half of rhythm as in the expressive[male archetypal violence]" The Creative Imperative, p252, Charles M. Johnston.

"In patterns of receptive violence, we hear echoes of those destructive descendent forces which I called the suffocating mother and the tooth mother. In the first...is a bit like... tar baby. Expression brings not expressiveness, but entanglement and insatiable need. Rather than being received...sucked in...sucked dry..melodrama….” The Creative Imperative p252

“ ...One way of looking at pseudo-receptivity and receptive violence is that they are ways to attain the creative energy of another without reciprocal vulnerability.” The Creative Imperative p252

"These forces are violent at very least in the sense they suffocate and confuse men's ability to bring fairness and justness…to a relationship" William T P6 essay 1983

Definitions

--- tenets as worked on in many sessions with Charles M. Johnston---

"Female archetypal violence" is both distinct and statistically more predominant in biological females. (60/40 ration)3

FAV is based on an enforced oneness at the expense of the others (victim's) boundary. Needs to be agreed to by the victim. Agreement is fundamentally unconscious (part of its potency). The buying in thus represents a dissolution of boundary.

Female archetypal violence is hidden and very difficult to see. Expression in the culture is indirect (not by thought) as novels, poetry, artistic and culture expressions. For example it represents the basis of advertisement which could be seen as a dissolution of boundary with the promise of belonging and perhaps entitlement.

The "creative system" 4theory of personality which generated the female archetypal violence framework would assert that everyone along with many different inclinations and traits will have within them elements of female archetypal violence. These elements will be difficult to see, understand, or grasp and the power that they have are enhanced by its covertness.

Most importantly an understanding of this hidden form of violence is the next step in the advancement of whole person relationship.

---- end of tenets -----

Since this is archetypal female violence it seemed, by the doctor, appropriate that females would be the one to create the analytical literature that surrounds this concept.

Idea History:

My dilemma - So here I am in 2017 an explorer in the realms of female violence from the late 60's (ever since I met women's liberation in Lethbridge, Alberta) onward. I wrote two essays in the 80's and yet I struggled to find a framework for this violence. I had to rely on my own experience and my many discussions with other men to derive an approach to what I could clearly see. I speculated that this was emotional violence. With the result that emotion pretty much always won out over thought in the relational world. This 60's belief was fueled by an attitude that emotion was closer to the truth than thought. It was more natural and closer to our authentic nature. It just so happened to be in the feminine realm. However instead of an emotional utopia what I see are relational talents which are then leveraged to become violent. Many friendships ended for me when I mentioned that I was exploring the nature of female violence. These thoughts were drowned in a sea of emotions (sometimes screaming), sometimes just a warning not to proceed. This to me is thoughticide and never was acceptable to me. As a result I have felt very distant from the world for many years.

"Shared living spaces! We consider "Mens things" to be juvenile, banal or plain stupid. When moving in together his things "Need to go." Bachelor pad "garbage" is ridiculous! His feelings of sentimental desire to hold on to the pieces of himself that are reflected in his belongings are belittled. He's not sentimental, he is trying to hold on to memories of his singlehood, the grotesqueness of a man living without the guidance of a woman to pick out tasteful items! Absolutely not, toss the shit out your saved you have a woman now!

[My current husband] was so shocked at my acceptance of his things, that to this day he will describe a struggle that never happened when people comment in pure disbelief that there are things in our home that would normally be banned to the shop or study if we had one. A framed hockey jersey and sports figurines in the shared living space, as if the space belongs to him as well as me. I always have to say, "that was a different girlfriend, I never asked you to take your stuff off your walls and shelves!" I just assumed I was moving into his space that he was sharing with me. Now it is our home with our things. Every year when we break out the Christmas ornaments he will ask permission to hang his ornaments. Every year when I look at him like he is crazy and say "Well of course you should!" his response is "Finally after all these years I can hang them!" He is so trained that his things are stupid and unacceptable ( Yes I hate his ornaments I think they are stupid but have never said so, but they're looney toons characters!) That he like blocks out that they have been on all 8 trees we have shared! His ex had a themed tree every year ie:all red and silver or all blue etc. His things were to stay in the box and never blemish HER beautiful tree that she decorated so he could enjoy a beautiful tree.

How would a woman react if when her and her partner went to move in together and he laughed at her things and said "Oh no missy, none of that shit is coming in here. Toss it out, that is all stupid bachelorett garbage. Don't worry I know how to decorate right!" Of course it would never work, she would be angry and insulted. Her things have value, they mean something to her, she picked them up with thought and feeling. Or maybe it was a gift, maybe it reminds her of that day....! [My current husband] was willing to put his shit in storage, he was ready and willing to put it away and expect no empathy or understanding from me. Because in this world, that is how moving in together works! Even when the first time I came here as a visitor, he spent 15 passionate minutes telling me about the framed Jersey. I could have banished it to a closet without batting an eyelash, and he would have pretended it was ok, he should understand how important it was to me to not have dumb things like that hanging around! "Unhooked" 2012 Nikki S. unpublished memoirs

The Logic of Pursuit

In my 80's essays I commented on the female cultural orientation towards relationship which leads them to have developed much greater abilities both to build and then tear down within that arena. This is analogous to the male who in general is able to build or tear down a boat or a skyscraper or even a concept . I had theories that this was set up developmentally by ”the logic of pursuit”.

"A devastating logic of pursuit set up men initially to lose in the relational world. The logic of pursuit is a baptism of steel and fire at the gates of relationship. In this milieu men learn to suppress feelings of weakness and fear. This game or the threat of this game insures that men will be emotionally off balance and ultimately will not be in touch with their feelings when their aid is required. Men only somewhat survive when the object of pursuit is well intentioned, agreeable or benign. Under stress men will be forced to rely entirely on reason which is clumsy, slow, and fairly inadequate tool for successful relational navigation." W.T 1982 p5 "Romanticism and the assault on male value"

Men who are basically socialized to be the pursuer were good at the hunting and capturing phase of the relational world. However this involved a distortion of their selves (lies and bravado (false/otherwise)) in the subsequent civilized relational part they were not so much at home. The deception which allowed relationship to first occur now becomes a hindrance to intimacy. One result of the initial foray was that within relationship the lack of initial disclosure became something which hindered flexible and natural behavior going forward thus leaving them to be easily out maneuvered to the point of damage. Where on the female side disclosures of weakness and vulnerability are expected, perhaps even encouraged (as they gives men a place to fit in). Thus women come to the relationship with much less hidden. They do not have to spend so much energy in self censure. This further increases the emotional facility gap. These are of course generalities but we have a culture in which men are generally disadvantaged in relational navigation.

Meeting the Doctor

I met the doctor who had a structure and a conceptual framework for understanding what this particular talent was composed of. It fit my basic model. My model said that this type of violence resides mainly in the female realm, was hidden and was the enemy of thought. The doctor provided the terminology of "female archetypal violence" which resides most predominantly in the biological female in the ratio of 60/40 (biological females use female archetypal violence 60 percent of the time and male archetypal violence 40 percent time while for biological males the ratio is reversed). FAV is basically hidden and received its power from that trait. It defeats or confuses boundary. The doctor extended my understanding by showing me that this type of violence must have an element of self-infliction. The boundary which is breached must be at some level of consciousness agreed to (an unwillingness of the organism for separation or exclusion). The doctor did not hold the same emphasis I had that this was a assault against thought. However when a violence of this ilk is finally understood the conclusion often comes out like: “I knew better but I still allowed it to happen.”

Considering potency

Even though at first glance it seems like there is only a slight predominance between men and women in their utilization of FAV. However it actually nets out to a very great potential difference in potency. It is easiest to understand this point by analogously looking at MAV which has the 60/40 ratio in men. Its use might be in that ratio but its form is much more effective in the biological male. This potency in the male archetypal form is much more demonstrative (in your face) which is the nature of MAV anyways. And if you see male archetypal violence in the simplest physical form. The destruction of the other by force simply demonstrates that the superior physical strength of the male realm produces a much more potent variety of this violence . Their physical strength gives them an advantage which in general is very hard for the biological female to overcome. And even though men in general use this form of violence only slightly more then the female part of the population, their use of it is much more effective. It is so effective that a body of culture (I.E. you should never hit a women: oft transmitted from father to son) and law try to neutralize this advantage. The similar type of situation exists on the receptive side of violence. Though females use FAV only slightly more than males would use it, their use of it is much more potent. A father might smother his offspring in attempt to keep them in the fold but he cannot compete for a title in the smothering mother sweepstakes. The male just doesn't have the biology/culture to often effectively be both helpless and yet domineering in the same breath. Here the weakness is just as important as the subsequent strength. The other common form of female archetypal violence is called the tooth mother. The tooth mother is the seductress. Promising union and oneness while cleverly giving very little away. People become the pawns of such violence as their investment is high based on the false air of invitation and intimacy. Most assuredly the wielding of this is much weighted in the biological females favor.

What happened to the thought

I have great issue with the lack of truly analytic or structural analysis in the female archetypal realm. However since female archetypal violence is basically a violence directed against thought it is not completely surprising that thought about it would be at a premium. And that it would appear to most keen observers that a black hole in this regards exists.

�� The war against thought

Perhaps the lack of coherent thought on this topic is the most compelling argument for its essential essence being an assault against thought. The definition of female archetypal violence is that which dissolves boundaries and requires the victim to engage in self-infliction. Therefore a boundary of this type which can be compromised by FAV violence must be at least somewhat consciously breached. This type of internal object must have some thought or thought like structure. Without a definable structure, something that could be identified when confronted or elucidated, there would be no sense in saying its dissolution was self-inflicted. A fully unconscious boundary at least in terms of female archetypal violence is no boundary at all. A conscious boundary implies both structure and abstraction. This type of entity is either thought or thought like.

The smothering mother extinguishes the nascent thought of its victim. This extinguishing cannot exist without the willingness of the victim. One might still hold thoughts of independence or escape but these thoughts do not result in action, only regret and ultimately self-recrimination. In the relational world this exists as a threat of banishment, exclusion or as a tool to suppress discussion, analysis or consideration.

The tooth-mother, the seductress has a different thought assault methodology. Here there is an assumption of belonging. A creation of a one-sided myth. The seductress dulls are skepticism or critical evaluation. We are encouraged to create an imaginary union in which the perpetrator gets undeserved special status. We treat this person as special and in the final analysis they treat us as one of the many adulating and exploitable fans. We have given up that which would demand a careful and rational negotiation for the dispersion of our own resources. At some point we wake up and realize there is no balance and that was given is substantial and what is received is ethereal.

The cult mother (my own extension of the theory) directly tries to destroy or inhibit any thought that is counter to its world view. This is an enforced oneness often using MAV. MAV in service of FAV. (MAV) Threats of expulsion or harm paired with an implied or real carrot of inclusion (oneness; welcoming back to the family; or redemption). In my case this was to a posited relational reality. The effective threat of exclusion was used to squelch my opposition usually delivered in a very shrill voice. In some major aspects women's liberation of the early 70's operated with this cult like ferocity. Women's emotional facility was seen as much closer to reality than the abstract thought world of the male. So the female was grounded on an unassailable truth. Mostly men could only contribute to the dialogue if they had no qualms about the negativity that was heaped generously upon them and were willing to be part of women's liberation auxiliary unit. It was also necessary for them to believe that in the relational world it was men's violence that was the only truly significant factor. What a women would/could do or had done could not be compared to the violence that they had suffered at paternalistic hands. When I tried to say that I believed that the female types of (emotional) preferred violence (now known as FAV) was potent and needed to be taken seriously I mostly received shrieking. Sometimes I received pronouncements to the fact that mine was just male abstract thought and it was not to be tolerated. Either way I shut up and realized that I was dealing with irrational violence. I basically walked away with my own feelings and experience of being male and stuck to my belief that we were dealing with only half the story. The one sided analysis that I was presented was not possibly accurate. The cult bulldozing was successful as I was silenced. It was easy for me to accept that most of their claims of male's unacceptable attitudes were emotionally true even if their analysis was flawed.

Extreme MAV sounds like pilfering, bullying, robbing, torturing, killing. If we were to imagine a scenario of male archetypal violence it might look like: He came into my house by breaking down the door, then he robbed me, molested my family, pushed me around and destroyed a great deal of valuable furniture before fleeing in a screechingly fast car. There is not a lot more that needs to be understood. The violence is obvious and overtly in your face. This is sometimes considered the violence of the two where the victim is completely other and therefore expendable. There is no sense that the other is connected to you at all and that its destruction implies some loss for yourself and for your humanity.

FAV further explored

In contrast female archetypal is the violence of the enforced one. It creates a sticky, false and unbalanced or overwhelming oneness at the cost of the vitality and independence of the other. This at its root more accurately and surprisingly could be described as a violence against thought. The victim has their thought suppressed or destroyed. At some level this must happen with permission of the victim in the psyche of the victim. The smothering mother, the tooth mother and the cult mother have developed within a milieu of a monumental amount of thought (cultural history and social gauntlet) to be correctly conceived and executed. They must for example be understandable in terms of boundary dissolution, covertness, indirectness. Their expression is anecdotal or culturally literate. Both the mechanism and the rewards are often unclear.

Often it is only on later reflection that this type of violence is recognized. So at its core this type of violence demands a great deal of introspection and contextualization to become understandable. And given that much of its power comes from it's hiddenness it is easy to see that analytical thought about this is going to be very difficult.

Elinor explained that the perfection of this type of violence is the result of a great deal of planning and practicing. The two main components of this is the realization that women are physically at risk in the world. This is coupled with the fact that they are told they must be a certain indirect way for the good of the world, society, family. They cannot directly confront what they perceive as either not right or not true. Women are therefore forced to come up with a covert way of coping and thriving in the world. This task demands planning, conceiving and negatively scheming in order to pull off either a coped or thrived existence. The victim of this has their boundaries dissolved; these boundaries are of a thought like nature. For it is only type of structure which is truly identifiable in consciousness. And this structure which is thought or thought like is destroyed by tools which are created by a considerable amount of experiential practice. Archetypal female violence is such a violence, a violence against thought. If I read the previous paragraph to my wife she would correct some of my excesses. The scheming aspect is very minor while the analysis, thought, testing, hypothesizing and verifying that goes on is much more central to the situation. My wife mentioned that she had not grown up with brothers so men were not really something that she had to learn to deal with. She had gone to visit her relatives in Puerto Rico and was confronted with boys who were out of control and realized that to deal with such forces that planning and experimenting would need to take place. In this atmosphere men were to be handled and controlled with the minimum amount of effort. Men were out of control hulks that needed to be managed. There was little empathy to be found here.

“Our incompatibility is BIG! It extends into so many areas, I was originally just thinking about sex, how women view male sexuality. Even that takes off in several directions, we love it hate it, deny it and use it. But it isn't only sex, it is just about every aspect of our lives. How in the world do we share the planet with each other in our constant power struggle? Even to suggest to a liberal woman that we have little empathy for men could get me strung up!” "Unhooked" 2012 Nikki S. unpublished memoirs

“Women have reigned supreme in the relational world since the beginning of the courtly love tradition [a cult like structure]. When they (i.e. Eleanor of Aquitaine) dictated what was acceptable behavior for the civilized court and the social world, Men seem to accept it silently without struggle. Men who now have had a long history of losing in the relational/emotional world, have and will escape inevitably into the power of the more abstract, business, war, or thought realm.” “Romanticism and the assault on Male Values” 1982 W.T. P4

Biology

It would be a mistake not to believe that biology is at the root of the issue. The biology provides the engine, the power.

“I thought women have no idea how this damages and hurts our men. For most women, sex is a want not a need. We can take it or leave it. We can tell our husbands we don't want to do it anymore, but you should still hold me, hold my hand stroke my hair because I need that. Our expectation is that he should react as if we just said I no longer want to use the shower any more, I'm just going to bath from now on because that feels better to me. But I think for men sex is more of a need, part of their health and well being, Not so much like we will die without food and water, but somehow more important than women (most) understand. Then when men are upset about the lack of sex most women don't see the pain and damage, that the person they trust to love them and meet this need denying them causes. They see them as selfish and cruel expecting them to give up their body for the selfish male want. How dare those men! We expect all the empathy to be on the male side, understand "I love you, but I suddenly find myself repulsed by your need to be inside me, even though I used to love it. Just hold me and love me the way I want to be loved because my revulsion of sex hurts me! Hold me and understand me, and for gods sakes don't try to tell me how this denial of sex hurts you! Because this is all about me and my need!" "Unhooked" 2012 Nikki S. unpublished memoirs

This topic has no thought!

Once the four tenets (60/40 split, oneness, victims agreement, hiddenness as power)had been agreed upon there was a foundation. I then worked on getting the best answer that this culture could produce as to why this violence continues unchecked and unheeded. I believe that the doctor (because of his already demonstrated sophistication in these matters) could be counted on to represent the culture most convincingly.

Before I met the doctor this topic had been a vague and disturbing black hole . This is no longer true. The three mothers intertwine to create a real context in the analytical realm of this issue. The cultural stuff erupts into consciousness with a high volume of plays, poems and other expressions which when pondered can be seen as elucidating instances of FAV. For the doctor and this culture, this has been at least tacitly deemed as sufficient material on this topic. The doctor did express some hope that there would ultimately be a female commentator on these matters. In terms of analytical matters there is an added reason which explains the lack of a framework of understanding. The topic by nature resists thought and its power is derived from being in the shadows (one of the tenets). So from my vantage point that is the best that our culture has so far presented.

Even the paltriest of subjects have much discussion and if controversial, involving judgment or morality there can be volumes. So why does this topic have so little? The doctor’s answer is that there is no lack here and that this is congruent with the indirect nature of the issue. Its expression is indirect residing in literature, art and popular culture. This fecundity to me is not reassuring as it simply points out that the need for tough analysis is long overdue. I would say that thought is not very much present here and these cultural manifestations are in fact an anathema to thought. In culture “advertising” is the main negative archetypically feminine manifestation. Advertising lives on the ability to convince us that the road to belonging and achievement is through acquisition and materialism. Get into the Pepsi generation. Step into the now. Show the world that you have distinctive and refined taste. The promise of inclusion if only you would be a consumer participant. This can only be effective if the norm is a sense of exclusion and disenfranchisement.

“[My current husband] was so shocked at my acceptance of his things, that to this day he will describe a struggle that never happened when people comment in pure disbelief that there are things in our home that would normally be banned to the shop or study if we had one.” N.S (sited previously)

There would need to be some cultural evolution of understanding based on and accounting for the indirect material, before I would even begin to believe that this has been appropriately digested. I wait for literature that expresses the relational dominance to appear. I don’t believe there exists another issue of this gravity of which there has seen so little conscious cultural evolution. The recognition and integration of the archetypically female both positive and negative in the doctor’s and my perception represents the next step in cultural evolution. The next step in interpersonal evolution involves the recognition and integration of the female archetype both negative and positive is something that we both agreed on. For the doctor this will happen naturally and in a generation will be part of the culture analogous to gay rights 20 years ago. For me the topic has not advanced since the courtly love tradition and I see little evidence that this is about to change. While the issue hides in the shadow it is in need of a very strong flashlight. The interpersonal relational environment is toxic to males and needs a deep cleansing. I believe the doctor’s argument to be just a smokescreen of avoidance of many necessary skirmishes in the natural war.

To (the better) half the world:

The shadow side of the archetypically masculine is very well known. War and all its friends. The archetypically female also has a shadow. It is this shadow that lacks substance. In this essay I am trying to convince men both of the reality and scope of a violence for which they have almost no understanding, defense or cognition. I have historically lacked the ability to convince them not to stick their heads in the sand at a very basic level. It is a hostile environment for men out there. And the understanding of that has never been in vogue or sanctioned by our culture. It is understood both by N.S. and Elinor that men are in a ridiculous situation which is not to be envied, ridiculed or profited by.

As you can see it is hard for me not for one last time try to convince men that there is a problem and that they might be effective if they would consider it. I think what Elinor has demonstrated, that though she understands the reality of the female behavior as being not understood in its negative aspects yet she also has a very hard time going into a detailed explanation of how this works. But she sees outbreaks of the consequences in the negative image of maleness that plays itself out in this culture. She agrees that this thing is not without importance and yet is understood little.

Eleanor of Aquitaine told men that they were not welcome in civilized society or with a woman unless they changed their behavior towards women and made themselves clean and worthy.

“One story is that in her effort to shed her rough knights of their unruly ways, she made up a mock trial in which the court ladies sat on an elevated platform and judged the knights, who read poems of homage to women and acted out proper courting techniques. The men wore fancy clothes - flowing sleeves, pointed shoes - and wore their hair long.” http://www.womeninworldhistory.com/EofAreturns.html

Men did not disagree with the pronouncements. The courtly love tradition and romantic love as we know it was codified from this powerful historical watershed. At that point there should have been a dialogue about the other side. What should women do that addresses the equal nastiness on their side of the ledger? Men are very much in touch with the out-front archetypically masculine type of violence and extremely aware of its negative side and consequences however on the female side (they and we) have no such understanding. There is barely an acknowledgment of how much hostility is directed towards men. The lack of sympathy which basically exists for the male predicament which is seen and justified but not understood in all its nasty and psychotic cultural presence. Women are not in touch with their negative possibilities in a coherent way. This both damages men and limits some of the essential power and potency of what the archetypically female should bring to the cultural table. So I ask women to struggle with this with very little idea about how that is done. At some level it means create one more skirmish in the natural war.

Women’s liberation has essentially sounded like this through it’s 45 or so years of existence.

"there was a time in which humans did not know of any exploitation, whether it be of man by man or of woman by man. This period was known as matriarchy."

“Violence against women widespread in US

Why do so many women face this form of oppression?”

By Eman Khaleq

January 26, 2012

“Any increase in awareness of rape and violence against women can only be attributed to the efforts of the organized women's movement.

A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found that one in four women have experienced physical violence from an intimate partner. Researchers also discovered that for nearly 70 percent of women who were victims of some type of intimate partner violence, it happened for the first time before age 25. Sexual violence, stalking and intimate partner violence are widespread in the United States but are rarely ever addressed.

Violence against women rooted in class society

The origins of violence against women can be traced to the “world historic defeat of the female sex,” as 19th century German socialist Frederick Engels called it.

Before the emergence of patriarchy and class society, there was a time in which humans did not know of any exploitation, whether it be of man by man or of woman by man. This period was known as matriarchy. This does not mean women were superior to men, but instead there was an absence of male supremacy and the line of descent was established through the female, not the male.

Engels referred to this stage of society as “primitive communism” because the means of production were primitive, based on hunting and gathering, but the social group worked together as a whole to ensure the survival of all its members.”

From: http://pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/violence-against-women.html

Conclusion

You can see my response in 1983 to 15 years of women’s liberation influence which had and still has a very strong influence in academic circles. I have come to realize that this is another coming of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Females stand up to tell men that they are unsuitable to be in the presence of women unless they get rid of their chauvinism, their paternalism, their exploitation, and their regard of women as sexual objects for their ownership and gratification. When I confronted women’s liberation In Lethbridge Alberta in approximately 1968 I was immediately drawn in. I was embarrassed by men’s treatment of women and was glad that these attitudes were going to change even if it was much surface dressing. At least it was less overt and therefore made my life less painful. I also basically agreed with the negativity that was being expressed. I saw that paternalistic economy was ultimately something that forced me to be the bread winner. I also found it disgusting to see women as sex objects. I could see how much distress it caused women and did not want to be part of that.

At the same time I could not believe that men did not also have a story to tell as I did not see men faring well either. What was expected of them in relation to women became so arbitrary and unpredictable that it created an amazing amount of angst and turmoil. I was often told by women that I was not macho enough for them though I was always dating on the edge of women’s liberation movement. This basic disconnect made me very suspicious of the one way diatribe that was women’s liberation. But when I expressed my reservations I was shut up and shunned. As a man I could not accept that a topic was off limits. Men are abstract thinkers, historically, so where was the thought on this topic. When women’s liberation was born there was a strong anti-thought attitude but I was a philosopher so I did not accept this level of negativity and have kept thinking on this issue for the last 49+ years. Women’s liberation basic tenet that the personal was political has always impressed me as being true. So I have always believed that when men decide that they have a plight in this and that should be known that it should also be profoundly political.

William C. Teskey Feb 6 2017

Elinor's addendum:

Men vulnerable because: unaware; need to be loved as refuge from brutal male world but can't openly acknowledge this. Vulnerability seen as weakness in men. Also, men as protectors and defenders, involves a feeling of unworthiness -- self sacrifice for a greater cause.

MAV: Loyalty to a cause (Male Archetypal Violence)

The destruction of the conceptual universe by

"Freeing men's thought from their dependence on female acceptance.

Maybe a goal, but personally a hard thing to do: not to want acceptance. It's a heart thing, that'll always get you.

Exiled from domestic sphere

FAV (Female Archetypal Violence) --forced underground. Little girls are said to to be sugar and spice and everything nice. Which means, growing up female, aggression is channeled into less visible and less direct means and ways. The "darker" less visible side has its accompanying negative imagery. The "tooth mother" vs "bold warrior"? Women are vicious; men are aggressive.

Balance of power. Two worlds excluding the other sex. Male sphere: business, sport. Both follow rules. Female sphere: relational, domestic, rules implicit, more individual. Both practice exclusion. Women have made some inroads in male sphere. More recently a few men have taken up domestic roles. Both face huge challenges. Seen as threats. Where to start?

Male inclusion/exclusion based on being members of a club. Economic spheres such as company boards, religious orders. There are rules, requirements to belong. Explicit. Group based. When a member of the out-group wants in, threatens the male exclusivity, rules may be referred to. If rules are overturned, usually in the courts, new extra-judicial strategies are required. In extreme cases aggressive sexual or unadorned violence may be used. Female inclusion/exclusion: more of a personal-interaction skill set. The rules are less explicit then in the male sphere. At school level, a group thing, being part of the in-group. Not based on explicit rules, but intangible qualities, reading the weather (personal and group cues), and use of or access to fashion/personal style.

Later, friendships and family are the clubs that women belong to. Men are only given temporary passes after agreeing to forgo certain "male" activities and behavior. Women are the rule setters and arbiters. The threat of banishment from this sphere, is a figurative sword hanging over the heads of men. Banishment from the home hearth/refuge.

Elinor J Powicke

1Males generally use MAV 60% of the time and FAV 40% of the time while females use FAV 60% of the time and MAV 40% of the time. A discussion of this phenomena will be considerable. Please see the addendum provided by Elinor .

2Elinor points out in the addendum correctly that this goal of freeing male from their dependence is not reasonable and in discussion we both agreed that this was exactly where their vulnerability lies.

3“While there is immense individual variation, on the average, the gender balance between poles is 60/40” Creative Imperative P246

4 Creative Imperative, p252, Charles M. Johnston.

0 notes

Last Seen Blogs

ato-dato

emangolbbutfrontwards

Untitled

a-feltsamwich

Felt crafts and such

cubeudesigns

C U B E U

digitalstowaway

electronic castaway