James Romanow's answer to According to Bernie Sanders, all Canadian citizens are guaranteed healthcare, and if they come out of a hospital, they don't get a bill. Is this true? - Quora - "There needs to be a special space on Quora for Americans to ask about Canadian (and other country’s) healthcare system. So, despite what your boyfriend/newscaster/father says about Canadian healthcare you need to know a couple of things...
There is Triage in Emergency rooms, and generally throughout the system. If I show up with a cut, and it’s a busy place I may wait a while to get stitched. On the other hand on a sunday morning with four people ahead of us, my elderly father was admitted and in a bed inside of a minute. I had to do the paperwork for him while he was being treated.
Hip and knee replacements are usually done quickly but as the population ages there have been surgery backlogs. Stents etc. get done right away.
In short the system could stand improvement. A Swedish doctor told me he considered the French medical system the world’s best. I’ve heard French men and women complain about their system. Bitching about healthcare is pretty normal worldwide. So yes you can find Canadians who complain...
Life expectancy in Canada is about 4 years longer than the USA (Canada’s ranking is 7, US’s ranking is 34.)...
Infant mortality in Canada is 54 per 10,000 births. In the US it is 58 per 10,000 We get all this without getting billed when we exit the hospital!"
Jose on Twitter - "but I like having a choice"
-your employer chooses your health plan.
- your insurance chooses your healthcare provider
-insurer chooses what prescriptions will get covered
-insurer chooses the doctors
Tell me again what choice you made in all that. Literally the worst argument"
Not to mention your insurer chooses whether to pay you back
Why The US Has Better Cancer Survival Rates Than The Rest Of The World - "The United States has better survival statistics compared to most other countries. Whether this is simply because of better cancer treatment is arguable. A missed cancer diagnosis is a common lawsuit in America. The defendants typically settle for unlimited economic loss and also pain and suffering. That is a huge incentive for American doctors to overtest for cancer. Of course that leads to earlier diagnosis and a significant time bias in studies comparing healthcare systems... Very expensive cancer treatments such as the new immunotherapies for cancer are more widely available in America than in countries with national healthcare where there are restrictions based on cost/benefit and budget caps.The larger question is whether a society can afford to spend what America spends to get low single digit improvement in cure rates and and to prolong survival by a few months especially at the end of life.Treatments that cost $200,000 per year are used to extend average life expectancy by 3–4 months in stage 4 cancers. Of course it’s worth it for the minority of patients who are put into long term remission. But it doesn’t help the others."
This might explain why a Lancet article, correcting for age, finds the US has poorer outcomes than Western European countries
Utah cuts healthcare costs by flying employees to Mexico for prescriptions - "A health insurer in Utah is seeking to reduce prescription drug costs by flying state employees to Mexico, where they can collect medications at a fraction of the US cost.The year-old programme involves about 10 state employees. The cost savings are so large that the insurance program can pay for each patient’s flight, give them a $500-per-trip bonus and still save tens of thousands of dollars. One participant, Ann Lovell, a 62-year-old teacher, said she had saved as much as $2,400 by travelling from Salt Lake City to San Diego and then crossing the border, in order to refill a prescription for arthritis medication... Four states, including Florida, are looking at Trump administration proposals to allow states to import drugs from Canada... Support for cross-border prescription drug purchasing, or “pharmaceutical tourism”, is a rare instance where political ideologies meet."
Uninsured Get Pushed from Hospitals Faster - "Folks who aren't covered by private insurance are much more likely to get booted out of the hospital early, a new study finds.Uninsured patients were also more than twice as likely to be transferred to another hospital and 66% more likely to be discharged outright, compared with people with private insurance"
Of course, even before this, some Americans insist their system is fine since you are guaranteed emergency room treatment regardless of ability to pay (ignoring the fact that relying on emergency room treatment is not a viable healthcare strategy)
Bills from out-of-network doctors rising at in-network hospitals - "In the U.S., physicians in an insurer’s network have agreed to accept a set amount from the insurer as payment in full for their services. Out-of-network physicians, however, are not constrained by any in-network agreements and can seek additional payment from patients, a practice known as out-of-network balance billing.At many hospitals in an insurer’s network, some of the physicians may still be out-of-network, particularly for specialties like anesthesiology. This can lead to balance billing surprises even when patients make a point to seek care at an in-network hospital... “In an emergency, a patient is often unable to choose the emergency department, the physicians or the ambulance service,” Steinbrook, author of an editorial accompanying the study, said by email. “And, a patient may seek routine in-network care at an inpatient hospital or outpatient facility, only to later find out that in-network physicians were not available to care for them.”"
This is the real reason most Americans file for bankruptcy - "66.5 percent of all bankruptcies were tied to medical issues —either because of high costs for care or time out of work. An estimated 530,000 families turn to bankruptcy each year because of medical issues and bills, the research found.Other reasons include unaffordable mortgages or foreclosure, at 45 percent; followed by spending or living beyond one’s means, 44.4 percent; providing help to friends or relatives, 28.4 percent; student loans, 25.4 percent; or divorce or separation, 24.4 percent.
It is notable that spending or living beyond one's means is so high and speaks to the American culture of instant gratification and consumerism (i.e. no, it's not just because of "capitalism" and "exploitation" that you're spending more than you can afford)
Why the U.S. Health-Care System Is So Bad - The Atlantic - "According to the Commonwealth Fund, which regularly ranks the health systems of a handful of developed countries, the best countries for health care are the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Australia. The lowest performer? The United States, even though it spends the most. “And this is consistent across 20 years”...
1. A lack of insurance coverage
2. Administrative inefficiency
3. Underperforming primary care...
Together, these reasons help explain why U.S. life expectancy has, for the first time since the 1960s, recently gone down for two years in a row."
Gandhi said “The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.” It seems those who think US healthcare is the best option out there think “The true measure of any healthcare system can be found in how it treats its richest patients"
An American tried to dismiss this by claiming that access was what pulled down the US's rankings. Yet, the US has middling results for care process, is second last for administrative efficiency and is last for health care outcomes. In the end he conceded defeat by telling a Brit challenging US healthcare to go such on the NHS
A World of Wellness— Medical Tourism is on the Rise - "The community of Los Algodones, Mexico, 10 miles from Yuma, AZ, bills itself as “Molar City” with more dentists per capita than anywhere in the world. Drawn by its 350 dental clinics and 150 optical clinics, an estimated 6,000 U.S. citizens cross the border each day from November to March seeking dental and vision care that can cost two-thirds less than it does back home. In December the town even throws a party with food, drink, and live music to welcome its annual influx... even if insurance covers treatment, high deductible and co-pay requirements can make U.S. treatment cost prohibitive. A good rule of thumb, claims Woodman, is the $6,000 rule. “If your specialist quotes you a price of $6,000 or more for treatment, chances are good that one or more foreign countries can offer you the same procedure and quality for less, even including your travel and lodging expenses.”Businesses who self-insure their employees’ health care plans are beginning to realize the value of encouraging out-of-country care. Three years ago, in Antigua, Guatemala, I met four vacationing families working for the same Colorado business whose employer annually covered their Guatemalan vacation and medical costs for dental and medical checkups because it was less expensive than offering an insurance plan. Beyond cost, international medical facilities actively market an improved patient experience. Amenities like low nurse-to-patient ratios; deluxe hospital suites; boutique recuperation resorts; airport and in-town limo transportation and concierge services to make all arrangements during a medical stay are often included as part of the care. For less invasive treatment, the facility’s concierge or a specialized medical tourism travel agent can assist with logistics should you decide to combine treatment with vacation... The American Journal of Medicine estimates that 1.4 million Americans sought international health care in 2017. The number is expected to increase 25 percent annually, driven by a maturing population and increasing medical costs... International medical facilities marketing to U.S. patients are often staffed by physicians and other health professionals trained in the U.S."
Strange how US healthcare is superior, yet so many Americans go abroad for treatment
20 leading economists just signed a letter arguing Medicare for All would generate massive savings for American families - "Dr. Gerald Friedman, a professor at the University of Massachussetts Amherst, told Business Insider that the best argument for a universal healthcare system is its potential ability to rein in the skyrocketing costs of healthcare."There's been too much loose talk that Medicare for All is unaffordable," Friedman said. "What's really unaffordable is the current system. We spend about twice the average for affluent countries in the OECD on healthcare""
Naturally, there were people dismissing them as not real economists, frauds, an advocacy group etc
New poll shows Canadians overwhelmingly support public health care - "A new poll conducted by the Toronto-based Nanos Research points to overwhelming support — 86.2 percent — for strengthening public health care rather than expanding for-profit services... Canada’s government just released a report titled “Healthy Canadians — A Federal Report on Comparable Health Indicators 2008.” Its findings almost identically mirror the CHC polling results. In that report, a leading indicator points to the fact that “Most Canadians (85.2 percent) aged 15 years and older reported being ‘very satisfied’ or ‘somewhat satisfied’ with the way overall health care services were provided, unchanged from 2005.”"
If it were really that bad, why would Canadians support it so much?
That said a two tier system really makes sense to ease the load and offer choice
Most Americans Still Rate Their Healthcare Quite Positively
Medicaid/Medicare are rated as having better coverage than private insurance by 9% and 79% of people covered by Medicaid/Medicare say it is excellent or good (only 6% behind the rating for private insurance). So much for the claim that Medicare sucks and is worse than private insurance
One idiot American claimed that 79% of people covered by Medicaid/Medicare saying it was excellent or good said it was terrible. I said if so, that meant 70% of people on private insurance saying coverage was excellent or good meant private insurance coverage was even more awful
L'origine de Bert
Sunday, May 10, 2020
Islam and the West - can we live with difference? / Ched Evans
Everyday Ethics: 11 JAN 15: Islam and the West - can we live with difference?
‘We have to be proactive about this. It's no good just saying, you know, Islam is, in general, a religion of peace or something like that. We have to be discriminating, we have to work out. And the problem is that while I agree, there are hopeful signs that the overwhelming tendency is towards forms of Islam that are kind of less mystical, there's a more voluntary stick less philosophical, Wahhabism, and so on. And, you know, the more promising traditions of Islam that we can really enter debate with are much more the Shiite traditions, the more mystical traditions within Sunni Islam, especially if they're sort of wrapped apart from politics, that are often more associated with specifically religious non legal grouping, there's a then more like a church formation. And you know, the whole problem about Islam is in a sense that unlike Judaism, it's not a self imposed divine law for one group. Nor is it a sense of a religion, beyond law and looking towards reconciliation, like Christianity, but it is a religion of universal law, is inherently problematic in the modern world, and it needs to adapt, and it needs to draw on the more mystical interpretation of Islam that can, frankly, approximate it more to Christianity and Judaism.’
‘Ali, what's your view on this? Is this possible? Can Islam change in this way to be more of a synthetic with with Christianity and Judaism?’
‘I think there is a technological mistake that we are doing at the moment. It seems that there is a call for ethnic cleansing at the moment, and we have to be really alerted from that. That is the, that is-’
‘I don't actually think Ali that anybody is asking for Muslims to be driven into the sea. But I think we can ask, Where does this desire for a caliphate, for for a fundamentalist view come from? Because, you know, in the in the last century, and in the early part of this century, there is a sense of of Muslims living peacefully within one Empire or another and not particularly wanting to have a jihad against the West, where has all this come from?’
‘Take a country like Ireland, for example, here, like the existence of Muslims in Ireland, it's back to the early 50s. Yeah. And please mention one incident that happened in Ireland... You can apply your, live up to the values of your Islam, in a society like Ireland, and there are no problems whatsoever. I think it is a mutual responsibility. Muslims and non Muslims should cooperate, to create the right atmosphere for peace, and harmony.’...
[On Ched Evans] 'I know that this is not a popular view, with particular kind of feminist, but there are different kinds of rape. And I do think that man believes he's innocent because he believes it was consensual sex. She was drunk, they seem to all have been drunk, it’s a most unsavory incident, extremely unsavory. He ended up getting five years, which seems to me to be actually excessive. And even if he were guilty. He can't apologize in the normal way, because he’s wants to appeal, he can't do that. So he's in a really tricky position. All he can do, he's not a very talented person in any regard except football. Why can't he be allowed to play football? We're supposed to be in favor of rehabilitation, and encouraging people to go back to a normal life. I think it's mob rule, I think it is utterly mob rule. And I noticed that a lot of the people going after him are the sort of people who think that Julian Assange is a hero'...
‘The culture of football… is disgusting. The event was disgusting. I just don't like seeing scapegoats. And I think that's what we've got. Now the victim has suffered in this one, particularly because having one particular set of a mob having gone after, having gone after Evans, another mob proceeds to go after his victim. The whole thing is that social media at its absolute worst… it absolutely appalls me that people are giving into this. It appalls me that people who want to give him a job and are saying, no, we won't, because we've been threatened on Twitter with having our daughters raped. So people who are, who are saying that Evans shouldn't be allowed to play football, are saying they’re so much against rape, that they're going to threaten people with raping their daughters, if they give the fellow a job. What sort of a world are we in when we actually give way to that?’…
‘The scapegoat has a very strong moral provenance. And the idea of the society taking responsibility for the evils within it, by making an example of somebody. And football does have evils within it, which it must associate itself from, and if it falls to Chad Evans to be the scapegoat, by which responsible people in football say no, we have a sexual culture, which is appalling and what we need to get rid of, then so be it he is that scapegoat, he will have done us all a fine service if he bows his head and accepts that responsibility.’
Amazingly the one saying to lynch Evans was a man and the one against threatening his prospective employers was a woman
Since Evans got acquitted, what does that say about all the moral posturing?
‘We have to be proactive about this. It's no good just saying, you know, Islam is, in general, a religion of peace or something like that. We have to be discriminating, we have to work out. And the problem is that while I agree, there are hopeful signs that the overwhelming tendency is towards forms of Islam that are kind of less mystical, there's a more voluntary stick less philosophical, Wahhabism, and so on. And, you know, the more promising traditions of Islam that we can really enter debate with are much more the Shiite traditions, the more mystical traditions within Sunni Islam, especially if they're sort of wrapped apart from politics, that are often more associated with specifically religious non legal grouping, there's a then more like a church formation. And you know, the whole problem about Islam is in a sense that unlike Judaism, it's not a self imposed divine law for one group. Nor is it a sense of a religion, beyond law and looking towards reconciliation, like Christianity, but it is a religion of universal law, is inherently problematic in the modern world, and it needs to adapt, and it needs to draw on the more mystical interpretation of Islam that can, frankly, approximate it more to Christianity and Judaism.’
‘Ali, what's your view on this? Is this possible? Can Islam change in this way to be more of a synthetic with with Christianity and Judaism?’
‘I think there is a technological mistake that we are doing at the moment. It seems that there is a call for ethnic cleansing at the moment, and we have to be really alerted from that. That is the, that is-’
‘I don't actually think Ali that anybody is asking for Muslims to be driven into the sea. But I think we can ask, Where does this desire for a caliphate, for for a fundamentalist view come from? Because, you know, in the in the last century, and in the early part of this century, there is a sense of of Muslims living peacefully within one Empire or another and not particularly wanting to have a jihad against the West, where has all this come from?’
‘Take a country like Ireland, for example, here, like the existence of Muslims in Ireland, it's back to the early 50s. Yeah. And please mention one incident that happened in Ireland... You can apply your, live up to the values of your Islam, in a society like Ireland, and there are no problems whatsoever. I think it is a mutual responsibility. Muslims and non Muslims should cooperate, to create the right atmosphere for peace, and harmony.’...
[On Ched Evans] 'I know that this is not a popular view, with particular kind of feminist, but there are different kinds of rape. And I do think that man believes he's innocent because he believes it was consensual sex. She was drunk, they seem to all have been drunk, it’s a most unsavory incident, extremely unsavory. He ended up getting five years, which seems to me to be actually excessive. And even if he were guilty. He can't apologize in the normal way, because he’s wants to appeal, he can't do that. So he's in a really tricky position. All he can do, he's not a very talented person in any regard except football. Why can't he be allowed to play football? We're supposed to be in favor of rehabilitation, and encouraging people to go back to a normal life. I think it's mob rule, I think it is utterly mob rule. And I noticed that a lot of the people going after him are the sort of people who think that Julian Assange is a hero'...
‘The culture of football… is disgusting. The event was disgusting. I just don't like seeing scapegoats. And I think that's what we've got. Now the victim has suffered in this one, particularly because having one particular set of a mob having gone after, having gone after Evans, another mob proceeds to go after his victim. The whole thing is that social media at its absolute worst… it absolutely appalls me that people are giving into this. It appalls me that people who want to give him a job and are saying, no, we won't, because we've been threatened on Twitter with having our daughters raped. So people who are, who are saying that Evans shouldn't be allowed to play football, are saying they’re so much against rape, that they're going to threaten people with raping their daughters, if they give the fellow a job. What sort of a world are we in when we actually give way to that?’…
‘The scapegoat has a very strong moral provenance. And the idea of the society taking responsibility for the evils within it, by making an example of somebody. And football does have evils within it, which it must associate itself from, and if it falls to Chad Evans to be the scapegoat, by which responsible people in football say no, we have a sexual culture, which is appalling and what we need to get rid of, then so be it he is that scapegoat, he will have done us all a fine service if he bows his head and accepts that responsibility.’
Amazingly the one saying to lynch Evans was a man and the one against threatening his prospective employers was a woman
Since Evans got acquitted, what does that say about all the moral posturing?
Post ID: 422057472348111889
Links - 10th May 2020 (1)
MOH Confirms 2 Brands Of Canned Sardines From China Are Contaminated With Parasites - "in March, Indonesia's Food and Drugs Monitoring Agency (BPOM) found that 27 brands of canned mackerel were contaminated with threadworms. According to BPOM head Penny Kusumastuti Lukito, out of the 27 brands, 16 brands are imported while the remaining 11 are local products."
Vietnamese Factory Has Been Mixing Dirt And Battery Chemicals Into Their Coffee Since 2016 - "Despite the owner’s confession and evidence, police have not found enough proof to conclude that the “coffee” was sold for food and drinks... this isn’t the first time Vietnamese coffee has been found to hold chemicals. Back in 2015 in Ho Chi Minh, a black liquid that smelled like coffee was believed to contain dangerous heavy metals such as mercury and lead... According to Xuan, the liquid actually comes from China."
You Could Be Buying Toxic, Fake Food Products Sold Under Brands Like Maggi And Lee Kum Kee - "a massive underground business in Tianjin, China has been making fake-branded sauces and flavourings using illegal ingredients like industrial salt that can be harmful to human health... The manufacturers have gone lengths to ensure the public is convinced by making sure that everything is copied down to the last detail. Using the same packaging as their branded counterparts is one thing, but these manufacturers also took an extra step to copy and use QR barcodes from genuine products on their own counterfeit items. Clearly, the profit margin for selling those bogus products can be really significant as producers have allegedly earned so much money from this business that they are able to drive around in Porsches."
Instruments of Macabre Origin | The Metropolitan Museum of Art - "Lyre. Central Africa, 19th century. Human skull, antelope horn, skin, gut, hair...
A highly unusual musical instrument in the Museum's collection is a lyre fashioned from a human skull. Although the piece has not been exhibited since before 1980, it gained fame in Jerzy Kosinski's 1982 best-selling novel Pinball—a rock 'n' roll mystery written for George Harrison—and perennially draws attention.Not much is known about this instrument. It was purchased from an unnamed dealer at the end of the nineteenth century and was originally thought to have come from South America when it was cataloged in 1906, but was later reattributed to Central Africa. There is no known tradition to which this instrument may be assigned, although some have suggested it may have a symbolic or clandestine ritual use. Most likely it is a sensational item made by a clever indigenous entrepreneur for trade and profit with Europeans."
The case for mocking religion. - "Is it not clear, then, that those who are determined to be “offended” will discover a provocation somewhere? We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt."
I wonder what Hitchens would have said about SJWs
A Cough Cure For Kids? Try Honey - "there might be dozens of bottles of cough syrup promising to help your kid's cough. You'll see labels with babies and crescent moons that promise to relieve "chest congestion" and help your kid sleep.Pediatrician Jennifer Shu says don't buy it. Shu, a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics, says the shelves of kids' cough medicine at the pharmacy are not really about good medicine — it's marketing... Mostly, these kids cough syrups have either a cough suppressant like dextromethorphan (in Robitussin and Delsym, for example) or an antihistamine like diphenhydramine (in Benadryl and Dimetapp). "What the studies have shown is that — for some reason — in kids they aren't that effective," she explains.Plus, these drugs can cause side effects, she says, "such as increasing your blood pressure, making your heart rate go up or suppressing the drive to breathe — and that's definitely something we don't want for kids."So what can desperate, sleep-starved parents give their kids? The answer might be already in the kitchen cupboard."Honey is at least as effective as those many, many products that you see in the drugstore"... This is only for kids older than 1 year old. (There's a risk of botulism for infants.) ... "Honey has some natural antibacterial and antiviral properties," she says. "It contains hydrogen peroxide, so there is a theory that that's why it might help fight a cold. But also the thickness of it helps coat the throat and makes it feel more comfortable so you don't have that dry, ticklish feeling that's causing your cough."... kids can get an average of one cold a month in the winter — and each one can last two weeks — or longer."
Man arrested after allegedly driving van into GOP registration tent - "A man has been arrested after allegedly deliberately driving a van into a tent full of Trump supporters who were working to register new voters at a shopping center parking lot.The incident occurred on Saturday afternoon in the Kernan Village Shopping Center in eastern Jacksonville, Florida, when a man, later identified by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office as 27-year-old Gregory Timm, allegedly drove a van through a tent where people were working to register voters. The driver narrowly missed several people in the tent and fled the scene after the incident by car."
Of course, since no one was killed liberals can continue dismissing this kind of incident and go on supporting inflammatory antifa rhetoric
Report: Man tells police he targeted Trump campaign volunteers because he does not like the President - "The man who police say drove a van through a tent in a Walmart parking lot on Saturday in Jacksonville, Florida, where Trump campaign volunteers were gathered told officers he doesn't like President Donald Trump"
Anti-Trump terrorist van attacker: 'Someone had to take a stand' - "Timm himself confirmed that the van action was an anti-Trump political attack, which would classify it as a terrorist attack by Florida state law... “Someone had to take a stand,” said Timm to police. The video did not show the moment the van struck the tent, as Timm stated the video ended before “the good part.”"
Why Labeling Antonio Banderas A 'Person Of Color' Triggers Such A Backlash - "Outlets called Antonio Banderas, nominated for best actor for his role in Pedro Almodóvar's Pain and Glory, an actor of color.The thing is, Banderas is from Málaga, Spain, and does not identify as a person of color. There are nonwhite Spanish people, but this isn't the case for him... "I don't know what I am," he told Ramos. "When I've gone to the U.S., I've considered myself Latino, because those are the people I've connected with the most."Banderas then recalled filling out an official form in the U.S.: When he went to check the box for "white" under race, he was told that was wrong, that he was Hispanic."I said, 'Hispanic isn't actually a race,' " Banderas told Ramos, but he went ahead and checked the Hispanic box. "Great, I'm happy to be Hispanic, Spanish, Latino, and if I'm a person of color, well then I'm a person of color."... Spaniards are technically considered Hispanic by the U.S. Census Bureau, which defines the term as "a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race."... Banderas has often taken on Latin American roles in movies, including a Mexican mariachi assassin in Robert Rodriguez's Desperado... Spanish media pounced on the word choice. Some publications accused the U.S. of having an "absurd obsession" with race... Juan Pedro Sánchez, 25, who lives in Madrid and weighed in on the Twitter discussion, criticized those who responded negatively, saying the concept of race and ethnicity varies according to where you are. He said Spaniards were all too quick to point out that they're white."A lot of people in Spain are bothered if others confuse them for Latin American because Spaniards see Latinos as people of color, and they don't want to be associated with that"... At times in history, many Spaniards have also felt like the "other" in Europe... there's a reason the term Hispanic is so vague. When it was first introduced into the U.S. census in 1980, the idea was to be as inclusive and all-encompassing as possible, so as to not leave out any groups. Before 1980, people of Latin American descent were labeled white by the U.S. government — but by being grouped with whites, there were few statistics on the Latinx community and therefore no way of knowing what its concerns and needs were. "There wasn't a lot of consensus about what it meant to be Hispanic in the first place, and so [those lobbying for the term to be created] were kind of reluctant to give very clear parameters around that," says Jones. "But they realized there was power in numbers to be able to make claims to the state, in terms of resources and support, to create a voting bloc and to get lawsuits around these kinds of issues. So they sort of banded together as a way of asking for a category."Linguistic anthropologist Jonathan Rosa at Stanford University says it's precisely because of this inclusive language that people from Spain can now strategically access certain political and economic markets — and benefit from the ambiguity of the definition of Hispanic. "People fought really hard to have these categories or to make recognition possible for artistic or athletic or intellectual prowess," Rosa says. "And I think there's legitimate concern when someone who isn't associated with the kinds of histories of marginalization and exclusion ... is benefiting.""
Identity politics poisons everything
Presumably it's okay for rich African Americans to benefit from the political power of being "black" since "history" trumps contemporary reality
ZUBY: on Twitter - "I've NEVER seen a push for 50/50 'gender equity' in a male-dominated field that involves dangerous work, exposure to the elements, extended time away from home, or hard physical labour. I wonder why..."
If You're Going Bald, Consider Rubbing Wasabi on Your Head - "Japanese wasabi company Kinin recently made an announcement that chemicals found within the wasabi plant help regrow hair faster than current hair-loss remedies such as Rogaine (minoxidil). Keep in mind that they mean real wasabi, and not that toxic-green playdough sitting in a mound next to the birthday-pink pickled ginger that you're undoubtedly familiar with. Considering fresh wasabi typically goes for around $80 per pound, and has a rather pungent odor, you might be better off picking up some Rogaine... Onions (pick your favorite variety) can be frapped and put on the head. A study from 2002, claims that onion juice is actually effective in treating alopecia areata, a less common form of hair loss"
Vietnamese Factory Has Been Mixing Dirt And Battery Chemicals Into Their Coffee Since 2016 - "Despite the owner’s confession and evidence, police have not found enough proof to conclude that the “coffee” was sold for food and drinks... this isn’t the first time Vietnamese coffee has been found to hold chemicals. Back in 2015 in Ho Chi Minh, a black liquid that smelled like coffee was believed to contain dangerous heavy metals such as mercury and lead... According to Xuan, the liquid actually comes from China."
You Could Be Buying Toxic, Fake Food Products Sold Under Brands Like Maggi And Lee Kum Kee - "a massive underground business in Tianjin, China has been making fake-branded sauces and flavourings using illegal ingredients like industrial salt that can be harmful to human health... The manufacturers have gone lengths to ensure the public is convinced by making sure that everything is copied down to the last detail. Using the same packaging as their branded counterparts is one thing, but these manufacturers also took an extra step to copy and use QR barcodes from genuine products on their own counterfeit items. Clearly, the profit margin for selling those bogus products can be really significant as producers have allegedly earned so much money from this business that they are able to drive around in Porsches."
Instruments of Macabre Origin | The Metropolitan Museum of Art - "Lyre. Central Africa, 19th century. Human skull, antelope horn, skin, gut, hair...
A highly unusual musical instrument in the Museum's collection is a lyre fashioned from a human skull. Although the piece has not been exhibited since before 1980, it gained fame in Jerzy Kosinski's 1982 best-selling novel Pinball—a rock 'n' roll mystery written for George Harrison—and perennially draws attention.Not much is known about this instrument. It was purchased from an unnamed dealer at the end of the nineteenth century and was originally thought to have come from South America when it was cataloged in 1906, but was later reattributed to Central Africa. There is no known tradition to which this instrument may be assigned, although some have suggested it may have a symbolic or clandestine ritual use. Most likely it is a sensational item made by a clever indigenous entrepreneur for trade and profit with Europeans."
The case for mocking religion. - "Is it not clear, then, that those who are determined to be “offended” will discover a provocation somewhere? We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt."
I wonder what Hitchens would have said about SJWs
A Cough Cure For Kids? Try Honey - "there might be dozens of bottles of cough syrup promising to help your kid's cough. You'll see labels with babies and crescent moons that promise to relieve "chest congestion" and help your kid sleep.Pediatrician Jennifer Shu says don't buy it. Shu, a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics, says the shelves of kids' cough medicine at the pharmacy are not really about good medicine — it's marketing... Mostly, these kids cough syrups have either a cough suppressant like dextromethorphan (in Robitussin and Delsym, for example) or an antihistamine like diphenhydramine (in Benadryl and Dimetapp). "What the studies have shown is that — for some reason — in kids they aren't that effective," she explains.Plus, these drugs can cause side effects, she says, "such as increasing your blood pressure, making your heart rate go up or suppressing the drive to breathe — and that's definitely something we don't want for kids."So what can desperate, sleep-starved parents give their kids? The answer might be already in the kitchen cupboard."Honey is at least as effective as those many, many products that you see in the drugstore"... This is only for kids older than 1 year old. (There's a risk of botulism for infants.) ... "Honey has some natural antibacterial and antiviral properties," she says. "It contains hydrogen peroxide, so there is a theory that that's why it might help fight a cold. But also the thickness of it helps coat the throat and makes it feel more comfortable so you don't have that dry, ticklish feeling that's causing your cough."... kids can get an average of one cold a month in the winter — and each one can last two weeks — or longer."
Man arrested after allegedly driving van into GOP registration tent - "A man has been arrested after allegedly deliberately driving a van into a tent full of Trump supporters who were working to register new voters at a shopping center parking lot.The incident occurred on Saturday afternoon in the Kernan Village Shopping Center in eastern Jacksonville, Florida, when a man, later identified by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office as 27-year-old Gregory Timm, allegedly drove a van through a tent where people were working to register voters. The driver narrowly missed several people in the tent and fled the scene after the incident by car."
Of course, since no one was killed liberals can continue dismissing this kind of incident and go on supporting inflammatory antifa rhetoric
Report: Man tells police he targeted Trump campaign volunteers because he does not like the President - "The man who police say drove a van through a tent in a Walmart parking lot on Saturday in Jacksonville, Florida, where Trump campaign volunteers were gathered told officers he doesn't like President Donald Trump"
Anti-Trump terrorist van attacker: 'Someone had to take a stand' - "Timm himself confirmed that the van action was an anti-Trump political attack, which would classify it as a terrorist attack by Florida state law... “Someone had to take a stand,” said Timm to police. The video did not show the moment the van struck the tent, as Timm stated the video ended before “the good part.”"
Why Labeling Antonio Banderas A 'Person Of Color' Triggers Such A Backlash - "Outlets called Antonio Banderas, nominated for best actor for his role in Pedro Almodóvar's Pain and Glory, an actor of color.The thing is, Banderas is from Málaga, Spain, and does not identify as a person of color. There are nonwhite Spanish people, but this isn't the case for him... "I don't know what I am," he told Ramos. "When I've gone to the U.S., I've considered myself Latino, because those are the people I've connected with the most."Banderas then recalled filling out an official form in the U.S.: When he went to check the box for "white" under race, he was told that was wrong, that he was Hispanic."I said, 'Hispanic isn't actually a race,' " Banderas told Ramos, but he went ahead and checked the Hispanic box. "Great, I'm happy to be Hispanic, Spanish, Latino, and if I'm a person of color, well then I'm a person of color."... Spaniards are technically considered Hispanic by the U.S. Census Bureau, which defines the term as "a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race."... Banderas has often taken on Latin American roles in movies, including a Mexican mariachi assassin in Robert Rodriguez's Desperado... Spanish media pounced on the word choice. Some publications accused the U.S. of having an "absurd obsession" with race... Juan Pedro Sánchez, 25, who lives in Madrid and weighed in on the Twitter discussion, criticized those who responded negatively, saying the concept of race and ethnicity varies according to where you are. He said Spaniards were all too quick to point out that they're white."A lot of people in Spain are bothered if others confuse them for Latin American because Spaniards see Latinos as people of color, and they don't want to be associated with that"... At times in history, many Spaniards have also felt like the "other" in Europe... there's a reason the term Hispanic is so vague. When it was first introduced into the U.S. census in 1980, the idea was to be as inclusive and all-encompassing as possible, so as to not leave out any groups. Before 1980, people of Latin American descent were labeled white by the U.S. government — but by being grouped with whites, there were few statistics on the Latinx community and therefore no way of knowing what its concerns and needs were. "There wasn't a lot of consensus about what it meant to be Hispanic in the first place, and so [those lobbying for the term to be created] were kind of reluctant to give very clear parameters around that," says Jones. "But they realized there was power in numbers to be able to make claims to the state, in terms of resources and support, to create a voting bloc and to get lawsuits around these kinds of issues. So they sort of banded together as a way of asking for a category."Linguistic anthropologist Jonathan Rosa at Stanford University says it's precisely because of this inclusive language that people from Spain can now strategically access certain political and economic markets — and benefit from the ambiguity of the definition of Hispanic. "People fought really hard to have these categories or to make recognition possible for artistic or athletic or intellectual prowess," Rosa says. "And I think there's legitimate concern when someone who isn't associated with the kinds of histories of marginalization and exclusion ... is benefiting.""
Identity politics poisons everything
Presumably it's okay for rich African Americans to benefit from the political power of being "black" since "history" trumps contemporary reality
ZUBY: on Twitter - "I've NEVER seen a push for 50/50 'gender equity' in a male-dominated field that involves dangerous work, exposure to the elements, extended time away from home, or hard physical labour. I wonder why..."
If You're Going Bald, Consider Rubbing Wasabi on Your Head - "Japanese wasabi company Kinin recently made an announcement that chemicals found within the wasabi plant help regrow hair faster than current hair-loss remedies such as Rogaine (minoxidil). Keep in mind that they mean real wasabi, and not that toxic-green playdough sitting in a mound next to the birthday-pink pickled ginger that you're undoubtedly familiar with. Considering fresh wasabi typically goes for around $80 per pound, and has a rather pungent odor, you might be better off picking up some Rogaine... Onions (pick your favorite variety) can be frapped and put on the head. A study from 2002, claims that onion juice is actually effective in treating alopecia areata, a less common form of hair loss"
Post ID: 2634739248974688127
Peter Singer on Marx
BBC Radio Ulster - Everyday Ethics, Marriage & Children, Karl Marx and Rend Collective
‘So 200 years on since his birthday, can we say with with almost 100% certainty that his theories have been discredited?’
‘Well, I think what we can say is that the predictions that he made about how things would work out, have been shown to be false. He made a number of quite specific predictions. One was that capitalism would collapse because of its own internal contradictions. And he thought that would actually happen in the most advanced capitalist economies. Well, of course, that didn't happen. Most advanced capitalist economies remain capitalists to this day. And the revolutions that were anti capitalist happened where capitalism was either not fully developed as in Russia, or not really developed at all, as in China and Cuba. So yes, he got those things quite wrong.
Does that mean that his theory is completely falsified or refuted? Well, I mean, among his theories was one about the way in which ideas and politics and a lot of other things about our life are influenced and affected by the economic relations we're in. That is that, as he said, under feudalism you get ideas of loyalty and obligation to your Lord or the Lord's obligation to the vassals. Under capitalism, you get much more of an idea of individual freedom, because it's important to the factory owners that workers are free to leave the land and to move to where the factories are. And so you get a different set of ideas based on that. And I think, you know, there's there's still a significant element of truth in that. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Marx got it completely right. But it's a useful framework for thinking about influences on our ideas’
‘Did communism collapse because it It didn't provide people with a standard of living that could compete with Capitalism?’
‘I think that that is true to a large extent, especially if we're talking about the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and in the Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union. I think people there were able to see as communications improved, people were able to see that over in the West, people did have a materially better standard of life. East Germans, for example, could see that West Germans just lived much better than they did. They were able to buy things that ast Germans couldn't really dream of buying. And they took them for granted. So I think that was a major factor in collapse of communism, perhaps not the only one but an important one.’
‘And would you argue that that has more to do with human nature and that perhaps Marx had a false view of human nature and ultimately, that is why communism failed?’
‘I think that Marx certainly had a false view of human nature. Essentially, he denied that there is such a thing as human nature, certainly an innate human nature that we inherit, irrespective of the economic relations in which we're living. Marx thought that human nature is something that is always really determined by the economic structures so that essentially, he thought, yes, under capitalism, you have this nature in which people think of themselves, are basically selfish and want more consumer goods for themselves. Whereas he thought once you eliminate private property, and you hand over the factories to workers in the factory, the workers will work cooperatively together. And they will not be so egoistic as they are under capitalism.
What we saw in the Soviet Union was that, you know, maybe they they simply couldn't acquire the same sort of material goods, but they were still were egoistic, in the sense of trying to achieve power, and the drive in the Soviet Union for the party members to gain power over others was perhaps even more destructive than the desire under capitalism to acquire more wealth than others. So yes, in that sense, Max got human nature quite wrong. And that definitely meant that communism did not develop in anything like the way that he had anticipated that it would.’
‘And that aspect of human nature that it devotes themselves to themselves rather than to the common good, is that most clearly demonstrated in the China of today?’
‘Yes, I think you what you can say China demonstrates today is that after Deng Xiaoping brought in economic reforms, basically, in the late 70s, changed the nature of the economy to allow more private enterprise, China's living standard rose quite rapidly. And that this was really because people were more prepared to work when they had the incentive of enriching themselves than they were when they were simply working for a state owned enterprise. And I think that's, that is effective. That has made capitalism more productive than fully socialist or communist economies, state owned enterprises. And this is something that Marx had not reckoned with. He thought that the opposite would happen, that in fact, he thought communism would be more productive than capitalism, because it would be more cooperative’…
‘So 200 years on since his birth, his name is either a rallying cry, or it's an insult. He's a divisive figure. What is his legacy?’
‘I think his legacy is is to make us see the world as one which we don't fully control what is happening because the economic structure in which we're living, which none of us can individually determine, has an important effect on us. And in a sense, we're not working together, we're working in a structure that none of us individually set up. And that frames the way we interact with each other. That's something significant for us to think about in terms of, are we really, fully free? And what does freedom mean in a world in which we cannot control these structures that we or previous generations set up.
So I think he's still got some interesting ideas for us to ponder. But he's certainly not got any recipes for how we ought to reorganize the economy. And I certainly think we ought to reject the idea that he somehow was a scientist that discovered laws of nature or laws of development that predict how history is going to unfold. Because those are the things that he got most clearly mistaken about.’
‘What might he think of those today who want to overthrow the globalist capitalist order in his name?’
‘Well, I'm not sure because he could point out that the conditions are not those that he expected. He expected that under capitalism, the workers would remain close to the line the World Bank now calls the line of extreme poverty, that is the line at which they barely have enough to meet their basic needs for food and shelter and survival, because he thought that there would always be a kind of law and supply of supply and demand, that meant that workers would never in the long run anyway, maybe for short term times they would but in the long run, they would never rise above that level. And that was what would lead them to want to have a revolution against the small number of capitalists who hold power.
And we could point out to Marx that that hasn't happened, that in the most advanced capitalist countries, the standard of living has risen far above that. And in fact that workers as long as they are employed, of course, not everyone is employed, but those who are employed, can live at a much better level than people could, workers could in the 19th century. So I'm not sure that Marx would actually think that the conditions for revolution are here or even that they're on the horizon in the near future, and therefore, I'm not sure that he would still be the kind of revolutionary that he was in the 19th century.’
China must have developed more than the USSR because of the lack of US sanctions, not because of capitalism
‘So 200 years on since his birthday, can we say with with almost 100% certainty that his theories have been discredited?’
‘Well, I think what we can say is that the predictions that he made about how things would work out, have been shown to be false. He made a number of quite specific predictions. One was that capitalism would collapse because of its own internal contradictions. And he thought that would actually happen in the most advanced capitalist economies. Well, of course, that didn't happen. Most advanced capitalist economies remain capitalists to this day. And the revolutions that were anti capitalist happened where capitalism was either not fully developed as in Russia, or not really developed at all, as in China and Cuba. So yes, he got those things quite wrong.
Does that mean that his theory is completely falsified or refuted? Well, I mean, among his theories was one about the way in which ideas and politics and a lot of other things about our life are influenced and affected by the economic relations we're in. That is that, as he said, under feudalism you get ideas of loyalty and obligation to your Lord or the Lord's obligation to the vassals. Under capitalism, you get much more of an idea of individual freedom, because it's important to the factory owners that workers are free to leave the land and to move to where the factories are. And so you get a different set of ideas based on that. And I think, you know, there's there's still a significant element of truth in that. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Marx got it completely right. But it's a useful framework for thinking about influences on our ideas’
‘Did communism collapse because it It didn't provide people with a standard of living that could compete with Capitalism?’
‘I think that that is true to a large extent, especially if we're talking about the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and in the Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union. I think people there were able to see as communications improved, people were able to see that over in the West, people did have a materially better standard of life. East Germans, for example, could see that West Germans just lived much better than they did. They were able to buy things that ast Germans couldn't really dream of buying. And they took them for granted. So I think that was a major factor in collapse of communism, perhaps not the only one but an important one.’
‘And would you argue that that has more to do with human nature and that perhaps Marx had a false view of human nature and ultimately, that is why communism failed?’
‘I think that Marx certainly had a false view of human nature. Essentially, he denied that there is such a thing as human nature, certainly an innate human nature that we inherit, irrespective of the economic relations in which we're living. Marx thought that human nature is something that is always really determined by the economic structures so that essentially, he thought, yes, under capitalism, you have this nature in which people think of themselves, are basically selfish and want more consumer goods for themselves. Whereas he thought once you eliminate private property, and you hand over the factories to workers in the factory, the workers will work cooperatively together. And they will not be so egoistic as they are under capitalism.
What we saw in the Soviet Union was that, you know, maybe they they simply couldn't acquire the same sort of material goods, but they were still were egoistic, in the sense of trying to achieve power, and the drive in the Soviet Union for the party members to gain power over others was perhaps even more destructive than the desire under capitalism to acquire more wealth than others. So yes, in that sense, Max got human nature quite wrong. And that definitely meant that communism did not develop in anything like the way that he had anticipated that it would.’
‘And that aspect of human nature that it devotes themselves to themselves rather than to the common good, is that most clearly demonstrated in the China of today?’
‘Yes, I think you what you can say China demonstrates today is that after Deng Xiaoping brought in economic reforms, basically, in the late 70s, changed the nature of the economy to allow more private enterprise, China's living standard rose quite rapidly. And that this was really because people were more prepared to work when they had the incentive of enriching themselves than they were when they were simply working for a state owned enterprise. And I think that's, that is effective. That has made capitalism more productive than fully socialist or communist economies, state owned enterprises. And this is something that Marx had not reckoned with. He thought that the opposite would happen, that in fact, he thought communism would be more productive than capitalism, because it would be more cooperative’…
‘So 200 years on since his birth, his name is either a rallying cry, or it's an insult. He's a divisive figure. What is his legacy?’
‘I think his legacy is is to make us see the world as one which we don't fully control what is happening because the economic structure in which we're living, which none of us can individually determine, has an important effect on us. And in a sense, we're not working together, we're working in a structure that none of us individually set up. And that frames the way we interact with each other. That's something significant for us to think about in terms of, are we really, fully free? And what does freedom mean in a world in which we cannot control these structures that we or previous generations set up.
So I think he's still got some interesting ideas for us to ponder. But he's certainly not got any recipes for how we ought to reorganize the economy. And I certainly think we ought to reject the idea that he somehow was a scientist that discovered laws of nature or laws of development that predict how history is going to unfold. Because those are the things that he got most clearly mistaken about.’
‘What might he think of those today who want to overthrow the globalist capitalist order in his name?’
‘Well, I'm not sure because he could point out that the conditions are not those that he expected. He expected that under capitalism, the workers would remain close to the line the World Bank now calls the line of extreme poverty, that is the line at which they barely have enough to meet their basic needs for food and shelter and survival, because he thought that there would always be a kind of law and supply of supply and demand, that meant that workers would never in the long run anyway, maybe for short term times they would but in the long run, they would never rise above that level. And that was what would lead them to want to have a revolution against the small number of capitalists who hold power.
And we could point out to Marx that that hasn't happened, that in the most advanced capitalist countries, the standard of living has risen far above that. And in fact that workers as long as they are employed, of course, not everyone is employed, but those who are employed, can live at a much better level than people could, workers could in the 19th century. So I'm not sure that Marx would actually think that the conditions for revolution are here or even that they're on the horizon in the near future, and therefore, I'm not sure that he would still be the kind of revolutionary that he was in the 19th century.’
China must have developed more than the USSR because of the lack of US sanctions, not because of capitalism
Post ID: 8881617939823570799
Friday, May 08, 2020
Heritage and preservation
BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, Heritage and preservation
"‘What I think has happened in the last 30 years really, since the 1980s, is the tremendous expansion of what heritage is seem to be by these bodies, English Heritage and the National Trust and so on. You've got that kind of proliferation of blue pat plaques now all over the place for people you've never heard of. So I think there is a problem. And I think we are trying to preserve too much, but really, because we are unable to make judgments about what should and shouldn't be valued. That would mean in my book, yes, letting things go. But not necessarily to give them over to the rats and the mice that you write to Caitlyn so beautifully about, but maybe to create a space to build something new.’
‘So you feel there is a danger that we actually are going to lose contact with some parts of our past if we follow Caitlyn's-’
‘There is a danger and that's not all bad. Actually. I think some of the some of the cases she talks about, yes, you should let them go. We preserve too much because we are not deciding what is important to save… if you take something like the Liverpool docks, which is a World Heritage Site, it is now very difficult for them to build anything new on it, because it's been preserved by kind of UNESCO. So that's really limiting new growth and new build for something that perhaps isn't as important as heritage people think it is’...
‘The object, whether it's something like the Elgin marbles, or the human remains that are in museum collections around the world, that is what is important here, not the relationship. That's what I'm interested in. The subject that can tell us about ancient Greece and Athens or the Ottoman Empire, or even the British elite and the Bavarian elite in the 19th century when they retrieved the Elgin marbles and brought them to Britain or restored them in Greece. So the object is what's important. The objects is what is important. When it comes to human remains, research on human remains is what led to an understanding of patterns of human evolution and where populations go to and from. So this is really vital research material, it is sort of what people choose to go see when they're visiting museum collections. That's why people go to heritage sites, they want to see the thing. So it does matter. It is important. And where it is, is important.’
‘So you'd want to say that the historical interest in say the Elgin marbles, or all sorts of related interest, trumps questions of ownership, or are questions of ownership almost impossible to decide?’
‘Questions of ownership are difficult and I think we have to look at why they've become really prominent in the last 20, 30 years. And that's one thing that's concerning me. So I think one of the things that happened is that the kind of remit of the museum to pursue knowledge went into kind of a crisis. Critical questioning, no longer confident about that. At the same time, as you've had the politicization of culture. Culture has always been political. People have always used it in political ways, but it seems to have really come to the forefront now. So you have indigenous movements now, arguing for the return of, quote, unquote, their culture, as a way of doing all sorts of things, which I think culture can't do. So I don't think culture, can raise self ,esteem can create community, can do all these things. In a way it's too much is asked of it. And that's often what is at the heart of arguments over ownership.’...
‘In Scotland, where there's a modernist seminary that was built in the 60s, used for 20 years ish, abandoned in the 80s. And it's been a derelict space, abandoned, spectacularly ruined for a long time. People value that, that ruined state of that building. And so the organization that's now managing that site has decided they're going to partially restore elements of that seminary structure, but they're actually going to allow the ruination to play out in other parts of it. And they're going to allow the way that people value that rawness and that openness of the site to persist if they can’...
‘In the heritage context, how many preserved Cornish engine houses do we need?... And it may be that there's one out there where it's more interesting to actually allow the people, the fringe, the radical fringe who really enjoys this kind of encounter with ruins to be in relation to that object, that lost engine house and I think it's just there's a very narrow sense now of how we do right by our heritage objects sometimes. And I think if we think about those relationships and unfolding processes, instead of thinking about permanence and fixity, then really fascinating things can start to happen.’
"‘What I think has happened in the last 30 years really, since the 1980s, is the tremendous expansion of what heritage is seem to be by these bodies, English Heritage and the National Trust and so on. You've got that kind of proliferation of blue pat plaques now all over the place for people you've never heard of. So I think there is a problem. And I think we are trying to preserve too much, but really, because we are unable to make judgments about what should and shouldn't be valued. That would mean in my book, yes, letting things go. But not necessarily to give them over to the rats and the mice that you write to Caitlyn so beautifully about, but maybe to create a space to build something new.’
‘So you feel there is a danger that we actually are going to lose contact with some parts of our past if we follow Caitlyn's-’
‘There is a danger and that's not all bad. Actually. I think some of the some of the cases she talks about, yes, you should let them go. We preserve too much because we are not deciding what is important to save… if you take something like the Liverpool docks, which is a World Heritage Site, it is now very difficult for them to build anything new on it, because it's been preserved by kind of UNESCO. So that's really limiting new growth and new build for something that perhaps isn't as important as heritage people think it is’...
‘The object, whether it's something like the Elgin marbles, or the human remains that are in museum collections around the world, that is what is important here, not the relationship. That's what I'm interested in. The subject that can tell us about ancient Greece and Athens or the Ottoman Empire, or even the British elite and the Bavarian elite in the 19th century when they retrieved the Elgin marbles and brought them to Britain or restored them in Greece. So the object is what's important. The objects is what is important. When it comes to human remains, research on human remains is what led to an understanding of patterns of human evolution and where populations go to and from. So this is really vital research material, it is sort of what people choose to go see when they're visiting museum collections. That's why people go to heritage sites, they want to see the thing. So it does matter. It is important. And where it is, is important.’
‘So you'd want to say that the historical interest in say the Elgin marbles, or all sorts of related interest, trumps questions of ownership, or are questions of ownership almost impossible to decide?’
‘Questions of ownership are difficult and I think we have to look at why they've become really prominent in the last 20, 30 years. And that's one thing that's concerning me. So I think one of the things that happened is that the kind of remit of the museum to pursue knowledge went into kind of a crisis. Critical questioning, no longer confident about that. At the same time, as you've had the politicization of culture. Culture has always been political. People have always used it in political ways, but it seems to have really come to the forefront now. So you have indigenous movements now, arguing for the return of, quote, unquote, their culture, as a way of doing all sorts of things, which I think culture can't do. So I don't think culture, can raise self ,esteem can create community, can do all these things. In a way it's too much is asked of it. And that's often what is at the heart of arguments over ownership.’...
‘In Scotland, where there's a modernist seminary that was built in the 60s, used for 20 years ish, abandoned in the 80s. And it's been a derelict space, abandoned, spectacularly ruined for a long time. People value that, that ruined state of that building. And so the organization that's now managing that site has decided they're going to partially restore elements of that seminary structure, but they're actually going to allow the ruination to play out in other parts of it. And they're going to allow the way that people value that rawness and that openness of the site to persist if they can’...
‘In the heritage context, how many preserved Cornish engine houses do we need?... And it may be that there's one out there where it's more interesting to actually allow the people, the fringe, the radical fringe who really enjoys this kind of encounter with ruins to be in relation to that object, that lost engine house and I think it's just there's a very narrow sense now of how we do right by our heritage objects sometimes. And I think if we think about those relationships and unfolding processes, instead of thinking about permanence and fixity, then really fascinating things can start to happen.’
Post ID: 1491216718655319874
LInks - 8th May 2020 (2)
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Post ID: 6544303133145511928
Life after prison - does a past deny a right to a future? / Bart Campolo (former evangelist) interview
Everyday Ethics: Life after prison - does a past deny a right to a future?
[On recruiting former prisoners] 'Within two years of leaving prison, 61% of ex offenders go back. But if they got a job that drops to 90%… the only risk you’re taking, you’re taking all the time, is that you pick the wrong, wrong man or woman. But you're actually, when you think about it, you're taking less risks than you are because we know exactly what's happened. They know the person's record, they can't hide what they have done. Large number of people out there in employment, who’ve got a criminal record, the employers don't know about it. So we obviously are not going to take on people where we consider there is any risk at all, particularly to our customers or to other colleagues. But that's never really been an issue...
Interview with one of the best known evangelists in the US, Bart Campolo, becoming an agnostic:
‘Did you ever really believe those dogmas?’
‘Well, golly, you know, that's, that's one of those things where, I think I did. But I mean, we, whenever we're in, you know, if you've ever broken up a romance, and then ask yourself, did you really ever love that woman or that man? You know, you go like, well, I thought I did. But now looking back at it now, I think there was always this going on. But for me, yeah, I had transcendent experiences as a Christian. I had moments in which I was sure that the Holy Spirit was speaking to me. I had moments in which things came together in such a way as it really felt like there was a divine architect, and I and I really interpreted those experiences in the context of the Christian framework.
I still say I had those experiences, those were real, my friends who are still, who are Christians, sometimes when they hear that I'm not, they say, are you denying these experiences that I've had? Are you saying that I didn't hear a voice? Or that I didn't have a, have a moment of transcendence? Like, oh, no, no, I understand that most Christians have had all their transcendent experiences in the context of Christianity. And, and that's why they stay Christians. And so I would interpret those experiences I had as a Christian differently now. But they were authentic, and my faith was authentic. And so if somebody, if somebody heard me preach 15 years ago, and came to Jesus under my teaching, like, and they said, well, I bet you would, you're embarrassed about that now, or you would repudiate it? Oh, no, that was a sincere sermon at the time. And if that person's life was blessed by that sermon, I'm glad for that...
[My realisation that God wasn’t real] started early on, like when I first became a Christian, and I ended up working in the inner city. I saw horrors there, I had come into the city, in the inner city, seeing, believing that God was in control of everything, and that you could pray to God for traveling mercies, that you should, you could ask God, you know, for help with things, and he would intervene. And when I saw some of the things that were happening in my friends lives, I lost my ability to believe in the sovereignty of God in that way. So I changed my theology to match what I saw in reality. Later, I did the same thing when I had close friends who were gay, I changed my theology, and changed my understanding the Bible and actually started to ignore certain Bible verses, in order to make room for that. That wasn't for me, stepping onto the slippery slope.
Because once you start modifying your theology, to match up to what you want to believe, or what you see, what you see around you, you know, they warn you about that. The Orthodox ones worry about that. You can't start changing things to make it work for your, for your, for your situation. But for me, the end point was, you know, I had become a Universalist. I had become somebody who didn't trust, you know, who, I had been dialing down the supernatural for many years.
But I had a bicycle accident. I don't actually remember that. I remember leaving the house that morning. And I remember waking up in the hospital. But in between, evidently, I had a very bad bicycle accident where I went off the road. And if I hadn't been wearing a helmet, I would have surely been killed. But as it was, I had brain injury, and I was concussed and I had amnesia, for about a month, I wasn't myself. And didn't know if I would get back to myself. And when I did get back to myself, you know, I realized maybe for the first time in a very visceral way, that my identity was not a disembodied spirit that was inhabiting this body.
But rather, that it was right in my brain, was right in my body. That if you took a hammer to my head in one place, I would change. If you cut this part of my brain out, I would still, I would still be intelligent, but I would have no compassion, if you cut this other part, I would still want to eat food, but I wouldn't want to have sex. If you cut this other part, I wouldn't be able to form any short term memories or another part long term. And I realized, like, oh, my goodness, I'm right here, in my head, in my body, and when this body and brain die, I'll be gone.
I still believe in in eternal life, because I believe that my kids will still be alive. And then they'll have kids and, you know, life will go on without me. But I don't believe in eternal Bart Campolo, or William Crawley for that matter, because you may actually be God. But guess what, what happens is, is that when you realize that you don't believe in eternal life anymore? You know, for me, that was kind of the last dress and like, you know, I can't check any of these boxes anymore. I don't believe in the divinity of Christ. I don't believe in the Virgin Birth. I don't believe in the Resurrection after three days. I don't believe in any life beyond this one. Not, not that I'm sure that there isn't one. But I have no, I have no evidence that there is. And, and I realized, like, you know, there are some very basic boxes, you have to check if you want to call yourself a Christian, at least in the tradition that I came from…
When I came out of, out of Christianity, and trying to figure out what comes next for me, I started visiting like atheist groups and, and free thinking groups, thinking I would find sort of like the secular equivalent of the church. And what I found was, I would go to these groups, and they were like, a lot of times, the people at the center of them were very angry at religion. And they were, they wanted to debate and talk about how stupid it was to believe in God. And I wasn't interested in that at all. What I was interested in is, where's the group of people who say, listen, this life is all we have? How do we make the most of it? All, the way to make the most of this life is to love one another.’"
[On recruiting former prisoners] 'Within two years of leaving prison, 61% of ex offenders go back. But if they got a job that drops to 90%… the only risk you’re taking, you’re taking all the time, is that you pick the wrong, wrong man or woman. But you're actually, when you think about it, you're taking less risks than you are because we know exactly what's happened. They know the person's record, they can't hide what they have done. Large number of people out there in employment, who’ve got a criminal record, the employers don't know about it. So we obviously are not going to take on people where we consider there is any risk at all, particularly to our customers or to other colleagues. But that's never really been an issue...
Interview with one of the best known evangelists in the US, Bart Campolo, becoming an agnostic:
‘Did you ever really believe those dogmas?’
‘Well, golly, you know, that's, that's one of those things where, I think I did. But I mean, we, whenever we're in, you know, if you've ever broken up a romance, and then ask yourself, did you really ever love that woman or that man? You know, you go like, well, I thought I did. But now looking back at it now, I think there was always this going on. But for me, yeah, I had transcendent experiences as a Christian. I had moments in which I was sure that the Holy Spirit was speaking to me. I had moments in which things came together in such a way as it really felt like there was a divine architect, and I and I really interpreted those experiences in the context of the Christian framework.
I still say I had those experiences, those were real, my friends who are still, who are Christians, sometimes when they hear that I'm not, they say, are you denying these experiences that I've had? Are you saying that I didn't hear a voice? Or that I didn't have a, have a moment of transcendence? Like, oh, no, no, I understand that most Christians have had all their transcendent experiences in the context of Christianity. And, and that's why they stay Christians. And so I would interpret those experiences I had as a Christian differently now. But they were authentic, and my faith was authentic. And so if somebody, if somebody heard me preach 15 years ago, and came to Jesus under my teaching, like, and they said, well, I bet you would, you're embarrassed about that now, or you would repudiate it? Oh, no, that was a sincere sermon at the time. And if that person's life was blessed by that sermon, I'm glad for that...
[My realisation that God wasn’t real] started early on, like when I first became a Christian, and I ended up working in the inner city. I saw horrors there, I had come into the city, in the inner city, seeing, believing that God was in control of everything, and that you could pray to God for traveling mercies, that you should, you could ask God, you know, for help with things, and he would intervene. And when I saw some of the things that were happening in my friends lives, I lost my ability to believe in the sovereignty of God in that way. So I changed my theology to match what I saw in reality. Later, I did the same thing when I had close friends who were gay, I changed my theology, and changed my understanding the Bible and actually started to ignore certain Bible verses, in order to make room for that. That wasn't for me, stepping onto the slippery slope.
Because once you start modifying your theology, to match up to what you want to believe, or what you see, what you see around you, you know, they warn you about that. The Orthodox ones worry about that. You can't start changing things to make it work for your, for your, for your situation. But for me, the end point was, you know, I had become a Universalist. I had become somebody who didn't trust, you know, who, I had been dialing down the supernatural for many years.
But I had a bicycle accident. I don't actually remember that. I remember leaving the house that morning. And I remember waking up in the hospital. But in between, evidently, I had a very bad bicycle accident where I went off the road. And if I hadn't been wearing a helmet, I would have surely been killed. But as it was, I had brain injury, and I was concussed and I had amnesia, for about a month, I wasn't myself. And didn't know if I would get back to myself. And when I did get back to myself, you know, I realized maybe for the first time in a very visceral way, that my identity was not a disembodied spirit that was inhabiting this body.
But rather, that it was right in my brain, was right in my body. That if you took a hammer to my head in one place, I would change. If you cut this part of my brain out, I would still, I would still be intelligent, but I would have no compassion, if you cut this other part, I would still want to eat food, but I wouldn't want to have sex. If you cut this other part, I wouldn't be able to form any short term memories or another part long term. And I realized, like, oh, my goodness, I'm right here, in my head, in my body, and when this body and brain die, I'll be gone.
I still believe in in eternal life, because I believe that my kids will still be alive. And then they'll have kids and, you know, life will go on without me. But I don't believe in eternal Bart Campolo, or William Crawley for that matter, because you may actually be God. But guess what, what happens is, is that when you realize that you don't believe in eternal life anymore? You know, for me, that was kind of the last dress and like, you know, I can't check any of these boxes anymore. I don't believe in the divinity of Christ. I don't believe in the Virgin Birth. I don't believe in the Resurrection after three days. I don't believe in any life beyond this one. Not, not that I'm sure that there isn't one. But I have no, I have no evidence that there is. And, and I realized, like, you know, there are some very basic boxes, you have to check if you want to call yourself a Christian, at least in the tradition that I came from…
When I came out of, out of Christianity, and trying to figure out what comes next for me, I started visiting like atheist groups and, and free thinking groups, thinking I would find sort of like the secular equivalent of the church. And what I found was, I would go to these groups, and they were like, a lot of times, the people at the center of them were very angry at religion. And they were, they wanted to debate and talk about how stupid it was to believe in God. And I wasn't interested in that at all. What I was interested in is, where's the group of people who say, listen, this life is all we have? How do we make the most of it? All, the way to make the most of this life is to love one another.’"
Post ID: 2424237772418416384
Links - 8th May 2020 (1) (Yale Shenanigans - Western Art History)
Yale Will Eliminate a Beloved Introductory Art Class for Being Too White, Male, and Western - "Enrollment has swelled for Yale University's introductory art history course, which covers "the Renaissance to the present." That's because the school plans to eliminate the popular class after the spring.According to The Yale Daily News, the art department has decided that the class might make some students uncomfortable due to the "overwhelming" whiteness, maleness, and straightness of the artists who comprise the Western canon (though that last label may be dubious). Indeed, the focus on Western art is "problematic," course instructor Tim Barringer told the student newspaper... In its final iteration, the course will "consider art in relation to questions of gender, class and race and discuss its involvement with Western capitalism," according to the latest syllabus. Art's relationship to climate change will also be a "key theme." "I'm really looking forward to seeing what works the students come up with to counteract or undermine my own narratives," said Barringer. Art students who wish to master the Western canon will still find plenty of other courses that satisfy their interests. But the removal of the introductory course makes it difficult for non-majors with a casual interest in the subject to study it... It has become more common in recent years for small cabals of students to rebel against liberal arts curricula that they feel are too focused on Western artists, authors, and thinkers. Students at Reed College, for instance, successfully pressured educators to disband an introductory humanities course. In that case, the activists demanded that all European texts be removed and replaced by non-European books as a form of reparations "for Humanities 110's history of erasing the histories of people of color, especially black people."... When a university eliminates an introductory art class because a tiny number of ideologues object to the whiteness and maleness of it all, it feels like they are declining to teach history because some people don't like what happened. The West's outsized influence on the events of the last several centuries may very well be problematic, but that doesn't mean it isn't real."
Despite this, we are told that decolonising/diversifying the curriculum is not a zero sum game, and that diversity is only ever a good thing. Then again, the course has already been infected so maybe this is a good thing
Presumably students undermining the narrative of oppression will not delight Barringer
Segments of Random Thoughts - Posts - "The Woke are rewriting history with extreme prejudice. The West cannot have any positive legacy. Because they don't want you to feel pride, only guilt."
Yale Med School To Stop Teaching Medicine Discovered By White Males | The Babylon Bee - "This has been lauded as a much-needed stand for diversity at Yale, especially by current med students who will now have much more time to deal with the stress of med school by watching Netflix."Yes, many people will get sick and die because of this, but it will be worth it for the woke points," one professor said. "We will now only teach medicine discovered by brave, oppressed, trans people of color." At publishing time, Yale University had announced that the entire campus would be bulldozed over after faculty discovered the school was founded by privileged white males."
Yale against Western Art
"Given the role that these two courses have played in exposing Yale undergraduates to the joys of scholarship and knowledge, one would think that the department would have amassed overwhelmingly compelling grounds for eliminating them. To the contrary, the reasons given are either laughably weak or at odds with the facts. The first reason is the most absurd: the course titles (“Introduction to the History of Art: Prehistory to the Renaissance” and “Introduction to the History of Art: Renaissance to the Present”). Art history chair Tim Barringer apparently thinks students will be fooled by those titles into thinking that other traditions don’t exist... If the titles are such a trap for the Eurocentric unwary, the department could have simply added the word “European” before “Art” and been done with it...
Barringer also claims that it was “problematic” to put European art on a pedestal when so many other regions and traditions were “equally deserving of study.” The courses that will replace the surveys will not claim to “be the mainstream with everything else pushed to the margins,” he told the Daily News. Leave aside for the moment whether the European tradition may legitimately form the core of an art history education in an American university. The premise of Barringer’s statement—that previously European art was put on a pedestal and everything else was pushed to the margins—is blatantly false. The department requires art history majors to take two introductory-level one-semester survey courses. Since at least 2012, the department has offered courses in non-Western art that can fulfill that requirement in lieu of the European surveys...
Nor would anyone surveying the art history catalogue think that Yale was “privileging” the West, as they say in theoryspeak. That catalogue is awash in non-European courses...
Those courses must also be sacked because it is impossible to cover the “entire field—and its varied cultural backgrounds—in one course,” as the Daily News put it. If this statement means that the span of time covered in each of the one-semester Western art classes is too large, non-Western survey courses are as broad or broader. “Chinese Painting and Culture” covers 16 centuries. “Power, Gender, and Ritual in African Art” covers nearly two millennia. “Introduction to the History of Art: Buddhist Art and Architecture” covers seven centuries. “Introduction to the History of Art: Sacred Art and Architecture” covers several millennia. None of these courses is facing extinction.
Barringer promises that the replacement surveys will subject European art to a variety of deconstructive readings designed to pull that tradition down from its alleged pedestal. The new classes will consider Western art in relation to “questions of gender, class, and ‘race,’” he told the Daily News in an email, carefully putting scare quotes around “race” to signal his adherence to the creed that race is a social construct. The new courses will discuss the involvement of Western art with capitalism. Most intriguingly, the relationship between Western art and climate change will be a “key theme,” he wrote.
Barringer’s proposed deconstruction of Western art illustrates a central feature of modern academia: The hermeneutics of suspicion (Paul Ricoeur’s term for the demystifying impulse that took over the humanities in the late 20 century) applies only to the Western canon. Western academics continue to interpret non-Western traditions with sympathy and respect; those interpreters seek to faithfully convey the intentions of non-Western creators and to help students understand what makes non-Western works great. So, while the replacement European art survey courses will, in Marissa Bass’s words, “challenge, rethink, and rewrite” art historical narratives, the department will not be cancelling its Buddhist art and architecture class due to the low representation of female artists and architects, nor will it “interrogate” (as High Theory puts it) African arts and cultures for their relationship to genocidal tribal warfare, or Aztec art and architecture for their relationship to murderous misogyny.
In the replacement European survey courses, however, Tim Barringer will ask students to nominate a work of art that has been left out of the curriculum or textbook, in order to challenge long-held views of art history. Barringer is looking forward to seeing how students will “counteract or undermine” his own narratives about Western art, he wrote in an online syllabus note. Will students in “Painting and Poetry in Islamic Art” be asked to nominate an excluded art work? Unlikely. The idea that a Yale undergraduate knows enough to “counteract or undermine” the expertise of Islamic scholars would be seen as ludicrous. Only with regards to the Western tradition are ignorant students given the power to countermand what was once the considered judgment of the scholarly profession.
Students exert pressure over what gets taught not just through explicit pressure but also through their mere existence, if they possess favored identity traits. The “diversity of today’s student body” guides the art history department’s curricular thinking, department leaders explained in a statement on the cancelled survey courses. But the ephemera of students’ race and sex have no bearing on the significance of the past. The sublimity of Chartres Cathedral, a focal point of Scully’s fall semester course, transcends the skin color of the latest round of freshmen. If the University of Lagos suddenly received a large influx of students from Idaho, that would not change how Yoruba bronzes would be taught or interpreted. It is only in the West where scholarship and pedagogy are held hostage to some students’ demographic profile.
Yale has cancelled other landmark courses on identity grounds. For decades, English majors were required to take a yearlong course called “Major English Poets.”... But that course was defenestrated from its gateway status for English majors in 2017...
Rather than push back against this ignorant nonsense, members of Yale’s English faculty validated its premise... Medieval and Elizabethan England simply did not have black poets writing in the English language, a pattern that continued through the Augustan and Romantic periods. Females were only slightly more represented, but none of them had the influence of the course’s focal authors...
Yale’s lust for curricular cancellations has picked up steam since Major English Poets lost its required spot in the English major. The art history department appears to be eliminating the Western art introductory courses on its own initiative, without the pretext of a student petition or other agitation. The only possible grounds for doing so is a political hatred for the Western tradition, since the axed courses were voluntary and surrounded by numerous non-Western alternatives. Barringer did not respond to an email asking for a preview of the mysterious relationship between Western art and climate change. He also chose not to reveal whether African, Asian, and South American art will now be “problematized” along with Western art.
The one-sided subjection of Western civilization to the petty tyranny of identity politics will only worsen. Yale is one of four universities to have received a $4 million grant to infuse the theme of race into every aspect of humanities teaching and scholarship. Brown, the University of Chicago, and Stanford are the other recipients of that Andrew W. Mellon Foundation bequest. (The Mellon Foundation, once a supporter of apolitical humanities scholarship, has been captured by the identitarian Left.) Race, Yale announced in its press release about the Mellon grant, is critically important and indisputably central to the humanities.
Actually, it is not. The humanities are about matters far more compelling than the trivialities of race, which in any case we are supposed to believe is not even real. For centuries, poets, painters, novelists, and architects sought to express essential truths about the human condition. Race may have played a role in a few classic works, such as Othello or The Heart of Darkness, but it was hardly “central” to the entire tradition. Those who seek to make it so do so in the pursuit of political grievance, not scholarly accuracy.
Some students know better, however. Once word got out that this year would be the curtain call for the two introductory Western art courses, students stampeded to enroll. Though the courses were not in fact a required gateway into the study of art history, it would have been perfectly appropriate to make them so. The primary obligation of education is to pass on a particular civilization’s cultural inheritance with love and gratitude. Yale, like nearly every other college today, has lost the will to do so. It has therefore negated its very reason for being."
The Real Problem at Yale Is Not Free Speech
"Poor people pretend to be rich to look cool. Go visit the Russians on Brighton Beach in their tank tops and gold chains. Rich people pretend to be poor to fit in. Go to San Francisco and play a round of “Homeless or tech billionaire.”
But bizarre effects emerge when signals are mixed up. In particular, I have seen bizarre effects from mixed-up wealth signaling structures...
On the surface, there is nothing wrong with haphazard and sometimes warped class signaling. But if you put on a façade for long enough, you end up forgetting that it is a façade. The rich and powerful actually start believing that they are neither of those things. They actually start believing that there is not much difference in status and resources between themselves and the upper-middle class, the middle class—and eventually, between themselves and the actual poor. They forget that they have certain privileges and duties that others do not. They forget that the inside joke was just a joke all along...
When these kids grow up, they end up at conferences where everybody lifts their champagne glasses to speeches about how we all need to “tear down the Man!” How we need to usurp conventional power structures.
You hear about these events. They sound good. It’s important to think about how to improve the world. But when you look around at the men and women in their suits and dresses, with their happy, hopeful expressions, you notice that these are the exact same people with the power—they are the Man supposedly causing all those problems that they are giving feel-good speeches about. They are the kids from Harvard-Westlake who never realized they were themselves the elite. They are the people with power who fail to comprehend the meaning of that power. They are abdicating responsibility, and they don’t even know it...
We mock each other over wealth and mannerisms, to the point that we forget how and why wealth is built in the first place. We forget the extent of our own power and start blaming an ephemeral elite beyond ourselves for the ills of society. And when something does need to be challenged in elite thought, not in the fake, recuperated way that Greta Thunberg ritually challenges an already-supportive crowd at Davos, but in the real way that carries personal risk—we bail. When we see an unfashionable truth that may risk criticism or ostracism, we forget our own position of strength and assume we cannot bear those risks. We give up the fight before it even starts—as if somebody else can or will fight it.
That is what can lead to societal dysfunction. But it is also a symptom of that dysfunction...
The appearance of bottom-up protest politics is always a bit of a false narrative...
What do all of these events have in common? Some had student support. Some did not. Some started as public outrage taken to the street. Some were completely internal. What they had in common was an administration and student body coordinated around an ideology that continually mutated to ensure moral entrepreneurship and a continued supply of purges, as new forms of human behavior or commonplace descriptors became off-limits. Some of this energy was genuine, some cynical...
Their point was that this was all to help poor people. Immigrants. People whose parents are from distant, impoverished lands. People of color. Changing “Master,” firing the dean, and firing professors was all for this.
Except this did so little to actually help any of these people that this could not possibly have been the main motivation.
None of this was actually to their benefit, except for the few activists willing to invest time and energy into the game. It is not easy to stay up-to-date with the new, ever-more-complex rules about what you are allowed to say to qualify as the bare minimum of sociable and sane. It is cognitively and socially demanding. I had to not just study psychology and computer science, but I had to stay up-to-date with the latest PhD-level critical theory just to have conversations...
If words like “Master” are deemed offensive based on questionable linguistic or historical standards, then this means other words and phrases can become offensive at a moment’s notice. Under these rules, only people in the upper ranks who receive constant updates can learn what is acceptable. Everybody else will be left behind.
The people best positioned for this are professors at elite universities. They are ingrained in the culture that makes up these social rules. They get weekly or even daily updates, but even they cannot keep up...
If even competent, qualified, liberal, well-meaning, tenured professors at Ivy League universities are in danger of losing their livelihood for arbitrary reasons just because they said something subtly wrong to the wrong student organization, then what hope do the rest of us have?...
A cynical observer might conclude that this is all just revolution as usual—a small clique of agitators seizing more and more power, and purging their enemies by virtue of their superior internal solidarity, a bold and demanding ideology, lukewarm popular moral support, and no real organized opposition. In some ways, that is what’s going on. They have the bold ideology, the ambient support, and no real opposition.
But importantly, they don’t have internal coordination by any means other than adherence to the ideology itself. Even members of the clique are never really safe. Anyone who contradicts the latest consensus version of the constantly mutating ideology, even if they have worked to its benefit or are otherwise obviously on side, gets purged. If you don’t keep up, you get purged...
For everyone who gets purged for a slight infraction, there are dozens who learn from this example never to stand up to the ideology, dozens who learn that they can attack with impunity if they use the ideology to do it, and dozens who are vaguely convinced by its rhetoric to be supportive of the next purge. So, on it goes...
Yale administrators had lofty goals. In an attempt to placate their own biases, the administrators and faculty forgot that they are the ones who are supposed to be teaching. Instead of expelling or suspending the small number of people actively undermining the student body and university as a whole, the university does nothing, or actively accelerates the process. The professors are the ones who leave. The radical clique feels emboldened.
Now we can begin to understand the real problem at Yale...
The faculty get pushed around by a small number of students, and administrators actively fire up conflict on their behalf. If an administrator wins favor among them, that administrator gains power. If administrators come to understand that they can gain power via this vector, it makes sense why they would chip away at existing holders of power: the people on the board, the donors, the alumni, and the traditions of the institution itself.
In effect, a large fraction of the administrators form a revolutionary class within the rest of the university structure. They use both their existing power and new ideological mandates to expand their own domain at the expense of other players. The purpose of the administrators is to shape, tear down, and rebuild the university on the institutional level, which lets them act on ideological goals in a way students and faculty generally cannot. The people filling these expanded roles often come from the student body itself, having served in student government or activist student organizations before transitioning into their bureaucratic roles after graduation. This is the human institutional structure behind the ideological phenomenon.
The result is an institution increasingly unable to carry out its own mission, as tuition rises to pay for more administrators, and ideological drama makes it harder and harder to actually teach. And now we are back at the original question. What was the point of Yale? What was the point of going to Yale? What is the point of elite institutions?...
The problems present at Yale are present at every other university, and schools outside of the United States look to elite American universities as role models."
Despite this, we are told that decolonising/diversifying the curriculum is not a zero sum game, and that diversity is only ever a good thing. Then again, the course has already been infected so maybe this is a good thing
Presumably students undermining the narrative of oppression will not delight Barringer
Segments of Random Thoughts - Posts - "The Woke are rewriting history with extreme prejudice. The West cannot have any positive legacy. Because they don't want you to feel pride, only guilt."
Yale Med School To Stop Teaching Medicine Discovered By White Males | The Babylon Bee - "This has been lauded as a much-needed stand for diversity at Yale, especially by current med students who will now have much more time to deal with the stress of med school by watching Netflix."Yes, many people will get sick and die because of this, but it will be worth it for the woke points," one professor said. "We will now only teach medicine discovered by brave, oppressed, trans people of color." At publishing time, Yale University had announced that the entire campus would be bulldozed over after faculty discovered the school was founded by privileged white males."
Yale against Western Art
"Given the role that these two courses have played in exposing Yale undergraduates to the joys of scholarship and knowledge, one would think that the department would have amassed overwhelmingly compelling grounds for eliminating them. To the contrary, the reasons given are either laughably weak or at odds with the facts. The first reason is the most absurd: the course titles (“Introduction to the History of Art: Prehistory to the Renaissance” and “Introduction to the History of Art: Renaissance to the Present”). Art history chair Tim Barringer apparently thinks students will be fooled by those titles into thinking that other traditions don’t exist... If the titles are such a trap for the Eurocentric unwary, the department could have simply added the word “European” before “Art” and been done with it...
Barringer also claims that it was “problematic” to put European art on a pedestal when so many other regions and traditions were “equally deserving of study.” The courses that will replace the surveys will not claim to “be the mainstream with everything else pushed to the margins,” he told the Daily News. Leave aside for the moment whether the European tradition may legitimately form the core of an art history education in an American university. The premise of Barringer’s statement—that previously European art was put on a pedestal and everything else was pushed to the margins—is blatantly false. The department requires art history majors to take two introductory-level one-semester survey courses. Since at least 2012, the department has offered courses in non-Western art that can fulfill that requirement in lieu of the European surveys...
Nor would anyone surveying the art history catalogue think that Yale was “privileging” the West, as they say in theoryspeak. That catalogue is awash in non-European courses...
Those courses must also be sacked because it is impossible to cover the “entire field—and its varied cultural backgrounds—in one course,” as the Daily News put it. If this statement means that the span of time covered in each of the one-semester Western art classes is too large, non-Western survey courses are as broad or broader. “Chinese Painting and Culture” covers 16 centuries. “Power, Gender, and Ritual in African Art” covers nearly two millennia. “Introduction to the History of Art: Buddhist Art and Architecture” covers seven centuries. “Introduction to the History of Art: Sacred Art and Architecture” covers several millennia. None of these courses is facing extinction.
Barringer promises that the replacement surveys will subject European art to a variety of deconstructive readings designed to pull that tradition down from its alleged pedestal. The new classes will consider Western art in relation to “questions of gender, class, and ‘race,’” he told the Daily News in an email, carefully putting scare quotes around “race” to signal his adherence to the creed that race is a social construct. The new courses will discuss the involvement of Western art with capitalism. Most intriguingly, the relationship between Western art and climate change will be a “key theme,” he wrote.
Barringer’s proposed deconstruction of Western art illustrates a central feature of modern academia: The hermeneutics of suspicion (Paul Ricoeur’s term for the demystifying impulse that took over the humanities in the late 20 century) applies only to the Western canon. Western academics continue to interpret non-Western traditions with sympathy and respect; those interpreters seek to faithfully convey the intentions of non-Western creators and to help students understand what makes non-Western works great. So, while the replacement European art survey courses will, in Marissa Bass’s words, “challenge, rethink, and rewrite” art historical narratives, the department will not be cancelling its Buddhist art and architecture class due to the low representation of female artists and architects, nor will it “interrogate” (as High Theory puts it) African arts and cultures for their relationship to genocidal tribal warfare, or Aztec art and architecture for their relationship to murderous misogyny.
In the replacement European survey courses, however, Tim Barringer will ask students to nominate a work of art that has been left out of the curriculum or textbook, in order to challenge long-held views of art history. Barringer is looking forward to seeing how students will “counteract or undermine” his own narratives about Western art, he wrote in an online syllabus note. Will students in “Painting and Poetry in Islamic Art” be asked to nominate an excluded art work? Unlikely. The idea that a Yale undergraduate knows enough to “counteract or undermine” the expertise of Islamic scholars would be seen as ludicrous. Only with regards to the Western tradition are ignorant students given the power to countermand what was once the considered judgment of the scholarly profession.
Students exert pressure over what gets taught not just through explicit pressure but also through their mere existence, if they possess favored identity traits. The “diversity of today’s student body” guides the art history department’s curricular thinking, department leaders explained in a statement on the cancelled survey courses. But the ephemera of students’ race and sex have no bearing on the significance of the past. The sublimity of Chartres Cathedral, a focal point of Scully’s fall semester course, transcends the skin color of the latest round of freshmen. If the University of Lagos suddenly received a large influx of students from Idaho, that would not change how Yoruba bronzes would be taught or interpreted. It is only in the West where scholarship and pedagogy are held hostage to some students’ demographic profile.
Yale has cancelled other landmark courses on identity grounds. For decades, English majors were required to take a yearlong course called “Major English Poets.”... But that course was defenestrated from its gateway status for English majors in 2017...
Rather than push back against this ignorant nonsense, members of Yale’s English faculty validated its premise... Medieval and Elizabethan England simply did not have black poets writing in the English language, a pattern that continued through the Augustan and Romantic periods. Females were only slightly more represented, but none of them had the influence of the course’s focal authors...
Yale’s lust for curricular cancellations has picked up steam since Major English Poets lost its required spot in the English major. The art history department appears to be eliminating the Western art introductory courses on its own initiative, without the pretext of a student petition or other agitation. The only possible grounds for doing so is a political hatred for the Western tradition, since the axed courses were voluntary and surrounded by numerous non-Western alternatives. Barringer did not respond to an email asking for a preview of the mysterious relationship between Western art and climate change. He also chose not to reveal whether African, Asian, and South American art will now be “problematized” along with Western art.
The one-sided subjection of Western civilization to the petty tyranny of identity politics will only worsen. Yale is one of four universities to have received a $4 million grant to infuse the theme of race into every aspect of humanities teaching and scholarship. Brown, the University of Chicago, and Stanford are the other recipients of that Andrew W. Mellon Foundation bequest. (The Mellon Foundation, once a supporter of apolitical humanities scholarship, has been captured by the identitarian Left.) Race, Yale announced in its press release about the Mellon grant, is critically important and indisputably central to the humanities.
Actually, it is not. The humanities are about matters far more compelling than the trivialities of race, which in any case we are supposed to believe is not even real. For centuries, poets, painters, novelists, and architects sought to express essential truths about the human condition. Race may have played a role in a few classic works, such as Othello or The Heart of Darkness, but it was hardly “central” to the entire tradition. Those who seek to make it so do so in the pursuit of political grievance, not scholarly accuracy.
Some students know better, however. Once word got out that this year would be the curtain call for the two introductory Western art courses, students stampeded to enroll. Though the courses were not in fact a required gateway into the study of art history, it would have been perfectly appropriate to make them so. The primary obligation of education is to pass on a particular civilization’s cultural inheritance with love and gratitude. Yale, like nearly every other college today, has lost the will to do so. It has therefore negated its very reason for being."
The Real Problem at Yale Is Not Free Speech
"Poor people pretend to be rich to look cool. Go visit the Russians on Brighton Beach in their tank tops and gold chains. Rich people pretend to be poor to fit in. Go to San Francisco and play a round of “Homeless or tech billionaire.”
But bizarre effects emerge when signals are mixed up. In particular, I have seen bizarre effects from mixed-up wealth signaling structures...
On the surface, there is nothing wrong with haphazard and sometimes warped class signaling. But if you put on a façade for long enough, you end up forgetting that it is a façade. The rich and powerful actually start believing that they are neither of those things. They actually start believing that there is not much difference in status and resources between themselves and the upper-middle class, the middle class—and eventually, between themselves and the actual poor. They forget that they have certain privileges and duties that others do not. They forget that the inside joke was just a joke all along...
When these kids grow up, they end up at conferences where everybody lifts their champagne glasses to speeches about how we all need to “tear down the Man!” How we need to usurp conventional power structures.
You hear about these events. They sound good. It’s important to think about how to improve the world. But when you look around at the men and women in their suits and dresses, with their happy, hopeful expressions, you notice that these are the exact same people with the power—they are the Man supposedly causing all those problems that they are giving feel-good speeches about. They are the kids from Harvard-Westlake who never realized they were themselves the elite. They are the people with power who fail to comprehend the meaning of that power. They are abdicating responsibility, and they don’t even know it...
We mock each other over wealth and mannerisms, to the point that we forget how and why wealth is built in the first place. We forget the extent of our own power and start blaming an ephemeral elite beyond ourselves for the ills of society. And when something does need to be challenged in elite thought, not in the fake, recuperated way that Greta Thunberg ritually challenges an already-supportive crowd at Davos, but in the real way that carries personal risk—we bail. When we see an unfashionable truth that may risk criticism or ostracism, we forget our own position of strength and assume we cannot bear those risks. We give up the fight before it even starts—as if somebody else can or will fight it.
That is what can lead to societal dysfunction. But it is also a symptom of that dysfunction...
The appearance of bottom-up protest politics is always a bit of a false narrative...
What do all of these events have in common? Some had student support. Some did not. Some started as public outrage taken to the street. Some were completely internal. What they had in common was an administration and student body coordinated around an ideology that continually mutated to ensure moral entrepreneurship and a continued supply of purges, as new forms of human behavior or commonplace descriptors became off-limits. Some of this energy was genuine, some cynical...
Their point was that this was all to help poor people. Immigrants. People whose parents are from distant, impoverished lands. People of color. Changing “Master,” firing the dean, and firing professors was all for this.
Except this did so little to actually help any of these people that this could not possibly have been the main motivation.
None of this was actually to their benefit, except for the few activists willing to invest time and energy into the game. It is not easy to stay up-to-date with the new, ever-more-complex rules about what you are allowed to say to qualify as the bare minimum of sociable and sane. It is cognitively and socially demanding. I had to not just study psychology and computer science, but I had to stay up-to-date with the latest PhD-level critical theory just to have conversations...
If words like “Master” are deemed offensive based on questionable linguistic or historical standards, then this means other words and phrases can become offensive at a moment’s notice. Under these rules, only people in the upper ranks who receive constant updates can learn what is acceptable. Everybody else will be left behind.
The people best positioned for this are professors at elite universities. They are ingrained in the culture that makes up these social rules. They get weekly or even daily updates, but even they cannot keep up...
If even competent, qualified, liberal, well-meaning, tenured professors at Ivy League universities are in danger of losing their livelihood for arbitrary reasons just because they said something subtly wrong to the wrong student organization, then what hope do the rest of us have?...
A cynical observer might conclude that this is all just revolution as usual—a small clique of agitators seizing more and more power, and purging their enemies by virtue of their superior internal solidarity, a bold and demanding ideology, lukewarm popular moral support, and no real organized opposition. In some ways, that is what’s going on. They have the bold ideology, the ambient support, and no real opposition.
But importantly, they don’t have internal coordination by any means other than adherence to the ideology itself. Even members of the clique are never really safe. Anyone who contradicts the latest consensus version of the constantly mutating ideology, even if they have worked to its benefit or are otherwise obviously on side, gets purged. If you don’t keep up, you get purged...
For everyone who gets purged for a slight infraction, there are dozens who learn from this example never to stand up to the ideology, dozens who learn that they can attack with impunity if they use the ideology to do it, and dozens who are vaguely convinced by its rhetoric to be supportive of the next purge. So, on it goes...
Yale administrators had lofty goals. In an attempt to placate their own biases, the administrators and faculty forgot that they are the ones who are supposed to be teaching. Instead of expelling or suspending the small number of people actively undermining the student body and university as a whole, the university does nothing, or actively accelerates the process. The professors are the ones who leave. The radical clique feels emboldened.
Now we can begin to understand the real problem at Yale...
The faculty get pushed around by a small number of students, and administrators actively fire up conflict on their behalf. If an administrator wins favor among them, that administrator gains power. If administrators come to understand that they can gain power via this vector, it makes sense why they would chip away at existing holders of power: the people on the board, the donors, the alumni, and the traditions of the institution itself.
In effect, a large fraction of the administrators form a revolutionary class within the rest of the university structure. They use both their existing power and new ideological mandates to expand their own domain at the expense of other players. The purpose of the administrators is to shape, tear down, and rebuild the university on the institutional level, which lets them act on ideological goals in a way students and faculty generally cannot. The people filling these expanded roles often come from the student body itself, having served in student government or activist student organizations before transitioning into their bureaucratic roles after graduation. This is the human institutional structure behind the ideological phenomenon.
The result is an institution increasingly unable to carry out its own mission, as tuition rises to pay for more administrators, and ideological drama makes it harder and harder to actually teach. And now we are back at the original question. What was the point of Yale? What was the point of going to Yale? What is the point of elite institutions?...
The problems present at Yale are present at every other university, and schools outside of the United States look to elite American universities as role models."
Post ID: 3185260622847175467
Interview with the Pope's Astronomer
BBC Radio Ulster - Everyday Ethics, How Do We Measure Success?
Interview with Brother Guy J. Consolmagno:
‘He's the director of the Vatican Observatory, and he has spent most of his life studying galaxies far far away. And if he isn't studying objects from space, he's probably explaining how science and religion should not be competing ideologies. More about that in a moment, but he began by describing what it was like to work for one of the oldest astronomical research institutions in the world.’
‘Well it's an interesting place to work as an astronomer. When I got here, my instructions were do good science. So unlike the days that I was living off in NASA grant before I became a Jesuit, we have the freedom to pursue whatever astronomy is interesting to us. And that means we've got a dozen astronomers who's doing a dozen different projects with collaborators from around the world. But we're not limited to what can be funded in a three year cycle or you know, a six year, 10 year thing. It means that the kind of science we do complements the science of the people that we do. We do surveys, we will take 20 years to measure the physical properties of meteorites, that sort of thing. And it gives us the freedom to look into places that other scientists don't get to look into’
‘Many people might wonder, why does the Vatican need to do this? Why?’
‘Well, you could ask really the bigger question, why does anybody need to do astronomy? I had that crisis when I was much younger when I was about 30. And thought, you know, why am I doing astronomy when people are starving in the world? I quit astronomy at that point. I went off to the Peace Corps and worked in Kenya for two years. And the Africans reminded me that they wanted to know about astronomy, too. It's human to have this hunger about who are we, what is the world all about, what are the things in the sky, what is this conversation that human beings have been having about the universe and cosmology for the last 3000 years? It's what makes us more than just well fed cows. In particular, the Vatican does it because it makes us look good compared to the mistake they made with Galileo 400 years ago... [Pope Francis has] got a background in chemistry. And the director before me was an Argentinian Jesuit. They knew each other before he was Pope. Pope Francis was the one who told my predecessor to continue on in his studies in astronomy, that it was useful to have both the scientists and the people who work with the poor. Sometimes you can do both.’
‘Do you get much pushback? Do you receive much challenge to the Vatican pursuing science?’
‘Surprisingly no. The people in the field have known us for 125 years, we've been partaking in International Science. And as I say, because we don't have to compete with them for money, we're welcome on the field of science. The funny thing that happened to me when I became a Jesuit, I'd met a scientist had been in astronomy 15 years at that point. And so many of my friends and colleagues said, You're a Jesuit? You don't, like, you go to church? Couldn't tell. And then they started telling me about the churches they went to. And I discovered the religious background of so many people in my field who I would never have thought were science, scientists and religious. It's a kind of thing that we don't talk about, usually until we have the permission to and when I have my collar, whether I'm wearing it or not, I give people permission to ask the bigger questions, whether it's, you know, what is this all about? Or the simpler ones of you know, I've got an issue with my church. I've got an issue with my marriage. What do I do? Who can I talk to? That happens all the time.’
‘Why do you think there is that reluctance to talk about it?’
‘Well, there is this myth that goes back to the end of the 19th century, that somehow science was going to replace religion. And I think the 20th century proved that one wrong. First of all, that science doesn't seem to be so cut and dried as it was before we knew about quantum physics and relativity. And the second that we've learned that just having good technology doesn't mean you have good ethics, you know, like, Nazi Germany had great technology. But so as a result, I think people now are more open to the idea of science and religion coexisting. Yeah, we're both interested in learning truths. And we both know that we have this urge to know the truth, and we need tools to know the truth and we can help each other out that way. But there's still this suspicion, we grew up with the idea that all it had to be one or the other. You see the pop scientists on TV saying, well, I'm I must be a scientist because I don't believe in God. And it's surprised to discover that those [op scientists on TV are probably the minority.’
‘So are you a creationist or an evolutionist?’
‘I'm a Catholic. Which means that I recognize ,the current theories of evolution are as good as a theory we've got at the moment to explain how we went from inanimate atoms to the multiplicity of life we see on Earth. But in 1000 years, we may not even be asking those questions. You know, evolution isn't the final answer. And yet I'm also with my Catholic background, well aware of what St Augustine said and what St. Thomas Aquinas said, that anyone who wants to treat the scripture as if it was a science book is misunderstanding scripture and actually heaping abuse on it. That's not my term. That's the term of St Augustine writing about the year 400’
Interview with Brother Guy J. Consolmagno:
‘He's the director of the Vatican Observatory, and he has spent most of his life studying galaxies far far away. And if he isn't studying objects from space, he's probably explaining how science and religion should not be competing ideologies. More about that in a moment, but he began by describing what it was like to work for one of the oldest astronomical research institutions in the world.’
‘Well it's an interesting place to work as an astronomer. When I got here, my instructions were do good science. So unlike the days that I was living off in NASA grant before I became a Jesuit, we have the freedom to pursue whatever astronomy is interesting to us. And that means we've got a dozen astronomers who's doing a dozen different projects with collaborators from around the world. But we're not limited to what can be funded in a three year cycle or you know, a six year, 10 year thing. It means that the kind of science we do complements the science of the people that we do. We do surveys, we will take 20 years to measure the physical properties of meteorites, that sort of thing. And it gives us the freedom to look into places that other scientists don't get to look into’
‘Many people might wonder, why does the Vatican need to do this? Why?’
‘Well, you could ask really the bigger question, why does anybody need to do astronomy? I had that crisis when I was much younger when I was about 30. And thought, you know, why am I doing astronomy when people are starving in the world? I quit astronomy at that point. I went off to the Peace Corps and worked in Kenya for two years. And the Africans reminded me that they wanted to know about astronomy, too. It's human to have this hunger about who are we, what is the world all about, what are the things in the sky, what is this conversation that human beings have been having about the universe and cosmology for the last 3000 years? It's what makes us more than just well fed cows. In particular, the Vatican does it because it makes us look good compared to the mistake they made with Galileo 400 years ago... [Pope Francis has] got a background in chemistry. And the director before me was an Argentinian Jesuit. They knew each other before he was Pope. Pope Francis was the one who told my predecessor to continue on in his studies in astronomy, that it was useful to have both the scientists and the people who work with the poor. Sometimes you can do both.’
‘Do you get much pushback? Do you receive much challenge to the Vatican pursuing science?’
‘Surprisingly no. The people in the field have known us for 125 years, we've been partaking in International Science. And as I say, because we don't have to compete with them for money, we're welcome on the field of science. The funny thing that happened to me when I became a Jesuit, I'd met a scientist had been in astronomy 15 years at that point. And so many of my friends and colleagues said, You're a Jesuit? You don't, like, you go to church? Couldn't tell. And then they started telling me about the churches they went to. And I discovered the religious background of so many people in my field who I would never have thought were science, scientists and religious. It's a kind of thing that we don't talk about, usually until we have the permission to and when I have my collar, whether I'm wearing it or not, I give people permission to ask the bigger questions, whether it's, you know, what is this all about? Or the simpler ones of you know, I've got an issue with my church. I've got an issue with my marriage. What do I do? Who can I talk to? That happens all the time.’
‘Why do you think there is that reluctance to talk about it?’
‘Well, there is this myth that goes back to the end of the 19th century, that somehow science was going to replace religion. And I think the 20th century proved that one wrong. First of all, that science doesn't seem to be so cut and dried as it was before we knew about quantum physics and relativity. And the second that we've learned that just having good technology doesn't mean you have good ethics, you know, like, Nazi Germany had great technology. But so as a result, I think people now are more open to the idea of science and religion coexisting. Yeah, we're both interested in learning truths. And we both know that we have this urge to know the truth, and we need tools to know the truth and we can help each other out that way. But there's still this suspicion, we grew up with the idea that all it had to be one or the other. You see the pop scientists on TV saying, well, I'm I must be a scientist because I don't believe in God. And it's surprised to discover that those [op scientists on TV are probably the minority.’
‘So are you a creationist or an evolutionist?’
‘I'm a Catholic. Which means that I recognize ,the current theories of evolution are as good as a theory we've got at the moment to explain how we went from inanimate atoms to the multiplicity of life we see on Earth. But in 1000 years, we may not even be asking those questions. You know, evolution isn't the final answer. And yet I'm also with my Catholic background, well aware of what St Augustine said and what St. Thomas Aquinas said, that anyone who wants to treat the scripture as if it was a science book is misunderstanding scripture and actually heaping abuse on it. That's not my term. That's the term of St Augustine writing about the year 400’
Post ID: 4792337249773408041
Thursday, May 07, 2020
Links - 7th May 2020 (3)
Remarks by President Trump in State of the Union Address | The White House -"We are advancing with unbridled optimism and lifting high our citizens of every race, color, religion, and creed."
"From the pilgrims to our Founders, from the soldiers at Valley Forge to the marchers at Selma, and from President Lincoln to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Americans have always rejected limits on our children's future."
"To expand equal opportunity, I am also proud that we achieved record and permanent funding for our Nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities."
"The USMCA will create nearly 100,000 new high-paying American auto jobs, and massively boost exports for our farmers, ranchers, and factory workers. It will also bring trade with Mexico and Canada to a much higher degree, but also to a much greater level of fairness and reciprocity. This is the first major trade deal in many years to earn the strong backing of America's labor unions."
"The unemployment rates for African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and Asian-Americans have reached the lowest levels in history. African-American youth unemployment has reached an all-time low."
"African-American poverty has declined to the lowest rate ever recorded."
"The unemployment rate for women reached the lowest level in almost 70 years -- and last year, women filled 72 percent of all new jobs added."
Literally Hitler. We all know Hitler was so racist that he talked the Jews up before gassing them
Trump puts on a clinic at State of the Union address - The Post Millennial - "No matter how much you hate President Trump—and I have some world-class Trump haters in my immediate circle of family and friends, so I know how deeply authentic and ferociously visceral that particular hatred is—you have to admit he has some great speech writers."
Trump Gives Presidential Medal Of Freedom To Rush Limbaugh - "Barack Obama famously awarded the honor to Ellen DeGeneres"
Trump puts on a clinic at State of the Union address - The Post Millennial - " no response to the SOTU address would be complete without a word about House Leader Nancy Pelosi’s unbelievably dumb gesture at the end of the speech. With the camera still steady on a radiantly happy Trump and her, plainly visible behind him, she ripped the pages of his speech in half.Whatever possessed her? Had she already planned to do it before she arrived? Hard to believe that with time to consider, such a seasoned politician wouldn’t see the obvious danger of unintended consequences inherent in that symbolic act. Or was it Trump’s insulting refusal to shake her proffered hand before the speech that triggered her ill-considered thirst for revenge? Even then, she had a full hour to contemplate the gesture’s attendant risk. Whatever, Pelosi’s “Nantrum” (thanks, witty tweeter) is the meme that will live in infamy. Trump was wrong to ignore her hand, but that was only an insult to her personally – or perhaps to her party. Tearing up the speech was an insult not only to Trump and Republicans, but to his guests. And in any case, there is no tit-for-tat possible here, because the expression implies that Trump and Pelosi are peers. They are not. He is the duly elected president of the United States. She is a party appointee, not even a candidate for president... many Americans, a lot of them undecided, would see the gesture as an offence to the office of the presidency. After all, she had gotten a dig in by refusing to intone the usual introduction with the words “honour” and “privilege,” so she had already riposted the handshake refusal. I’m pretty sure Pelosi handed Trump a significant number of votes with that moment of uncontainable malice. Never a dull moment in American politics, eh? Even without impeachment dramas, an Iowa primary disaster and a SOTU spat meme gone viral, it’s a circus like no other."
Baby bears found in rest stop bathroom near Banff
Do We Really Live Longer Than Our Ancestors? - "while medical advancements have improved many aspects of healthcare, the assumption that human life span has increased dramatically over centuries or millennia is misleading.Overall life expectancy, which is the statistic reflected in reports like those above, hasn’t increased so much because we’re living far longer than we used to as a species. It’s increased because more of us, as individuals, are making it that far.“There is a basic distinction between life expectancy and life span,” says Stanford University historian Walter Scheidel, a leading scholar of ancient Roman demography. “The life span of humans – opposed to life expectancy, which is a statistical construct – hasn’t really changed much at all, as far as I can tell.”Life expectancy is an average. If you have two children, and one dies before their first birthday but the other lives to the age of 70, their average life expectancy is 35... Do We Really Live Longer Than Our Ancestors? - "while medical advancements have improved many aspects of healthcare, the assumption that human life span has increased dramatically over centuries or millennia is misleading.Overall life expectancy, which is the statistic reflected in reports like those above, hasn’t increased so much because we’re living far longer than we used to as a species. It’s increased because more of us, as individuals, are making it that far.“There is a basic distinction between life expectancy and life span,” says Stanford University historian Walter Scheidel, a leading scholar of ancient Roman demography. “The life span of humans – opposed to life expectancy, which is a statistical construct – hasn’t really changed much at all, as far as I can tell.”Life expectancy is an average. If you have two children, and one dies before their first birthday but the other lives to the age of 70, their average life expectancy is 35. In the 1st Century, Pliny devoted an entire chapter of The Natural History to people who lived longest. Among them he lists the consul M Valerius Corvinos (100 years), Cicero’s wife Terentia (103), a woman named Clodia (115 – and who had 15 children along the way), and the actress Lucceia who performed on stage at 100 years old... Back in 1994 a study looked at every man entered into the Oxford Classical Dictionary who lived in ancient Greece or Rome. Their ages of death were compared to men listed in the more recent Chambers Biographical Dictionary.Of 397 ancients in total, 99 died violently by murder, suicide or in battle. Of the remaining 298, those born before 100BC lived to a median age of 72 years. Those born after 100BC lived to a median age of 66. (The authors speculate that the prevalence of dangerous lead plumbing may have led to this apparent shortening of life).The median of those who died between 1850 and 1949? Seventy-one years old – just one year less than their pre-100 BC cohort... Not everyone agrees. “There was an enormous difference between the lifestyle of a poor versus an elite Roman,” says Valentina Gazzaniga, a medical historian at Rome’s La Sapienza University. “The conditions of life, access to medical therapies, even just hygiene – these were all certainly better among the elites.”In 2016, Gazzaniga published her research on more than 2,000 ancient Roman skeletons, all working-class people who were buried in common graves. The average age of death was 30, and that wasn’t a mere statistical quirk: a high number of the skeletons were around that age. Many showed the effects of trauma from hard labour, as well as diseases we would associate with later ages, like arthritis... “The life expectancy of Roman women actually increased with the decline of fertility,” Gazzaniga says. “The more fertile the population is, the lower the female life expectancy.”... Did having money or power help? Not always. One analysis of some 115,000 European nobles found that kings lived about six years less than lesser nobles, like knights. Demographic historians have found by looking at county parish registers that in 17th-Century England, life expectancy was longer for villagers than nobles"... “once the dangerous childhood years were passed… life expectancy in the mid-Victorian period was not markedly different from what it is today.” A five-year-old girl would live to 73; a boy, to 75.Not only are these numbers comparable to our own, they may be even better. Members of today’s working-class (a more accurate comparison) live to around 72 years for men and 76 years for women... if we think we’re living longer than ever today, this is because our records go back to around 1900 – which they call a “misleading baseline,” as it was at a time when nutrition had decreased and when many men started to smoke"
One of these is a deadly viper. The other is a harmless toad. Can you tell the difference? - "The Congolese giant toad, which grows to the size of a small hand, would be a hearty meal for any predator. But it escapes being eaten by birds, lizards, and snakes with a trick never seen anywhere else in the world: It looks and acts just like the Gaboon viper, one of the most venomous snakes in Central Africa.Many animals imitate dangerous ones to avoid being eaten. Viceroy butterflies are colored like the toxic monarch, for example, and many harmless snakes mimic venomous ones. But this is the first time a toad has been found to mimic a snake... given their close evolutionary history (both evolved between 4 million and 5 million years ago) and the fact that the toad is found only in locations where the viper is present, it’s likely that the toads and vipers coevolved together"
Ricky Gervais on Twitter - "What's your New Year's Mantra? Mine is..."You found it offensive? I found it funny. That's why I'm happier than you." Happy New Year."
Ricky Gervais, Man of the People - "In a room filled with self-absorbed narcissists, one brave, slightly less self-absorbed narcissist had the balls to speak truth to power—and his name is Ricky Gervais... They have the audacity to call for an “economic revolution” after making fortunes off us working-class stiffs. They look down on anyone who doesn’t vote like them because they can’t possibly imagine a world in which they might be wrong. Fame has tricked them into believing they are the moral arbiter of all that is good and right and just in the world... I have to say, it was satisfying to watch a roomful of self-righteous celebrities be on the receiving end of a roast. Only a cheeky atheist comedian with a British accent could get away with saying, “So, if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your god, and fuck off.”"
David Burge on Twitter - "Good comedy never punches down on marginalized communities like entertainment industry executives, it challenges sacred cows like all those stump-toothed inbred hillbillies from Pennsyltucky or wherever"
Tim Dillon on Twitter - "The reason critics hate what Gervais did is because they have spent the last two years telling people that boring virtue signaling is the truest form of comedy, and the only person worth talking about is Trump. In 7 minutes Gervais reminded people of what comedy actually is."
Ricky Gervais - "How the fuck can teasing huge corporations, and the richest, most privileged people in the world be considered right wing? #GoldenGlobes"
Ricky Gervais on Twitter - "1. Simply pointing out whether someone is left or right wing isn't winning the argument.
2. If a joke is good enough, it can be enjoyed by anyone.
3. It's not all about you.
4. Just because you're offended, doesn't mean you're right."
Serhii Plokhy On A US/USSR Operation In WW2 | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "[On US bases in the USSR] ‘The Soviets… they really just acted like they did the issues related to dating or sex and the Red Army didn't exist. And one of the outcomes of that was of course, mass rape of, for example, German women and women in Eastern Europe. The US position was that, yes, the Soviets told them that the American Airmen, GIs are not supposed to date the women in the uniforms. So women in the Red Army, but it was expected that they would be *something* their allies, that they would be allowed to date civilian women. Like that was the case in Britain. Again, good memories, bad memories about that, like that was the case in France as well. In the Soviet Union, they actually allowed and even encouraged that kind of dating as long as they thought they needed the Americans, and they thought they needed the Americans before the opening of the second front. So one of the reasons why Stalin agreed to open the bases was to accommodate Roosevelt's request for that because he wanted, he wanted the second front. Once the second front was there, one of the reason to be nice to the Americans disappeared. Then once they they moved the frontier. As a result, the Soviets came in, as a result of that offensive, there was one less reason to have the Americans there and then there was embarrassment of not being able to protect them. So by July of... 1944, what you see are the military counterintelligence groups and the civilian secret police is going there and actually openly harassing women whom the Americans were dating. And resentment towards rich Americans dating the locals in Britain or in France was there certainly. But nowhere there was a secret police go in there and try to break the relationships that originally they encouraged to develop. And that certainly added to the frictions’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Catullus - "‘When I was studying Latin when I was 14, 15, in a convent school, we had selections of Catullus. So there was a lot left out. We had poems that we were told what the translation was of certain words. And they were just not true. So we were told that scortillum meant little cabbage, and it means little whore. But you couldn't have had that in the convent school. And then we were also told, oh, when men kiss each other, as they seem to be doing in this particular poem, that's because Romans are just like Italians today. They're much more outward looking and friendly than you know, us Brits. And you realize it's a completely false education’"
"From the pilgrims to our Founders, from the soldiers at Valley Forge to the marchers at Selma, and from President Lincoln to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Americans have always rejected limits on our children's future."
"To expand equal opportunity, I am also proud that we achieved record and permanent funding for our Nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities."
"The USMCA will create nearly 100,000 new high-paying American auto jobs, and massively boost exports for our farmers, ranchers, and factory workers. It will also bring trade with Mexico and Canada to a much higher degree, but also to a much greater level of fairness and reciprocity. This is the first major trade deal in many years to earn the strong backing of America's labor unions."
"The unemployment rates for African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and Asian-Americans have reached the lowest levels in history. African-American youth unemployment has reached an all-time low."
"African-American poverty has declined to the lowest rate ever recorded."
"The unemployment rate for women reached the lowest level in almost 70 years -- and last year, women filled 72 percent of all new jobs added."
Literally Hitler. We all know Hitler was so racist that he talked the Jews up before gassing them
Trump puts on a clinic at State of the Union address - The Post Millennial - "No matter how much you hate President Trump—and I have some world-class Trump haters in my immediate circle of family and friends, so I know how deeply authentic and ferociously visceral that particular hatred is—you have to admit he has some great speech writers."
Trump Gives Presidential Medal Of Freedom To Rush Limbaugh - "Barack Obama famously awarded the honor to Ellen DeGeneres"
Trump puts on a clinic at State of the Union address - The Post Millennial - " no response to the SOTU address would be complete without a word about House Leader Nancy Pelosi’s unbelievably dumb gesture at the end of the speech. With the camera still steady on a radiantly happy Trump and her, plainly visible behind him, she ripped the pages of his speech in half.Whatever possessed her? Had she already planned to do it before she arrived? Hard to believe that with time to consider, such a seasoned politician wouldn’t see the obvious danger of unintended consequences inherent in that symbolic act. Or was it Trump’s insulting refusal to shake her proffered hand before the speech that triggered her ill-considered thirst for revenge? Even then, she had a full hour to contemplate the gesture’s attendant risk. Whatever, Pelosi’s “Nantrum” (thanks, witty tweeter) is the meme that will live in infamy. Trump was wrong to ignore her hand, but that was only an insult to her personally – or perhaps to her party. Tearing up the speech was an insult not only to Trump and Republicans, but to his guests. And in any case, there is no tit-for-tat possible here, because the expression implies that Trump and Pelosi are peers. They are not. He is the duly elected president of the United States. She is a party appointee, not even a candidate for president... many Americans, a lot of them undecided, would see the gesture as an offence to the office of the presidency. After all, she had gotten a dig in by refusing to intone the usual introduction with the words “honour” and “privilege,” so she had already riposted the handshake refusal. I’m pretty sure Pelosi handed Trump a significant number of votes with that moment of uncontainable malice. Never a dull moment in American politics, eh? Even without impeachment dramas, an Iowa primary disaster and a SOTU spat meme gone viral, it’s a circus like no other."
Baby bears found in rest stop bathroom near Banff
Do We Really Live Longer Than Our Ancestors? - "while medical advancements have improved many aspects of healthcare, the assumption that human life span has increased dramatically over centuries or millennia is misleading.Overall life expectancy, which is the statistic reflected in reports like those above, hasn’t increased so much because we’re living far longer than we used to as a species. It’s increased because more of us, as individuals, are making it that far.“There is a basic distinction between life expectancy and life span,” says Stanford University historian Walter Scheidel, a leading scholar of ancient Roman demography. “The life span of humans – opposed to life expectancy, which is a statistical construct – hasn’t really changed much at all, as far as I can tell.”Life expectancy is an average. If you have two children, and one dies before their first birthday but the other lives to the age of 70, their average life expectancy is 35... Do We Really Live Longer Than Our Ancestors? - "while medical advancements have improved many aspects of healthcare, the assumption that human life span has increased dramatically over centuries or millennia is misleading.Overall life expectancy, which is the statistic reflected in reports like those above, hasn’t increased so much because we’re living far longer than we used to as a species. It’s increased because more of us, as individuals, are making it that far.“There is a basic distinction between life expectancy and life span,” says Stanford University historian Walter Scheidel, a leading scholar of ancient Roman demography. “The life span of humans – opposed to life expectancy, which is a statistical construct – hasn’t really changed much at all, as far as I can tell.”Life expectancy is an average. If you have two children, and one dies before their first birthday but the other lives to the age of 70, their average life expectancy is 35. In the 1st Century, Pliny devoted an entire chapter of The Natural History to people who lived longest. Among them he lists the consul M Valerius Corvinos (100 years), Cicero’s wife Terentia (103), a woman named Clodia (115 – and who had 15 children along the way), and the actress Lucceia who performed on stage at 100 years old... Back in 1994 a study looked at every man entered into the Oxford Classical Dictionary who lived in ancient Greece or Rome. Their ages of death were compared to men listed in the more recent Chambers Biographical Dictionary.Of 397 ancients in total, 99 died violently by murder, suicide or in battle. Of the remaining 298, those born before 100BC lived to a median age of 72 years. Those born after 100BC lived to a median age of 66. (The authors speculate that the prevalence of dangerous lead plumbing may have led to this apparent shortening of life).The median of those who died between 1850 and 1949? Seventy-one years old – just one year less than their pre-100 BC cohort... Not everyone agrees. “There was an enormous difference between the lifestyle of a poor versus an elite Roman,” says Valentina Gazzaniga, a medical historian at Rome’s La Sapienza University. “The conditions of life, access to medical therapies, even just hygiene – these were all certainly better among the elites.”In 2016, Gazzaniga published her research on more than 2,000 ancient Roman skeletons, all working-class people who were buried in common graves. The average age of death was 30, and that wasn’t a mere statistical quirk: a high number of the skeletons were around that age. Many showed the effects of trauma from hard labour, as well as diseases we would associate with later ages, like arthritis... “The life expectancy of Roman women actually increased with the decline of fertility,” Gazzaniga says. “The more fertile the population is, the lower the female life expectancy.”... Did having money or power help? Not always. One analysis of some 115,000 European nobles found that kings lived about six years less than lesser nobles, like knights. Demographic historians have found by looking at county parish registers that in 17th-Century England, life expectancy was longer for villagers than nobles"... “once the dangerous childhood years were passed… life expectancy in the mid-Victorian period was not markedly different from what it is today.” A five-year-old girl would live to 73; a boy, to 75.Not only are these numbers comparable to our own, they may be even better. Members of today’s working-class (a more accurate comparison) live to around 72 years for men and 76 years for women... if we think we’re living longer than ever today, this is because our records go back to around 1900 – which they call a “misleading baseline,” as it was at a time when nutrition had decreased and when many men started to smoke"
One of these is a deadly viper. The other is a harmless toad. Can you tell the difference? - "The Congolese giant toad, which grows to the size of a small hand, would be a hearty meal for any predator. But it escapes being eaten by birds, lizards, and snakes with a trick never seen anywhere else in the world: It looks and acts just like the Gaboon viper, one of the most venomous snakes in Central Africa.Many animals imitate dangerous ones to avoid being eaten. Viceroy butterflies are colored like the toxic monarch, for example, and many harmless snakes mimic venomous ones. But this is the first time a toad has been found to mimic a snake... given their close evolutionary history (both evolved between 4 million and 5 million years ago) and the fact that the toad is found only in locations where the viper is present, it’s likely that the toads and vipers coevolved together"
Ricky Gervais on Twitter - "What's your New Year's Mantra? Mine is..."You found it offensive? I found it funny. That's why I'm happier than you." Happy New Year."
Ricky Gervais, Man of the People - "In a room filled with self-absorbed narcissists, one brave, slightly less self-absorbed narcissist had the balls to speak truth to power—and his name is Ricky Gervais... They have the audacity to call for an “economic revolution” after making fortunes off us working-class stiffs. They look down on anyone who doesn’t vote like them because they can’t possibly imagine a world in which they might be wrong. Fame has tricked them into believing they are the moral arbiter of all that is good and right and just in the world... I have to say, it was satisfying to watch a roomful of self-righteous celebrities be on the receiving end of a roast. Only a cheeky atheist comedian with a British accent could get away with saying, “So, if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your god, and fuck off.”"
David Burge on Twitter - "Good comedy never punches down on marginalized communities like entertainment industry executives, it challenges sacred cows like all those stump-toothed inbred hillbillies from Pennsyltucky or wherever"
Tim Dillon on Twitter - "The reason critics hate what Gervais did is because they have spent the last two years telling people that boring virtue signaling is the truest form of comedy, and the only person worth talking about is Trump. In 7 minutes Gervais reminded people of what comedy actually is."
Ricky Gervais - "How the fuck can teasing huge corporations, and the richest, most privileged people in the world be considered right wing? #GoldenGlobes"
Ricky Gervais on Twitter - "1. Simply pointing out whether someone is left or right wing isn't winning the argument.
2. If a joke is good enough, it can be enjoyed by anyone.
3. It's not all about you.
4. Just because you're offended, doesn't mean you're right."
Serhii Plokhy On A US/USSR Operation In WW2 | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "[On US bases in the USSR] ‘The Soviets… they really just acted like they did the issues related to dating or sex and the Red Army didn't exist. And one of the outcomes of that was of course, mass rape of, for example, German women and women in Eastern Europe. The US position was that, yes, the Soviets told them that the American Airmen, GIs are not supposed to date the women in the uniforms. So women in the Red Army, but it was expected that they would be *something* their allies, that they would be allowed to date civilian women. Like that was the case in Britain. Again, good memories, bad memories about that, like that was the case in France as well. In the Soviet Union, they actually allowed and even encouraged that kind of dating as long as they thought they needed the Americans, and they thought they needed the Americans before the opening of the second front. So one of the reasons why Stalin agreed to open the bases was to accommodate Roosevelt's request for that because he wanted, he wanted the second front. Once the second front was there, one of the reason to be nice to the Americans disappeared. Then once they they moved the frontier. As a result, the Soviets came in, as a result of that offensive, there was one less reason to have the Americans there and then there was embarrassment of not being able to protect them. So by July of... 1944, what you see are the military counterintelligence groups and the civilian secret police is going there and actually openly harassing women whom the Americans were dating. And resentment towards rich Americans dating the locals in Britain or in France was there certainly. But nowhere there was a secret police go in there and try to break the relationships that originally they encouraged to develop. And that certainly added to the frictions’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Catullus - "‘When I was studying Latin when I was 14, 15, in a convent school, we had selections of Catullus. So there was a lot left out. We had poems that we were told what the translation was of certain words. And they were just not true. So we were told that scortillum meant little cabbage, and it means little whore. But you couldn't have had that in the convent school. And then we were also told, oh, when men kiss each other, as they seem to be doing in this particular poem, that's because Romans are just like Italians today. They're much more outward looking and friendly than you know, us Brits. And you realize it's a completely false education’"
Post ID: 3592538650943151217
The futility of exploring the stars
"Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu, Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes .. and all of this .. all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars."
― J. Michael Straczynski (Creator of Babylon 5)
There's another thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a million years or a billion years or a trillion years, eventually our universe will grow old and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu, Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes .. and all of this .. all of this was for nothing. Period, even if we go to the stars.
Further reading:
The fate of the universe—heat death, Big Rip or cosmic consciousness?
― J. Michael Straczynski (Creator of Babylon 5)
There's another thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a million years or a billion years or a trillion years, eventually our universe will grow old and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu, Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes .. and all of this .. all of this was for nothing. Period, even if we go to the stars.
Further reading:
The fate of the universe—heat death, Big Rip or cosmic consciousness?
Post ID: 3455431299093914752
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