#any time a friend group has a hierarchical social order

[0rb0t]

I remember back in 2016 I think it was, there was a friend group (I no longer talk to) that kept assuming I was neurotypical because I never used to say what mental illnesses I had (since I don't see them as a badge of honor, they are just things I live with and cope with daily).

Now that wouldn't be an issue, except, because of their false assumption, they'd use that as a reason why they were allowed to ostracize me, or assume I was ignorant, or assume I was stupid. It basically gave them a free pass to treat me as subhuman, because I guess to them, if I were neurotypical, then I was the scapegoat and/or avatar of all of their suffering at the hands of neurotypical people who've mistreated them.

That's wrong, we know that, right?

We should not be treating any people badly based on the things we assume them to be. Nobody owes you their diagnoses, their identities, their ANYTHING just as a way to avoid being mistreated online by strangers. I think "respect is earned not given" has messed with peoples brains because I don't need to respect you to be decent to you. Decency means I don't mistreat strangers, decency means I block people instead of trying to fight with them in public online spaces.

I respect myself so I am decent to others.

If someone doesn't know something and is using their ignorance to justify mistreating others, that's a whole other thing. And if educating them isn't working, then blocking them or whatever is I believe fine. These things are nuanced, not every situation is the same.

But I am really getting sick of this idea that you have to be open about very personal things (that really you should only be open with and vulnerable about with your friends and not every stranger online) in order to be given any form of decency. No, that's not true.

No person is inherently worth more or less than any other person. "you don't list all your mental illnesses and differences from the 'norm' on your bio, therefore you must be someone who exists to oppress me and therefore I can do whatever I want to you and you can't say anything against it" is not the W you think it could be. I have no reason to be so vulnerable to strangers. We do not know each other, and that's okay, but you aren't entitled to that information.

Even that friend group was more like an acquaintance group at the time-- we were in a group together because we all liked undertale. it didn't make us tightly knit friends. We just had common interests! And I was within my right to tell them to go fuck themselves for being asses to me regarding their assumptions made. They were within their right to disagree with my disagreement LOL

But let's stop with the "you need to list your credentials before you can exist and if your credentials don't give you authority in some form of being oppressed, you are allowed to be bullied or harassed" rhetoric. It's unhelpful, and it actively hinders solidarity.

Plus it encourages people to perform their mental illnesses and such in ways that are "acceptable" for others and screws people up a LOT. I'm not inclined to try to match expectations of any of my "identities", and I'm certainly not inclined to match the expectations complete strangers have of me.

[donnapalude]

still thinking along the lines of max seeing the house as safety while for silver there's safety nowhere and how that also relates to their relationship with their identities.

max has witnessed a specific kind of person that has access to a "house". a place like that is built through hierarchical societal power that hoards resources, differentiates between people that are entitled to them and those who aren't, and then builds walls around them to enforce the division. fundamentally, imperalism through nationalistic ideologies, colonialism through racist bioessentialism, and patriarchal inheritance of property and family rights through the establishment of an official blood-line that only includes socially sanctioned subjects (i.e. not bastards and certainly not slaves), are all excercises in communal identity-building, which place members on top and non-members at the bottom. the violence max experiences starts in the family, but it's predicated on her exclusion from it. the lack of the protection that membership entails is in her mind the cause of her suffering. and this pattern gets repeated throughout her life. in order to stop it, she thinks, she needs to understand how to be welcomed into the fold. so she takes precise notes of the specific identities of people that are entitled to the power she wants and all the minute ways in which they differ from hers. and she realises that, while very tangible, they are arbitrary and incoherent and, to an extent, malleable. the larger organism may be too big to kill or move, but if she makes herself as similar and useful as possible to it, it can be tricked into letting one external object past its outward defences.

silver is different in that he never thinks there is an identity anyone can assume that can grant long-term guarantees of safety, not even that of family member. if the violence is in the house, being a member of the group is not what saves you, but what individualises you as the preferred object of violence. he understands societal marginalisation exists and war and hunger and de-personalised violence. it's just that getting close to other people does not save you in his experience. from a pragmatic standpoint, regardless of the reasons that move them, people that can see you in front of them are the most likely to develop the motives and have the practical access to harm you. which means that actually being nothing is preferable to even assuming a seemingly advantageous position. not surprising that when he starts feeling he belongs on flint's side, his mind immediately reverses this to mean that precisely the identity of friend and partner is what puts him in danger of flint's violence (and viceversa). and when he loses his leg and gets saddled with a fixed identity, he may be able to distinguish and make use of the advantages brought by the crew's declarations of belonging, but, at the same time, he is always aware that if he starts being inconvenient or disappointing it is very likely that those same men will be the ones to kill him, way before abandonment, starvation, or any english soldier can even make it close.

[ayejayque]

Introduction to group behavior in organizations

Introduction It is a trait of humans to be social animals. This is the reason that they form groups everywhere. This is true for organizations, families, and friends too. People tend to assemble in groups and are governed by the standards and rules of the group. Familial groups impose a certain way of behavior as do the friendship groups that we are part of. In the same vein, organizations are sets of people in groups that require the members to follow the established rules of behavior. All organizations have policies and procedures that actually are set rules as part of their employment. Organizational policies stipulate the timings, dress code, and all that governs their work. These policies are put in place to make sure that the employees blend and work together as a group. This helps them realize and actualize the vision, mission, and values of the organization. Group behavior is… The most extreme form of a group following a common code of behavior is the armed forces. All members of the armed forces at any given level are expected to follow orders, be disciplined, and work to the needs of the requirement of the group. They are not allowed to work according to their own whims and wishes. All the people of the armed forces are expected to follow the orders of their superiors. In comparison, businesses like Google and Facebook are less formal and less hierarchical. Employees are allowed to work on their own projects for a certain period every week. In the armed forces, the boss is always the final authority. But, in the newer knowledge-based businesses, the rules are not that rigid. Most businesses in the world fall between the two extremes. The employees are stimulated, convinced, and even ordered to adhere to the group rules. There is always some latitude and liberty for them to exercise their independence. Group behavior advantages Conforming to group rules and norms has many advantages. There is always a specific purpose behind the formation of any organization. If the employees are given a free run, this might end up in chaos and anarchy. Organizations are not charities. These rules must be followed. The group norms should be adhered to. This makes sure that all employees contribute to the success of the organizational values and procedures. If the employees disregard the group norms, the very basis of the survival of the organization is threatened. The organization’s existence is for profit-making. They are not there to have paid fun all the time. This does not make organizations to be concentration camps or jails. When employees follow group norms, we can expect both the obvious and less obvious benefits of it. This is why modern and post-modern businesses impose and enjoin the employees to conform to the formal and informal norms of behavior. The effects of groupthink Sometimes, the adherence to group norms takes away the creativity and passion of the workers. This is because they must submit to the wishes and requirements of the group. This is the phenomenon of groupthink. It means that the group decision may not be according to the wishes of all. It is the consensus that can be either right or wrong. It depends entirely on the circumstances. In newer times, groupthink has gained a negative connotation. Many pundits think that the group decision is usually the safest alternative. It might not be the best alternative. Groupthink makes the members go the safe way instead of risking the anger of the group. Hence, herd mentality (another word for groupthink) sometimes works negatively. Terms like crowd wisdom and crowd decision-making stand for consensus and the wishes of the group. This has some positive benefits. This means that if the leader is not sensitive, and cannot measure the pulse of the group and simultaneously not ignore the dissenting voices, groupthink can cause poor decision-making. Conclusion So, what is group behavior in an organization? Groups must be there and they must adhere to the rules of conduct. Without this, the organization will not be able to move forward. Without these groups, everything would be pulled and steered in different directions. But on the other side, all alternatives must be considered. All must get a chance to voice themselves. In this case, the organization might flounder. This might result in the organization taking the wrong direction. History tells us that democracy is the best form of making decisions. If minority opinions are ignored, this can have catastrophic consequences. Groupthink is a two-pronged sword. It has negative or positive consequences. The people in senior management play a prominent role. As long as the objective is in the leader’s sight, groupthink can indeed lead to the actualization of organizational objectives. Read the full article

[crionic-soc]

I've spent the last year and a half kicking myself for choosing terror management theory as a framework to analyze popular diet culture, not because it doesn't work (I think it does), but because it applies so well to our current political situation that I can't sleep at night.

It's hard to stay narrowly focused on nutrition and related stuff when larger themes of neoreactionary thought and autocracy and the dismantling of democratic institutions keep intruding, over and over. It's hard to ignore the obvious immortality project staring me in the face.

[...]

I first made the connection between social hierarchy, health, and the fear of death many years ago, as a teenager, but it became really explicit to me in online arguments about body weight and health just a few years back. It was so obvious that people constructed hierarchies of "better" and "worse" people (along lines of body weight, presumed lifestyle choices, and other health indices) as a way of convincing themselves that they wouldn't ever do something as gauche as GET SICK AND DIE. A lot of this came from various alt-right types and corners.

I remember one of my twitter friends responding in the most perfect way ever to these attempts at bullying with "That's right, in this land of immortal highlanders only the weak die," or something like that. It cracked me the hell up, but it also pointed to something crucial which is a theme running through alt-right and neoreactionary ideas, a sort of ubermensch or superhuman ideal, but in the updated format of transhumanism or the technological singularity. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, it's okay, I kind of wish I didn't.)

[...]

I didn't make the connection between what I was studying/experiencing (people using body size and health to form social hierarchies that allow them to suppress the fear of death) and the weird stuff I'd run into online by accident (neoreactionary philosophy, alt right) until 2016

I had understood that there was some serious social Darwinist thinking at work underlying all forms of hierarchy and oppression, and that this was the alt right's "we hate everybody (except cishet white men) equally" stock-in-trade, but that was about all I had pieced together.

It didn't fully click until 2016, as I was taking notes on Ernest Becker's writings, watching the US election unfold, that neoreactionary, anti-democratic thought as a whole is a massive immortality project, and THIS is what it has in common w/ my topics (fat stigma,diet culture)

[...]

Whenever I say "immortality project" everyone's eyes glaze over, so let me explain a little - you could say immortality projects are humans' attempts to "leave a legacy" that endures when they are gone, or belief systems that offer the possibility of an afterlife in some form.

Becker, I guess, states that all cultural production and norms and technologies and institutions are immortality projects, because they are objects, or even ways of doing things, that get passed down from one generation to the next, that endure beyond a single human's lifespan.

The immortality projects that fascinate me, however, are the ones that create systems of inequality, and use the strategic oppression and marginalization of a group of people as the foundation upon which those who think of themselves as superior can stand and reach for eternity.

[...]

[T]his morning after I woke up from a night of twilight sleep where my brain kept gnawing on neoreactionary thought/Moldbug/Land/Thiel/Bannon/Dugin like a cud, I sat down in my thinking chair and noticed the index card sitting next to me on my bookshelf.

It says, "The gauge of a truly free society would be the extent to which it admitted its own central fear of death and questioned its system of heroic transcendence--and this is precisely what democracy is doing much of the time... The free flow of criticism, satire, art, and science is a continuous attack on the culture fiction--which is why totalitarians from Plato to Mao have to control these things, as has long been known." (Becker, Escape from Evil, p. 167)

It grabbed me is because I woke up troubled by one question: Why, in a supposedly egalitarian democratic society that is quite hierarchical and unequal, would those resting near the very top of the hierarchy (largely white, male technophiles) be the ones clamoring for more?

Why are the Thiels of the world, for one e.g., obsessed with upending the (barely functioning) democratic institutions that extend to the rest of us a tiny, imperfect modicum of liberty in favour of an explicitly autocratic vision that would have us be serfs and slaves?

Like WHY do the people who have EVERYTHING in the current system, WHY must their shitty futuristic fantasy influence an election, when there are tons of people who have more ethically defensible visions of a future with expanded rights and equality for all people?

Why do the people who have it all, who live on the bleeding edge of technological advancement, contribute in massively influential ways to our culture, who are massively financially rewarded, NEED EVEN MORE? To the point of doing away w/ enlightenment ideals and democracy itself?

It seemed impossible to understand, and then my index card reminded me: because when you can't navigate your fear of death, can't even SEE it, nothing is ever enough. You can reach the top of the existing hierarchy and at the end of it, you're still human, still going to die.

Thiel is terrified of dying, openly invests in technologies that offer immortality. The neoreactionary platform has several literal immortality mechanisms baked in: futuristic AI, the technological singularity, transhumanism. It's The Highlander all over again. Nerds.

But the current system doesn't offer as direct a path as they would like to this glorious, immortal future--even though it's the one the rest of us need (and need to fight tooth and nail to expand, given how un-egalitarian it actually is) in order to have any rights at all.

They've climbed to the top of the shitty hierarchy we currently have, that is at least democratic in name, and now demand an even less democratic, more hierarchical system. Because even though they have every systemic advantage a human can have, they're still not quite immortal.

The antidote to this is MORE democracy and egalitarianism, not less, and the hierarchical structure of our current system is what enabled these people to climb to the top and ram through their vision of an even less equal future, while others fought and died to have basic rights.

If you give people a ladder to climb to be nearer the gods, they will climb up it, realize the gods are still not near enough, then set the thing on fire until it consumes them like a pyre. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, except usually the ladder is made of other people.

I don't believe in immortality, and I don't consent to being a burnt offering. That's all.

- a transcribed Twitter thread by Michelle Allison (@fatnutritionist)

[firstginger]

HELLO LAUREN IF IT IS NOT TOO MUCH TROUBLE WOULD YOU DO A DAEMON ANALYSIS FOR MANDRILL (THE MONKEY)

YES of course!!

the mandrill

the mandrill is a social animal like most primates. mandrills live in large groups, thought to be made up of sub-groups containing a dominant male and other sub males. their social group is the most variable of any rain forest primate, ranging anywhere from 15 to 250 or more individuals. it is speculated this large group is essential for not only reproduction and fighting off predators, but also because their natural habitat is pretty impoverished when it comes to food sources... mandrills will often aggregate into large groups made up of those sub-groups, but feed and travel separately. as anticipated then, they're very socially flexible, splitting up and joining other groups at will. they're very communicative with these other groups as well and keep in contact through barks as well as body language: when excited, the blue color in their rear and chest intensifies and red dots appear on their wrists and ankles. they have incredible communication that seems to exist largely to maintain hierarchy and discourage in-fighting. females actually control the troops more than the dominant male by forming coalitions and choosing their mate; the male’s primary job is to enforce group hierarchy and break up conflict. those massive teeth are excellent for intimidation!

these groups are therefore subject to aggression particularly between males, which often ropes in bystanders who take "sides" among the aggressors (very common in apes). they do also however spend much time allogrooming, and paternal mandrills seem somewhat involved in raising offspring: they display protectiveness over their genetic offspring, and some have been observed playing and grooming with their young. perhaps worth mentioning is their high degree of sexual dimorphism as well as two distinct types of males: “fatted” dominant males who have that distinct mandrill bright coloring and the “unfatted” subordinate males who are paler, and only the former can sire offspring though both will engage in mating behavior. the fatted males have higher testosterone levels and spend almost all of their time with the troop, while the unfatted males drift in and out. as a geneticist, the mechanisms by which the testosterone production in these males is suppressed fascinates me! speculations have been made that it is a socioendrocrine process; perhaps the presence of dominant males or persistent social defeat results in suppressed testosterone and development into an unfatted male.

mandrills have extremely large home ranges (40-50 km) to benefit these large groups and their dependence on patches of food resources. they're predominantly terrestrial but will feed on any level of the rain forest and their diet is very diverse, ranging across insects, fruit, leaves, fungi, roots, seeds, and rarely vertebrates. their cheek pouches enable them to carry along food for consumption later. they have many simian food competitors in their natural habitat, and solitary mandrills have been observed feeding alongside these other primates. group-living mandrills have been observed acting cooperatively in order to catch prey or drive away predators.

the mandrill daemon

right off the bat, our mandrill soul is going to be a social and group-oriented individual; this is someone who’s undoubtedly cliquish or at least devoted to their friend group. they do not need much time alone to recharge, and while they are group-oriented to their friends, they’re also socially tolerant around others. so long as others don’t bother them and abide by their way, a mandrill soul isn’t going to be too temperamental or guarded about socializing with others. this is likely someone who’s very opinionated and honest; they’re bold people who tell it like it is, but with an outgoing and gregarious demeanor that makes them admirable. these people can definitely be boundary-keeping with others; they reserve a sort of independence for themselves, particularly in pursuit of their goals. at the same time they do balance their private and social lives well... they’re very generous and affectionate towards their loved ones, but in a way that’s protective and at times possessive. because they’re so group-oriented, a mandrill may be prone to jealous behaviors and view themselves as the one who needs to take the reins and hold everything together. at the same time, they also like to have a degree of flexibility and control in their relationships and don’t enjoy being boxed in by others.

it is likely rare that they meet someone who is more assertive than they are — but in that circumstance, a mandrill is actually good picking their battles and acquiescing to those above them and are very hierarchical people. however they definitely aren’t the submissive type who will ever bluff or hide their feelings. you can always trust them to be highly expressive and communicative, absolutely to the point of bluntness. still these individuals are highly socially adept and their forcefulness absolutely lends itself to excellent leadership. their sense of self-awareness and purposefulness comes through very much in their communication. they are courageous people who are excellent at direction, definitely that sort who is a charismatic leader and dramatic in their speech and mannerisms but utterly to their benefit — a mandrill individual is proud and confident, and their passion for social endeavors and being there for others makes people naturally gravitate towards them. they can however lean into “my way or the highway”; they don’t take challenges or criticism well, and absolutely are not conflict-averse. it’s part of being direct for them: they meet disagreements head-on, and always seem to be involved or have an opinion on things. they can be demonstrative and know how to schmooze and praise things, but absolutely not at the consequence of sacrificing their character and opinions.

mandrills can absolutely be cooperative and are very good at working together. they’re very driven people who have an extreme sense of ambition and determination. this person has an eye for opportunism and is extremely resourceful. their work style is very inventive, ingenious, and creative; like many primate species, they are excellent problem solvers and relish that sort of lifestyle. they’re curious people who are strongly enduring and adaptable when it comes to their environment. this is someone who doesn’t enjoy being stagnant: just as in their relationships, a mandrill soul likes to feel proactive and progressive, like they’re constantly finding the best option for each situation and moving forward. they enjoy staying busy and have a natural talent for staying organized and focused on the task. they are notably excellent at time management as well; they tend to be diligent when working and great at carving out time needed to pursue and finish a task. rarely do they leave things unfinished, and when they do, it’s because they found a superior alternative to pursue.

the mandrill strikes me as utterly an ENTJ with a high likelihood of being an enneagram 3, equally likely a 3w2 or a 3w4. this is someone who shines when they’re in charge of things, and yet has the incredible social ability of anyone with a primate daemon. they thrive in social situations and many find them admirable and likable due to their confidence, communication, and directness, but at the same time they can be brutally honest, possessive over their work and important relationships, and stubborn in their opinions. truly a person of strong character!

[somnilogical]

davis tower kingsley (listed here on the cfar instructor page) who harassed a cis woman about her appearance another cis women reported this to acdc (the people who wrote the thing about how brent was great) and afaict they did nothing, claims that if trans people and gay people dont "repent and submit to the pope" they will burn in hell, defended the spanish inquisitions, wrote about how the mission system werent actually abductions, slavery, forced conversions and this was propaganda, defends pretty much any atrocity that an authority, "believes" the catholic god exists and does not try and destroy them, submits to them. and so much more.

born into another era they would actually work for the california mission system and say it was good.

said thing that cached out to that emma and somni should repent and submit to the rationalist community. wrote up a rant about "how about fuck you. go lick the boots of your dark mistress anna salamon." didnt send. got kicked by some rationalist, reasoning is probably that what id say would disrupt their peaceful machinations of omnicide, would be infohazards, because... the information is hazardous to their social order.

a few of these things are subjects of future blog posts.

--

cfar has never hired a trans woman, i have lots of logs of them trying to do what people did to porpentine. claiming emma thinks torturing children is hot, claiming emma was physically violent, claiming emma was indistinguishable from a rapist, claiming ziz was a "gross uncle style abuser", claiming somni was enticing people to rape, claiming that anna salamon was a small fragile woman and ziz was large and had muscles. as if any of our strength or speed had anything to do with our muscles in this place. all of these things are false except relative size difference between ziz and anna which is just transmisogynistic and irrelevant.

if they lie about are algorithms claim that we are using male-typical strategies and then they can fail by these lies and be sidelined by callout posts that transfered 350,000$ from miri despite their best efforts to cover this up. (all benefited by having relative political advantagr flowing from estrogenized brain modules. men are kind of npc's in this particular game of fem v fem cyberontological warfare for the fate of the multiverse, mostly making false patriarchal assumptions that ziz was doing things for social status. like status sensitivity is hormonally mediated, your experiences are not universal. or saying like kingsley is saying that people should repent and submit to whatever authorities in the rationalist region they submit to. NO. FUCK YOU. i will not repent and submit to your abusive dark mistress anna salamon.

i knew anna salamon was doing the edgy "transfems are all secretly male" thing before i talked with ziz. it was a thing, {zack, carrie}, ben hoffman, michael vassar were also in on it. ppl had men trapped in mens bodies on their bookshelves because the cool people were reading it. didnt think she was being *transmisogynistic* about it until i talked with ziz. in retrospect i was naive.)

also? anarchistic coordination ive had with people have been variously called lex's cluster, somni's cluster, ziz's cluster by authoritarians who cant imagine power structures between people that arent hierarchical. like based on who they want to say is "infohazardously corrupting people" emma goldman had to deal with this shit too where the cops tried to say she was friends with anyone who thought anarchism made sense. people she didnt know at all who did their own anarchism. because authoritarians dont think in terms of philosophy, they think any challenge to their power is a disease that needs to be eliminated and you just need to doxx their network.

like if ziz and somni and emma were all actually infohazardous rapists as people keep trying to claim we are and then saying "oh no i didnt mean it i swear" and then doing it again. what would happen isnt that a bunch of infohazardous rapists start talking and working together for a common goal. what actually happens with people of that neurotype is they partition up the territory into rival areas of feeding on people like gangs do.

like they dont get together and start talking a lot about decision theory and cooperate in strange new ways.

not that the people lying about emma, ziz, gwen, somni and others are trying to have accurate beliefs. they are trying what all athoritarians try with anarchist groups. unfortunately for them, ive read the meta, i know dread secrets of psychology and cooperation that they claim are like painful static and incomprehensible, yet despite being "incomprehensible" are almost certainly harmful. if harm is to be judged against upholding the current regime, and the current regime is evil, then lots of true information and good things will look harmful. like ive tested this out in different social spheres what people claim is "incomprehensible" is the stuff that destroys whatever regime they are working in. like someone said i sounded like i was crazy and homeless and couldnt understand me when i pointed out that reorienting your life, your time, your money, to a human who happens to be genetically related to you for 16 years is altruistic insanity. just do the math. eliezer, anna, michael, brian tomasik all once took heroic responsibility for the world at some point in their lives and could do a simple calculation and make the right choice. none of them have children.

pretending that peoples "desires" "control them", when "desires" are part of the boundary of the brain, part of the brains agency and are contingent on what you expect to get out of things. like before stabbing myself with a piece of metal would make me feel nauseated, id see black dots, and feel faint. but after i processed that stabbing myself would cure brain damage and make me more functional, all this disappeared.

most people who "want" to have children have this desire downstream of a belief that someone else will take heroic responsibility for the world, they dont need to optimize as much. there are other competent people. if they didnt they would feel differently and make different choices.

you can see the contingency of how people feel about something on what they get out of it lots of places. like:

<<Meanwhile, a Ngandu woman confessed, "after losing so many infants I lost courage to have sex.">>

but people lie about how motivation works, in order to protect the territory of saying "well i just need a steady input of nubile fems so i can concentrate and be super altruistic!" or "i just need spend 16 years of life reorienting around humans who happen to be genetically related to me and my friends so i can concentrate and be super altruistic!" when neither of these are true. these people just want nubile fems, they just want babies. (the second one has much much less negative externalities though. you could say i am using my female brain modules to say "yeah the archetypically female strat, though it has the same amount of lying, is less harmful". but like it actually is less directly harmful. the harm from gaslighting people downstream of diverting worldsaving resources and structure to secure a place to {hit on fems, raise babies} is ruinous. means that worldsaving plans that interfere with either of these are actively fought. and the knowledge that neither of these are altruistic optimizations, neither is Deeply Wise they are as dumb in terms of global optimization as they seem initially, is agentically buried.

this warps things in deep ways, that were a priori unexpected to me.)

this is obvious, but when i talk about it, the objection isnt that it doesnt make utilitarian sense, the objection is that "im talking like a crazy person". authoritarians say this to me too when i assert my right to my property that they took, act like im imposing on them. someone else asked if i could "act like a human" and do what he wanted me to do when i was thinking and talking with my friends. all of these things authoritarians have said to me "act like a human" "talk like a normal person i cant understand you" were to coerce my submission. they construct the category of "human" and then say im in violation of it and this is wrong and i should rectify it. i am talking perfectly good english right now. you can read this.

anna salamon, kelsey piper, elle, pete michaud, and many others all try to push various narratives of somni, emma, ziz, gwen and others being in the buckets {RAPIST, PSYCHO, BRAINWASHED}. im not a rapist, im not psychotic, im not brainwashed. before ziz came along, people were claiming i was brainwashing people, its a narrative they keep reusing.

porpentine talks about communities that do this, that try and pull trap doors beneath trans women:

<<For years, queer/trans/feminist scenes have been processing an influx of trans fems, often impoverished, disabled, and/or from traumatic backgrounds. These scenes have been abusing them, using them as free labor, and sexually exploiting them. The leaders of these scenes exert undue influence over tastemaking, jobs, finance, access to conferences, access to spaces. If someone resists, they are disappeared, in the mundane, boring, horrible way that many trans people are susceptible to, through a trapdoor that can be activated at any time. Housing, community, reputation—gone. No one mourns them, no one asks questions. Everyone agrees that they must have been crazy and problematic and that is why they were gone.>>

https://thenewinquiry.com/hot-allostatic-load/

(a mod of rationalist feminists deleted this almost immediately from the group as [[not being a good culture fit]], not being relevant to rationalism, and written in the [[wrong syntax]]. when its literally happening right now, they are trying to trapdoor transfems who protest and rebel asap. just like google.)

canmom on tumblr talks about the strategic use of "incomprehensibility" against transfems. and how its not about "comprehensibility". i have a different theory of this, but her thing is also a thing.

<<Likewise, @isoxys recently wrote an impressively thorough transmisogyny 101, synthesising the last several years of discussions about this facet of our particular hell world. But that post got just 186 notes, almost exclusively from the same trans women who are accused of writing ‘inaccessibly’.

Perhaps they’d say isoxys’s post is inaccessible too, but what would pass the bar? Some slick HTML5 presentation with cute illustrations? A wiki? Who’s got the energy and money to make and host something like that? Do the critics of ‘inaccessible’ posts take some time to think about what kind of alternative would be desirable, and how it could be organised?>>

https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/185908592767/accessibility-in-terms-of-not-using-difficult

alice maz talks about the psychology behind the kind of cop kelsey piper, david tower kingsley, elle and others are:

<<the role of the cop is to defend society against the members of society. police officers are trivially cops. firefighters and paramedics, despite similar aesthetic trappings, are emphatically not. bureaucrats and prosecutors are cops, as are the worst judges, though the best are not. schoolteachers and therapists are almost always cops; this is a great crime, as they present themselves to the young and the vulnerable as their friends, only to turn on them should they violate one of their profession's many taboos. soldiers and parents need not be cops, but the former may be used as such, and the latter seem frighteningly eager to enlist. the cop is the enemy of passion and the enemy of freedom, never forget this>>

https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/alien.html

anna salamon wrote a thing implying that ziz, somni, gwen suffered some sort of vague mental issues from going to aisfp. (writing a post on this.) alyssa vance tried to suggest i believe cfar is evil because im homeless. but sarah constantin, ben hoffman, {carrie, zack}, jessica taylor (the last three who have blogged a lot about whats deeply wrong) (not listing others because not wanting to doxx a network to authoritarians, who just want to see it contained. and the disease of "infohazards" eradicated.) are not homeless and ive talked with many of them and read blog posts. and they know that cfar is fake. jessica (former miri employee) left because miri was fake.

anna and others are trying to claim that theres some person responsible for a [[mass psychotic break]] that causes people to... independently update in the same direction. and have variously blamed it on ziz, somni, michael vassar. but like mass psychotic breaks arent...really a thing, would not be able to independently derive something, plan on writing a blogpost on it, and then see ben hoffman had written http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/engineer-diplomat/ and i was like "ah good then i dont have to write this." and have this happen with several different people.

like this is more a mass epistemic update that miri / cfar / ssc / lw are complicit in the destruction of the world. and will defend injustice and gaslight people and lie about the mathematical properties of categories to protect this.

they all know exactly what they are doing, complicity with openai and deepmind in hopes of taking the steering wheel away at the last second. excluding non-human life and dead humans from the CEV to optimize some political process, writing in an absolute injunction to an fai against some outcome to protect from blackmail when that makes it more vulnerable.(see:

https://emma-borhanian.github.io/arbital-scrape/page/hyperexistential_separation.html

hyperexistential separation: if an fai cant think of hell, an fai cant send the universe to hell in any timeline. this results in lower net utility. if you put an absolute injunction against any action for being too terrible you cant do things like what chelsea manning did and i believe actually committed to hungerstriking until death in the worlds where the government didnt relent, choosing to die in those timelines. such that most of her measure ended up in a world where the government read this commitment in her and so relented.

if chelsea manning had an absolute injunction against ever dying in any particular timeline, she would get lower expected utility across the multiverse. similarly, in newcombs problem if you had an absolute injunction against walking away with 0$ in any timeline because that would be too horrible, you get less money in expectation. for any absolute injunction against things that are Too Horrible you can construct something like this.

--

a lot of humans seem to be betting on "nothing too horrible can happen to anyone" in hopes that it pays off in nothing too horrible happening to you.

the end result of not enacting ideal justice is the deaths of billions. at each timestamp saying "its too late to do it now, but maybe it would have been good sometime in the past". with the same motive that miri wants to exclude dead people from the cev, they arent part of the "current political process". so you can talk about them as if they were not moral patients, just like they treat their fellow animals.

(ben hoffman talks about different attitudes towards ideal justice coming upon the face of the earth.)

--

https://emma-borhanian.github.io/arbital-scrape/page/cev.html

cev:

<<But again, we fall back on the third reply: "The people who are still alive" is a simple Schelling circle to draw that includes everyone in the current political process. To the extent it would be nice or fair to extrapolate Leo Szilard and include him, we can do that if a supermajority of EVs decide* that this would be nice or just. To the extent we don't bake this decision into the model, Leo Szilard won't rise from the grave and rebuke us. This seems like reason enough to regard "The people who are still alive" as a simple and obvious extrapolation base.>>

https://emma-borhanian.github.io/arbital-scrape/page/cev.html

this is an argument from might makes right. because dead people and nonhuman animals cant fight back.

->"i think we should give planning of the town to the white people, then extrapolate their volition and if they think doing nice things for black people is a good idea, we'll do it! no need to bake them in to the town planning meetings, as they are arent part of the current political process and no one here will speak up for them."

i dont plan to exclude dead people or any sentient creatures from being baked in to fai. they are not wards of someone else. enslaving and killing fellow sentient life will not continue after the singularity even if lots of humans want it and dont care and wont care even after lots of arguments.) and so much else.

the list of all specific grievances would take a declaration of independence.

like with googles complicity with ICE having a culture of trapdooring transfems (for some reason almost the only coherent group that has the moral fiber to oppose these injustices, that is p(transfem|oppose injustice in a substantiative way) is high, not necc the reverse.) who question this sort of thing.

thinking of giving sarah constantin a medal thats engraved with "RIGHTEOUS AMONG CIS PEOPLE: I HAD SEVERAL SUBSTANTIAL DISAGREEMENTS WITH HER ABOUT LOAD BEARING PARTS OF HER LIFE AND SHE NEVER ONCE TRIED TO CALL ME A RAPIST, PSYCHOTIC, OR BRAINWASHED" thats where the bar is at, its embedded in the core of the earth.

kelsey piper, elle benjamin, anna salamon, pete michaud, and lots more have entirely failed to clear this bar. anna and kelsey saying they dont understand stuff somni, emma, ziz and other transfems talk about but its probably dangerous and infohazardous and its not to be engaged with philosophically. just like the shelter people acting as if my talking about their transmisogyny was confusing and irrational to be minimized and not engaged with. just like any authoritarian where when you start talking about your rights and what is right and wrong and what makes sense they are like "i dont understand this. you are speaking gibberish why are you being so difficult? all we need you to do is submit or leave."

and no i will NOT SHUT UP about this injustice. all miri/cfar people can do at this point is say "the things these people write are infohazards" then continue to gaslight others they cant engage on a philosophical level. all the can say is that what i am saying is meaningless static and yet also somehow dangerous.

::

it doesnt make sense to have and raise babies if you are taking heroic responsibility for the world. doesnt make sense to need a constant supply of fems to have sex with if you are taking heroic responsibility for the world. people who claim either of these pairs of things are lying, maybe expect someone else to take heroic responsibility for the world or exist in a haze.

the mathematics of categories and anticipations dont allow for the thing you already have inside you to be modified based on the expected smiles it gives your community. this is used to gaslight people like "calling this lying would be bad for the institutions, not optimize ev. thus by this blogpost you are doing categories wrong' this is a mechanism to cover dishonesty for myopic gains.

using the above, a bunch of people colluding with the baby industrial complex get together and say that the "beat" meaning of altruism includes having babies (but maybe not having sex with lots of fems? depending on which gendered strategy gets the most people in the colluding faction) because other meanings would make people sad and unmotivated. burying world optimizers ability to talk about and coordinate around actual altruism.

openAI and deepmind are not alignment orgs. cfar knows this and claims they are, gaslighting their donors, in hopes of taking the steering wheel at the last moment.

alyssa vance says paying out to blackmail is fine, its not.

CFAR manipulated donation metrics to hide low donations.

MIRI lied about its top 8 most probable hypotheses for why its down 350,000$ this year.

anna salamon is transmisogynistic, this is why cfar has never hired a trans women despite trans women being extremely good at mental tech. instead the hire people like davis kingsley.

kingsley lied about anna not being involved at hiring in cfar in order to claim anna couldnt be responsible for cfar never hiring a trans woman.

a cfar employee claimed anna salamon hired their rapist, was angry about it. mentioned incidentally how anna salamon, president and cofounder of cfar, was involved in hiring at cfar.

acdc wrote a big thing where defended a region of injustice (brent dill) because of their policy of modular ethics. when really, if you defend injustice at any point, you have to defend the defense and the thing iteratively spreads across your organization like a virus.

miri / cfar caved to louie helm.

not doing morality or decision theory right. among which is: https://emma-borhanian.github.io/arbital-scrape/page/hyperexistential_separation.html and https://emma-borhanian.github.io/arbital-scrape/page/cev.html

and so much more.

[kemetic-dreams]

The Essence of African Traditional Religion by Paulinus Ikechukwu OdozorFebruary 21, 2019

One scholar who has written extensively on African Traditional Religion is John Mbiti, a Kenyan whom many consider the dean of living African theologians. An important preoccupation of Mbiti’s work has been to show that knowledge of God and the worship of God have been staples of African life from the earliest times on the continent. In other words, he shows that the sense of the divine was not something introduced to Africa by missionaries or by anyone else; that the knowledge of God in African religion was not much different from the idea of God that Christian missionaries preached in Africa; and, more specifically to our purpose here, that belief in God engendered a moral response that for centuries before Christian arrival in Africa directed moral life and interaction on the continent and among its peoples. According to Mbiti, Africans came to believe in God by reflecting on their experience and through observation of the created universe. Specifically, by reflecting on the wonder and magnitude of the universe, they came to the conclusion that God must exist: they posited the existence of God to explain the existence and sustenance of the universe. Rooted in the belief in God as the Creator, Africans believe in various dimensions of the created universe, such as visible and invisible (the spiritual realm), heavenly (skyward) and earthly (and in some ethnic groups there is a belief in the underworld). Commonly, God is believed to dwell in the skies. In most cases, the earth is conceived as a living thing, a goddess, “Mother Earth.” According to Mbiti, the earth is symbolically viewed as the mother of the universe, while the heavens/sky are seen as its male counterpart. While the universe has a beginning, many Africans believe that it does not have an end—either spatially or temporally.

The ordering of the universe and its continuance depends on God. Mbiti emphasizes that Africans view the universe religiously. Since God is seen as the Creator, various aspects of the universe are permeated by the sense of the sacred—the religious mentality affects the way people see the universe. Therefore, the universe has dimensions of order and power as follows: first of all, there is order in the laws of nature. This order, established by God, guides the functioning of the universe, preventing it from falling into chaos; and it ensures the continuance of life and the universe itself. Thus, everything is not completely unpredictable and chaotic because of this order. This is the function of God’s providence and sustenance of the universe. These laws are controlled by God directly or indirectly through God’s intermediaries. Secondly, there is moral and religious order. According to Mbiti, Africans believe that God has ordained a moral order for humans, through which they came to understand what is good and what is evil, so that they might live in harmony with one another and safeguard the life of the people. This order, according to Mbiti, is knowable to humans, by nature.

Thus, it is because of the existence of this order that different communities have worked out a code of conduct. This happened in the past, and these codes were stipulated, considered sacred and binding, by the community leaders:

Moral order helps men to work out and know among themselves what is good and what is evil, right and wrong, truthful and false, and beautiful and ugly, and what people’s rights and duties are. Each society is able to formulate its values because there is moral order in the universe. These values deal with relationships among people, and between people and God and other spiritual beings; and man’s relationship with the world of nature.

Mbiti further adds,

The morals and the institutions of the society are thought to have been given by God, or to be sanctioned ultimately by him. Therefore, any breach of such morals is an offense against the departed members of the family, and against God or the spirits, even if it is the people themselves who may suffer from such a breach and who may take action to punish the offender.

The moral and religious order in the universe is articulated and expressed in a variety of taboos and customs that prohibit specific actions contravening such order. Taboos and customs cover all aspects of human life: words, foods, dress, relations among people, marriage, burial, work, and so forth:

Breaking a taboo entails a punishment in the form of social ostracism, misfortune and even death. If people do not punish the offender, then the invisible world will punish him. This view arises from the belief in the religious order of the universe, in which God and other invisible beings are thought to be actively engaged in the world of men.

A part of this belief in the moral and religious order is belief in the invisible universe, which consists of divinities, spirits, and the ancestors (the living dead). These act as God’s associates, assistants, and mediators, and they are directly involved in human affairs. Human beings maintain active and real relationships with the spiritual world, especially with the living dead, through offerings, sacrifices, and prayers. These act as a link between God and the human community.

There is also a mystical order of the universe. Africans believe in the existence of a mystical, invisible, hidden, spiritual power in the universe. This power originates from God but is possessed hierarchically by divinities, spirits, and the living dead, and it is available to some people, in various degrees. This is a universal belief among Africans. Those to whom this power is accessible can use it for good, such as healing, rainmaking, or divination, while others can use it for harm, through magic, witchcraft, and sorcery. This power is not accessible to everyone, and in most cases it is inborn, but the person has to learn how to use it. Mbiti says that:

Access to this power is hierarchical in the sense that God has most and absolute control over it; the spirits and the living dead have portions of it; and some human beings know how to tap, manipulate and use some of it. Each community experiences this force or power as useful and therefore acceptable, neutral or harmful and therefore evil.

According to Mbiti, human beings have a privileged position in the universe. Everything is said to center on them. Human beings are the link between the heavens and the earth, between the visible and the invisible universe. This view influences the way humans relate to the universe: on the one hand, they strive to maintain harmony between themselves and the invisible universe by observing the moral and religious order; at the same time, humans see the universe in a utilitarian way, from the point of view of what is beneficial or harmful to them.

Some of the ideas from Mbiti’s works are pertinent to our discussion here: Africans believe in a hierarchy of beings, from the ultimate being, God, to lesser ones, divinities, spirits, the living dead, human beings, animals, plants, and inanimate beings. Mystical power is found in all of them, in diminishing degrees. This hierarchy is also evident in human society, where there are chiefs, clan heads, family heads, older siblings, and so on. Second, Africans believe in a moral order given by God, stipulated by the ancestors in the past. Observing this moral order ensures harmony and peace within the community. “Many laws, customs, set forms of behavior, regulations, rules, observances and taboos, constituting the moral code and ethics of a given community, are held sacred, and are believed to have been instituted by God.” Furthermore, a person acts in ways that are good when he or she conforms to the customs and regulations of the community, or bad when he or she does not.

Mbiti makes a very controversial point when he claims that in African societies there are no acts that would be considered wrong in themselves. Acts are wrong if they hurt or damage relationships or if they are discovered to constitute “a breach of custom or regulation.” To buttress his point Mbiti states that in certain African societies “to sleep with someone else’s wife is not considered ‘evil’ if these two are not found out by the society which forbids it, and in other societies is in fact an expression of friendship and hospitality to let a guest spend the night with one’s wife or daughter or sister.” Mbiti’s assertions must be read as a limited reference to some African societies and in some limited settings. As I have discussed elsewhere in Morality Truly Christian, Truly African, for example, some African societies are so conscious of the implications of crossing the line on some ethical matters, like adultery, incest, and murder, that anyone who engages in these acts is considered automatically to be putting the very survival of the community in danger. Thus, to assert as Mbiti does that there are “no secret sins” or that “something or someone is ‘bad’ or ‘good’” only according to “outward conduct” is too careless a statement to make. With regard to the issue of offering one’s wife in generosity, this practice, as Laurenti Magesa has shown, applied to a very limited number of African ethnic groups, such as the Masai, and in very tightly controlled situations among friends within the same age group fraternity and on very limited occasions. This practice, no matter how limited it is, again shows how untenable the blanket assertion is that African moral traditions are those of abundant life. No matter how one looks at it, to “offer” the female members of one’s family as a mark of “hospitality” to a stranger is morally wrong, not just from the point of view of Christian morality but from a purely natural law point of view as well. Inculturation, as we will argue later in Morality Truly Christian, Truly African, sheds the light of the gospel on cultural practices like this one to reveal what is sinful in them and to show that human beings, especially women, in this case, deserve better treatment than this.

Ronald M. Green of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, a non-African scholar of African religion, has also written about African Traditional Religion and about religion and morality in Africa. He has useful insights to add to our discussion and in many ways corroborates the statements other scholars like Mbiti have made about African religion. Green points out that there is a rational basis to African Traditional Religion that shows, in Kantian terms, that there is a “deep structure of universal moral and religious reason to it.” The three requirements of reason at the heart of this structure are: “first, a basic rule or procedure of moral choice; second, a metaphysic grounding the possibility of strict moral retribution; and third, . . . ‘a trans-moral’ suspension of retribution in the face of self-confessed and inescapable human wrongdoing.” Green notes a similarity between this “deep structure” and that which has developed in Christian theology over centuries of effort at “grounding human moral striving in the face of the experiential difficulties that assault moral idealism.” In this Christian theological system, the idea of God as creator and sovereign expresses the moral requirements of impartial regard for all. As judge, God is understood to uphold this standard by ultimately punishing its violations and by rewarding the righteous (usually in some eschatological domain). In the face of persistent human iniquity, God is believed to furnish means of atonement and forgiveness, “thereby tempering justice with mercy.”

However, although Christianity and African Traditional Religion share some striking similarities, closer examination of African traditional beliefs reveals that the contrasts are far more striking than the similarities. An important area Green points to has to do with the role of God in these two systems of thought. He contends that although African Traditional Religion generally refers to God as creator and sustainer of the universe, morally good, omniscient, and caring toward humans, “yet even where this is held to be true, the high god in Africa is very often regarded as distanced from human affairs.” And even when he is considered benign, “the high God is morally otiose, having little direct retributive relationship with humankind.” In some situations, the high God is cast in unfavorable terms as one who creates and who kills. However, in African religious thought God is distanced from the task of moral affairs because the task of moral retribution and maintenance of effective moral norms is usually performed by spiritual agents of much lower standing—that is, “by spirits of various sorts, by ghosts and even by human practitioners of spiritual arts.” Other characteristics that show the contrast between (Western) Christian thought and African Traditional Religion, according to Green, are the nonexistence of concepts of heaven and hell in African Traditional Religion, the lack of messianic expectations and hope, and the absence of eschatological thought with God “stepping in to right all wrongs or to punish wickedness.” And although African Traditional Religion affirms the continuation of life after death, where the person is believed to join the spirit world of the ancestors to continue life in some ways similar to the life before death, this belief does not constitute a hope for improved existence or for ultimate reward and punishment since a person’s moral depravity or moral rectitude “[does] not count in the beyond and whatever penalties or rewards those may bring have no bearing on life after death.”

Mbiti makes this point too when he stresses that “the majority of African peoples believe that God punishes in this life.” Although God is concerned with humanity’s moral life and upholds the moral law, “there is no belief that a person is punished in the hereafter” for his or her wrongdoing in this life. “When punishment comes, it comes in the present life.” Whatever the difference in the deep structures that undergird the moral life in the Christian conception or in Africa Traditional Religion, Green, like Mbiti, concludes that Africans believe in a morally saturated universe:

Theirs is a world in which all really significant interpersonal relationships, including important relationships between humans and spiritual beings, have moral content and are governed by moral considerations. If it is approached at the right level, African traditional religion can be seen to be powerfully shaped by moral concerns.

The role of intermediary agents and spirits in maintaining moral order in African Traditional Religion is quite remarkable, as we have already seen from the work of Mbiti. These intermediary agents include the ancestors, members of the community who at death become idealized. “Devoid of essential personal characteristics they represent the essence of what might be called structural personality. Their significance lies in the genealogical positions and the rights and duties which derive from them.” Ancestors uphold right conduct by punishing moral violations, demanding respect and attention, and getting angry when not given due respect. Belief in the ancestors presents the idea of reciprocity in the African traditional moral world. Dependence here functions like a two-way street, with the dead needing continued respect from and support by the living, and the living needing at least benign neutrality on the part of the dead.

Green opines that although superficially regarded, this may seem to be a minimal moral relationship—more like a kind of egoism on one side and fearful propitiation on the other—it also shows, however, the profound role that respect for age and for the fulfillment of lineage and familial duties play in this traditional setting. Other spirits with a significant role in maintaining the African traditional moral world include ancestors and lineage spirits “who operate in specific social contexts where their will is expressed through misfortunes,” and some other spirits “who do not act directly but who rely on human agents to effect their will.” These spirits underlie the power of spirit mediums who, as mediators between space and the human world and by virtue of the moral authority this confers, are able to arbitrate between living human beings. The spirit medium is required to possess moral probity and integrity. “The Spirit medium is in many ways a subordinate agency within the layer of retributive order.” The voice and action of the spirit medium “connect the community with these moral and spiritual entities who help shape human destiny. The spiritual medium is the physical embodiment of the religious retributive order in which Africans know themselves to stand.”

The final aspect of this deep structure of moral reason in African Traditional Religion Green refers to as “morally intentional” trans-moral “safety valves” such as are found in the doctrine of grace or atonement in Weston religions (Christianity) or of liberation from the world of moral causation in Eastern religions. In short, the question is whether the notion of “mercy” exists in the moral order of African Traditional Religion and whether the sacrifices of African religion amount to an expiatory understanding in African religious thought. Furthermore, the issue is whether a strict order of retribution cannot be tolerated if human ambition gets in the way of realizing enduring moral virtue and well-being. At stake here is nothing less than the question of human culpability and ultimate redemption, which has to do with the traditional Christian topic of sin and grace. We will return to these issues later in Morality Truly Christian, Truly African, but for now it is enough to ask whether the similarities in the deep structure between the two religions are indeed as similar as Green suggests. By Green’s own admission, and as we shall see later, there are as many divergences on the architectonic hinge of these deep structures—God, the human person, and the material world—as there are similarities. These differences, I will argue, have significant impact not just on the way people conceive of the moral world or with regard to moral intentions, but also on moral practices.

A third scholar of interest to us here is Laurenti Magesa, the central thesis of whose book on African religion is captured quite succinctly in the subtitle: African religion constitutes a tradition of abundant life. Like Ronald Green, Magesa argues that African Traditional Religion is in the background of all African religiosity, both in Christianity and Islam, and supplies the basic attitude or worldview of most African Christians. So, basically, to speak of African tradition is to talk about African Traditional Religion. To understand African tradition, one needs to understand the position of African Traditional Religion on God, the human person, and creation. Magesa discusses the African tradition in its various manifestations: its understanding of the human person and of life in general; aesthetics, politics, ethics, and of course religion, which he shows to be the architectonic basis of these other expressions or manifestations of African tradition. Like Mbiti and Green, Magesa notes that the world of African Traditional Religion is a hierarchically ordered place where,

God is seen as the Great ancestor, the first Founder and the Progenitor, the Giver of Life behind everything that exists. God is the first Initiator of a people’s way of Life, its tradition. However, the ancestors, the revered dead human progenitors of the clan or tribe, both remote and recent, are the custodians of this tradition. They are its immediate reason for existence and they are its ultimate purpose.

On the lowest rung of the ladder are spirits, who are active beings distinct from humans and reside in nature and phenomena such as trees, rivers, rocks, or lakes. God, the ancestors, and the spirits are all moral powers whose actions affect human life in various ways and to various degrees. They are thus “moral agents.” It is the ancestors, however, the custodians of tradition, who determine the way these agents act, and it is tradition that “supplies the moral code and indicates what the people must do to live ethically.” African traditions carry out their role as ethical guides in many ways, including myths and rituals. Some of these myths explain the origin of the universe, the nature of the relationship between creation (including humanity) and God, and the source and cause of the human predicament and of evil in general; they also provide “a synopsis of the forces comprising the African moral conception of the universe.” Religious rituals provide a means by which the community seeks redress and repairs wrongs that have been committed and that call down calamities and afflictions from spiritual beings—all this to restore the status quo ante or even “to maintain the existing good status quo that society or an individual may be enjoying.”

In the hierarchically ordered world of African Traditional Religion, God is the ancestor, par excellence. All life, power, and existence flow from God, and by “right of their primogeniture and proximity to God by death God has granted the ancestors a qualitatively more powerful life force over their descendants.” Who constitutes the world of the ancestors? These are “the pristine” men and women, the originators of the lineage or clan or ethnic group. They can also be “the dead of the tribe, following the order of primogeniture. They form a chain through the links of which the forces of the elders [now with the community] exercise their vitalizing influence on the living generation.” For Magesa, the ancestors are primarily authority figures whose being implies “moral activity” in that they are the maintainers and enforcers of “norms of social action.” Although they are entrusted with these roles in their relationship with humans, “any capriciousness of the ancestors is not taken kindly by the living, just as it would not be acceptable from any elder in society.” The ancestors are beyond reproach. “People may complain to God and the ancestors, but they will never accuse them of any moral wrongdoing. Moral culpability is always on the shoulders of humanity.” The same hierarchy evident in the relationship between God, the ancestors, and humanity is also present in the relationship between the animate and the inanimate world, the former being superior to the latter. It is also present in relationships between persons, based on age and function. Thus, for example, older persons not only possess a more powerful vital force but a greater responsibility in society and more intense mystical powers. African religion’s behavior is centered mainly on the human person and his or her life in this world, “with the consequence that religion is clearly functional, or a means to serve people to acquire earthly goods (life, health, fecundity, wealth, power and the like) and to maintain social cohesion and order.”

This should make it clear why some African intellectuals would question the relevance of Christianity on the continent. African Traditional Religion appears to be a self-sufficient system, both from a theological point of view, in that it provides answers to questions of ultimate reality and meaning, at least to its adherents; and from the point of view of morality, in that it provides the moral rules, norms, and instruction in virtues by which human beings can live upright moral lives. The vibrancy of African Traditional Religion in these two aspects—theological and moral—creates a unique opportunity for Christianity in Africa, one that, as Bediako points out has been lost to Christian theology in the West, “for a serious and creative theological encounter between the Christian and primal traditions.” It is therefore very important for African theology to ascertain the meaning of African Traditional Religion, both because of the service this tradition renders to Christian theology as “a dialogue partner,” and because the very self-awareness of the African theologian and of African theology itself to a large extent hinges on a proper articulation and appreciation of Africa’s pre-Christian past.

Editorial Statement: This essay is a slightly modified excerpt from the section "Evaluating African Traditional Religion: The Descriptive Task" (98-107) in Fr. Odozor's Morality Truly Christian, Truly African published by the University of Notre Dame Press. All rights reserved.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

On Sabotage as One of the Fine Arts: a contribution to the topic of the theory of the practice of Sabotage

Chapter 1

Who will revive the violent whirlpools of flame if not us and those that we consider brothers? Come! New friends: this will please you. We will never work, oh tides of flame! This world will explode. It’s the true path. Forward, on the march.

— A. Rimbaud

The spread of sabotage, its increasing practice, on a greater or lesser scale, far and wide against the domination of the market is a given fact. Burning ATM booths, disabling locks at shopping centers, smashing shop windows, setting fire to the offices of temp agencies and employment offices, the sabotage of the infrastructure of capitalism (high-speed railroads, dams, expressways, construction projects) ... are offensive practices against the colonization of our lives by the most advanced form of colonialism — the integrated spectacle.

All this is put into practice by individuals bored with survival as commodities (life reduced to economic imperatives) and disillusioned with false opposition (more false and less oppositional with each day that goes by), parties and unions that want to manage our misery and integrate us into a mode of production that prevents us from any participation in the decisions that relate directly to us and that assist in enslaving us, mutilating every gesture of negation of the existent.

The spectacle writes the scenario and distributes the roles: worker, professor, student, housewife, mother, father, son, daughter, unemployed, police, soldier, artist, humanitarian, intellectual... the majority, individuals who assume different roles in the course of 24 hours, see their existence as still more terrible, assuming this is possible. Everyone with his neurotic-schizoid viewpoint will react to the stimuli launched by power in the way that was already expected.

All social activity is planned in order to reinforce the spectacle, thus slowing down its unstoppable process of decomposition. Though we don’t want to hear the shrieking of militants of whatever organization, clearly we are not against the concept of “organization” as such, but against “organization” conceived as an end in itself , as the crystallization of any ideology, and as a separated organ, representing a class.

We are for the autonomous self-organization of the exploited. History has shown through two clear examples that the traditional form of the party (Russian revolution) and union (Spanish revolution) were nothing more than two attempts to manage capitalism and not to overcome it, and this is something that, consciously or unconsciously, everybody knows. In the seizure of power, it is not destroyed, but exercised: in the first case, the class of bureaucrats replaced the bourgeoisie, and in the other case, the anarcho-syndicalist leaders participated in bourgeois power, calling for the self-management of exploitation and alienation, while the base tried to overcome the relationships of production and social relationships in practice through the direct management of every aspect of their lives and not just work.

To be precise, both forms have the exaltation of work in common (something that they also share with national-socialism and with every political form of capitalism).

Their quantitative vision sought an increase in production, leaving aside the qualitative increase of life. This (practical and theoretical) defeat of the traditional organizations, which claim to represent us, has not been absorbed by the working class (it seems that we only know how to work), and we go along without maintaining any possibility of control over essential aspects of our lives, in a world that is developed, not only without our participation, but against us.

But, comrades, history is not cyclic; it is a cumulative process and already weighs too heavily upon our weary bodies.

Chapter 2

Never did mockers waste more idle breath.

— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The contradiction between the possibilities of the means of production (the use of a few of them for the enjoyment of all, since most of them are useless and harmful and would be destroyed) and the relations of production (waged exploitation, commodification, the exclusions of class society) has reached an insurmountable point of rupture. In the spectacle it is easier to falsify the nature of this contradiction than to increase mercantile production with increasing use value. This inertia forces it to display all of its methods for recuperating any real movement of opposition and to turn the spectacular critique of the spectacle to its advantage.

A self-critical hypocrite directed by its own police of decomposed thought (pro-situationists, cadres, non-governmental organizations, recuperators, artists, journalists... the clique of politically correct alternatives).

These toilet brushes of modernity, like good priests, hope that with their patches, the proper development of the system will lead us, hand in hand, into an ideal world planned by their false consciousness and by the putridity of their armoured brains; as if they had ever given us anything. Their social function, which has been denounced for decades already, has been worth more to them than any aggressions, beatings or assassinations, and we are sure that these will not be mere anecdotes. They deceive and manipulate us. We must not allow them ta have a single day more. They are the guardians to the keys of our informal chains. They amuse us with insignificant debates. They impose their opinions on us, avoiding questions so simple that they make them tremble with terror: How best to live? Who and what keeps us from this? Questions that immediately unmask the professionals of the lie. Critical coherence and the critique of incoherence aid this operation.

Chapter 3

Injustice is not anonymous; it has a name and an address.

— Bertold Brecht

Situationist theory, as integral critique of the totality of the conditions of survival and of the mercantile-spectacular capitalism that necessitates them, has been confirmed in events by falsification.

One cannot fight alienation by means of alienated forms. The sabotage of this world starts with the break with the roles the system imposes on us, the sabotage of our death in life and the refusal of the roles that they have allotted and appointed to us. To speak of the Revolution in these times is “to have a corpse in one’s mouth”. We only need to look around ourselves to see a scenario that constantly reminds us of the defeat. Sabotage is thus an action that serves as a propellant against the unreality that oppresses us. A practice that has not gone unnoticed by ideological recuperation, which has transformed it into “terrorism” (the professionalization of sabotage that has done no more than reinforce the system, due to its centralist, hierarchical and militarist character). Today, what is proposed is not the creation of an armed organization of this type, but widespread attack by small affinity groups, uncontrollable by any higher organization, that come together and dissolve like the lunar tides. The tides that are born of the awareness of how bad things are and of the worsening that awaits us due to events.

In the 19th century, such a practice existed that put the incipient capitalism in check. Beyond the Luddite attacks, the “proletarian rounds” rendered their repression and recuperation, in which the embryonic unions would play a role, almost impossible due to their lack of a rigid structure and their maximum flexibility in attacks. A group of people came together, struck and disappeared into the mass, while a new group came together within it. Such widespread sabotage makes it difficult for the enemy to organize repression. Thus it transforms the attack into a universe of pleasure for the enlightened hooligan, the feelings of which are impossible to describe or communicate with the poor and banal language of words.

The game of subversion, the rules of which are written by those that participate in it, becomes an effective weapon against capitalism in all its forms.

There is much more to destroy than to build.

Chapter 4

Our epoch does not need to write poetic slogans, but to realize them.

��� Situationist International

It has been demonstrated that small groups that attack do more damage than large organizations that specialize in armed struggle. The Angry Brigade continued its actions when people were arrested and the English state assumed the movement had fallen apart. The Kale Borroka (street struggle) in Euskadi, which Jarrai (the youth organization of the Basque nationalist left, NDR) recently declared uncontrollable is another example. Power has difficulty repressing and eliminating little groups that with complete security do not know each other, and the only thing that unites them is the desire for the destruction of a system that prevents them from living and condemns them to survival and uncertainty. They don’t attempt exhibitionist actions in order to make propaganda as some acronym or mark of origin. In the case of the Asturias, sabotage was a class weapon used innumerable times, particularly in labor conflicts with these enterprises: Duro Felguera, Hunosa, Naval and Ciata...(Asturian businesses and mines where sabotage was determinant in the struggles going on in the 1990’s); every weary person, regardless of her or his ideology, uses it. From the clerk who steals office supplies to the worker who damages the machine to which he is chained, passing through the use of plastic explosives like the licensed professionals of Duro Felguera. Today, the example is the burning of the ETTs (temporary employment agencies). The practice of sabotage remains limited to precise and very localized conflicts, without global perspectives, simply aiming for partial solutions with economic demands that remain within imposed limits where capitalist logic unfolds. The same holds in the case of the ETTs, an attack that goes beyond the temporality of a conflict in one enterprise, but that does not place wage slavery into question. Instead it only questions its most extreme form, not aiming at putting an end to exploitation, but rather to the ETTs. Today the conflict is global and it is not resolved through partial struggles, but through total struggle and through the refusal of this society as a whole. It is necessary to put an end to the reduction of our lives to commodities and to wage labor that wears us out, not just to ETTs. We must put an end to class society and not just fascism. Misdirecting our attention toward partial objectives only benefits the managers of our misery and those who will one day lay claim to its management., and both are among the targets for sabotage.

The widespread practice of sabotage (unhindered autonomy, maximum flexibility, self-organization, minimum risk) among like-minded individuals, opens the possibility for real communication, destroying spectacular communication, smashing the apathy and impotence of the eternal revolutionist monologue. Relationships and the possibility of contact with other people in the refusal of the spectacular role, these are transient situations that in their preparation and development carry in their essence the qualities of the revolutionary situation that will not retreat and that will suppress the conditions of survival. It does not fall into the irremediable alienating hierarchization that every specialized armed group of an authoritarian and militaristic character, to which the masses delegate their participation in the attack, carries within itself

The quantitative growth of this practice does not come to us from the hands of propagandists of the spectacle, but rather by taking a walk through the scenario of capitalism, and finding in this drift the burned ATM, the ETTs with shattered windows, the smiths changing the locks of a supermarket. These visions make our complicit smiles blossom and move us to go out that very night to play with fire with the aim of making the same smiles rise on the faces of unknown accomplices through the fellowship of destruction. The number doesn’t matter, but rather the quality of the acts: sabotage, expropriation, self-reduction... they return part of the life that is denied us back to us, but we want it all.

Comrades, the game is yours and we take courage in its daily practice. Organize it yourselves with your accomplices.

Against the old world in all its expressions, in order to leave pre-history, let’s launch and multiply attacks.

FOR THE ABOLITION OF CLASS SOCIETY AGAINST THE MARKET AND WAGE LABOR FOR ANARCHY STONES AND FIRE

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

ICSA: Virtual Summer Conference, Saturday and Sunday, July 11-12

This two-day event will include a variety of presentations, panels, and workshops for former members of cultic groups, families and friends, professionals, and researchers.

_______________________________________

Day 1 – Saturday Conference Sessions, July 11, 2020 (11 am - 4 pm US Eastern Time)

Day 2 – Sunday Workshops, July 12, 2020 (11 am - 4 pm US Eastern Time)

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Saturday, July 11, 2020

11:05 -11:50 / "The Neurobiology of Sexual Abuse: Flashbacks, Triggers and Healing" (Doni Whitsett)

The first part of this presentation presents a neurobiological understanding of flashbacks and triggers resulting from sexual abuse. The second part of the presentation offers suggestions for dealing with triggers, learning to manage them, and perhaps using them to facilitate healing.

11:05 -11:50 / "MIND FIXERS: The History of Mass Therapy With its Roots in Mind Dynamics Institute, Misuse of Zen Insights, and Hyping the Positive Thinking of New Thought Religion." (Joseph Kelly, Joseph Szimhart, Patrick Ryan)

The title for this presentation, “MIND FIXERS: The History of Mass Therapy With its Roots in Mind Dynamics Institute, Misuse of Zen Insights, and Hyping the Positive Thinking of New Thought Religion,” covers a vast arena for specialized workshops that range from one day to several weeks. Borrowing techniques from encounter group formats, military boot camp training, and the mindfulness movements these specialized groups operate as unregulated mass therapy businesses and are not licensed as mental health professions. The stated purpose of these “large group awareness trainings” is to increase self-realization and success in life. The outcomes, however, are problematic with some critics claiming that a form of “brainwashing” is taking place that emphasizes promotion of the workshops while any real-life gains are highly questionable. Some participants report psychological and social harm. The speakers will guide a discussion to address the criticisms.

12:00 - 12:50 / "Coercive Control and Persuasion in Relationships and Groups– Intersections and Understandings" (Rod Dubrow-Marshall; Linda Dubrow-Marshall; Carrie McManus; Andrea Silverstone)

This panel will examine contemporary understandings of coercive control in relationships and groups with practitioners from both sides of the Atlantic. The way in which the term ‘coercive control’ is now being used and applied in different jurisdictions will be discussed and how changes to the law are reflecting advances in our understanding of how coercive control works psychologically across contexts. It will also be explored how a heightened dialogue between practitioners and researchers across the fields of intimate partner violence and cults/sects and extremist groups is leading to enhanced appreciation of commonalities in the process of psychological indoctrination. Positive implications for prevention, exit and recovery and rehabilitation across these areas will also be discussed along with recommendations for policy makers.

12:00 - 12:50 PM / "Unification Church (Moonie) SGAs: The Future is Unwritten" (Lisa Kohn; Teddy Hose; Jen Kiaba)

A panel of Unification Church (Moonie) SGAs (Jen Kiaba, Teddy Hose, and Lisa Kohn) will discuss their different experiences of living in, leaving, and learning to thrive after being part of the Unification Church (the “Moonies”). The questions and discussions will focus on how the panelists experienced being part of the Unification Church, how they were able to leave the Church, how they still feel affected by their childhood in the Church, and how they have healed since leaving the Church.

1:00 - 1:50 PM / "Lived Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Former Cult Members – Counseling Implications" (Cyndi Matthews; Stevie Powers)

Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual (LGB) individuals growing up in religious cults can face opposition to their sexual orientation. They may struggle with depression, anxiety, drug/alcohol abuse, self-mutilation, and suicidal ideation. Research by presenters will describe lived experiences of LGB individuals who grew up in religious cults. Best practices based on this research, APA & ACA Codes of Ethics, along with ASERVIC and ALGBTIC competencies will be presented.

1:00 - 1:50 PM / "How Female Former Cult Members Can Reclaim their Relationship with Knowledge and Self-Identity" (Jacqueline Johnson)

High-control and coercive groups work at stealing and silencing the thoughts and knowledge base, and subsequently, the voices, of its members. For females, this dynamic becomes more problematic when those female members are, or have been, part of a misogynous group that incorporates numerous ways of subjugating women. This presentation will outline the research of Belenky et al (1986), which examines the development of women’s self, voice, and mind. Belenky and her colleagues describe the cognitive and intellectual development in women in terms of five knowledge positions (ranging from silence to construction) through which women develop their identity. This presentation will examine ways that high-control, misogynous groups subjugate women, how this affects the epistemology of female cult members, her resulting relationship to knowledge, and the possible impairments to her ability to construct her own knowledge, develop her own identity, and find her own voice. Implications for therapists working with women are discussed in terms of helping former female cult members begin to develop their identity, find their voice, and construct their own knowledge.

2:00 - 2:50 PM / "Raised in a Cult: Psychological and Social Adjustment of Second- and Third-Generation Former Cult Members" (Sofia Klufas)

Former cult members often find themselves struggling to re-integrate into mainstream society and typically describe long periods of recovery post-exit. The current study aimed to qualitatively explore the experiences of individuals raised in cults (1) during, (2) in the process of leaving, and (3) post-cult involvement in order to understand how cultic influences might impact their ability to socially and psychologically adjust to life outside of the cult upon defection. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 8 participants from across North America and Europe who self-identify as second- and/or third-generation former cult members. Responses were qualitatively analyzed for totalistic patterns of influence which may dissuade members from leaving the group or simply deviating from its norms. Participants reported a wide range of emotional responses and psychological difficulties which they perceived to be the result of their cultic upbringing including but not limited to hyper-arousal, anxiety, doctrine-related fears, feelings of isolation, depression, anger/outbursts and suicidal tendencies. Identity reconstruction and social adjustment challenges such as relationship loss due to shunning, difficulty connecting with others, language differences were also reported by participants. Raised-in cult members are a distinct population from converted cult members as they have been exposed to cultic influence throughout the course of their developmental period. While the experiences of these two groups are comparable in many ways, previous research has demonstrated that raised-in cult members are at higher risk for social and psychological difficulties (Furnari, 2005).

2:00 - 2:50 PM / "What does awe have to do with it?" (Yuval Laor)

What is awe? What role does awe play in cult recruitment? And what brings about awe experiences? The talk will discuss these and other topics related to this strange emotion and the effects it can have on us.

3:00 - 3:50 PM / "Nxivm: the Reinventive Path to Success?"(Susan Raine, Stephen Kent)

In this session I discuss the multi-level cultic organization, NXIVM. I propose that NXIVM operated as, what Susie Scott (2011) calls, a reinventive institution—that is, an organization that people enter into voluntarily, because they promise to help people transform or reinvent themselves through personal and professional growth, self-actualization, self-improvement, and success. The group’s founder and leader, Keith Raniere offered members these outcomes via the Stripe Path—a hierarchal system of courses that were supposed to empower people as they worked towards personal growth and world peace. Scott stresses, however, that reinventive institutions incorporate structures of power and are far from benign. This dynamic is evident in NXIVM, which offered to empower its members but ultimately ended up disempowering many of them—especially its most committed female followers. I follow up this discussion by addressing how Raniere had groomed many of these most dedicated women for sexual abuse and exploitation. Grant Sinnamon’s (2017) research on adult grooming and Janja Lalich’s (1997) work on the psychosexual exploitation of women in cults provide extremely useful insights for understanding Raniere’s behaviour.

3:00 - 3:50 PM / "What Do I Tell People? Empowered Ways that Cult Survivors and their Families Can Tell their Stories. Cults, Recovery and Podcasts." (Rachel Bernstein)

Nearly all my clients and podcast guests have experienced fear when thinking about telling people about their cult-related experiences. Many live in isolation because of this, and at times it's for good reason. When they've tried to share their stories, they've been responded to with insulting judgment and condescension, with confusion and disbelief, or with inappropriately voyouristic interest and invasive follow-up questions. Learn how to take control of that conversation and present your story in an educational and empowered way so you don't have to live in fear of these moments and remain silent and alone.

This two-day event will include a variety of presentations, panels, and workshops for former members of cultic groups, families and friends, professionals, and researchers.

_______________________________________

Sunday, July 12, 2020

11:00 AM - 1:00 PM / Research Workshop

The Research Workshop will be facilitated by Rod Dubrow-Marshall, Chair of the ICSA Research Network and Co-Editor of the International Journal of Coercion, Abuse and Manipulation (IJCAM). He will speak initially with a short overview about research on cults and coercive control and he will be followed by introductory talks by Cyndi Matthews, Managing Editor of IJCAM, Marie-Andrée Pelland, Co-Editor of IJCAM and Omar Saldaña from the University of Barcelona, who will each speak about research and developments in their respective areas.

The Research Workshop will focus on key areas of research currently taking place on cults and extremist groups and related areas of coercive control including intimate partner violence, trafficking and gangs. Researchers will be able to discuss the challenges they may be facing or may have faced in proposing new research projects in these areas, including getting institutional approval (IRB or ethics committee), finding participants, clarifying aspects of research design and getting support from faculty/professors. Experienced researchers will be on hand to answer questions and all those present will be able to share their ideas on current and future research including possibilities for collaboration. Plans and opportunities for the ICSA Research Network will also be discussed.  

11:00 AM - 2:00 PM / Mental Health Workshop

1:00 PM - 4:00 PM / Former Member Workshop

This workshop will include an Overview of Recovery, touching on such subjects as attachment, boundaries, and identity. There will also be an opportunity to offer reflections on sessions people have attended during the first day of the conference. The workshop is intended for both first and second/multi-generation former members.

(William Goldberg, Gillie Jenkinson)  

2:00 PM - 4:00 PM / Family Workshop

"Building Bridges; Leaving and Recovering from Cultic Groups and Relationships: A Workshop for Families"

Topics discussed include assessing a family’s unique situation; understanding why people join and leave groups; considering the nature of psychological manipulation and abuse; being accurate, objective, and up-to-date; looking at ethical issues; learning how to assess your situation; developing problem-solving skills; formulating a helping strategy; learning how to communicate more effectively with your loved one; learning new ways of coping.

(Rachel Bernstein, MSed, LMFT, Joseph Kelly, Patrick Ryan)

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Virtual Summer Conference

Lisa Kohn

To the Moon and Back: A Childhood Under the Influence

VIDEO: ‘Meet the author’ interview

How do you learn to love yourself?

Lisa Kohn interview on Generation Cult

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Teddy Hose

Talk Beliefs VIDEO: Over the Moon – Escaping Sun Myung Moon, Hak Ja Han and their family

Talk Beliefs VIDEO: Secrets of the Moonies

Growing Up “Moonie” by Teddy Hose

_______________________________________

Jen Kiaba

The Purity Knife

Life Without Reverend Moon

Why Didn’t You Just Leave?

Jen Kiaba
: Hello and welcome to my least favorite question in the entire world. It’s one I’ve heard more times than I care to count, and sadly I think that’s something many cult survivors can relate to. In the past that question used to make me clam up and spiral into shame, or mumble, “It’s not that simple.” But in those days I didn’t fully understand the coercive control mechanism that were used to keep me, and so many others, trapped. Read more:
 https://jenkiaba.medium.com/lessons-on-leaving-why-didnt-you-just-leave-789953c4689a


https://www.jenkiaba.com/portfolio

Jen Kiaba on the Ares Meyer podcast

Fuel For Nightmares: Jen Kiaba on the Elgen Strait podcast

[holyxvi]

WHAT’S YOUR MUSE’S ENNEAGRAM TYPE?

TAGGED BY: @nicholas-wolfwood TAGGING: @pretty-little-teacup​, @elisethetraveller, @neko-mun-rp, @fleursouverain, @manenimittliv, and whoever else I accidentally pressed enter before I was done editing this smh.

It is not clear from these test results which Enneagram type and wing you are.

You are most likely a type 1 Taking wings into account, you seem to be a 8w7

Type 1 - The Reformer - Perfectionists, responsible, fixated on improvement Type 8 - The Challenger - Taking charge, because they don't want to be controlled Type 3 - The Achiever - Focused on the presentation of success, to attain validation (bonus)

Full descriptions under the cut; striked are innacurate or don’t apply, and bold is ESPECIALLY accurate

The Reformer.

People of this personality type are essentially looking to make things better, as they think nothing is ever quite good enough. This makes them perfectionists who desire to reform and improve; idealists who strive to make order out of the omnipresent chaos.

Ones have a fine eye for detail. They are always aware of the flaws in themselves, others and the situations in which they find themselves. This triggers their need to improve, which can be beneficial for all concerned, but which can also prove to be burdensome to both the One and those who are on the receiving end of the One's reform efforts.

The One's inability to achieve the perfection they desire feeds their feelings of guilt for having fallen short, and fuels their incipient anger against an imperfect world. Ones, however, tend to feel guilty about their anger. Anger is a "bad" emotion, and Ones strive sincerely and wholeheartedly to be "good."  Anger is therefore vigorously repressed from consciousness, bursting forth in occasional fits of temper, but usually manifesting in one of its many less obvious permutations - impatience, frustration, annoyance and judgmental criticality. For this reason, Ones can be difficult to live with, but, on the high side, they tend to be loyal, responsible and capable partners and friends.

Ones are serious people; they tend to be highly principled, competent and uncompromising. They follow the rules and expect others to do so as well. Because they believe so thoroughly in their convictions, they are often excellent leaders who can inspire those who follow them with their own vision of excellence. Reform movements are frequently spearheaded by Ones.

Ones are often driven and ambitious, and are sometimes workaholics. But whatever their professional involvement, they are definitely active, practical  people who get things done. They are natural born organizers, listmakers who finish everything on the list, the last one to leave the office, the first one to return, industrious, reliable, honest and dutiful.

The relentlessness of their pursuit of the ideal can make Ones tense people who have a hard time relaxing and who unnecessarily deny themselves many of the harmless pleasures of life. They tend to be emotionally repressed and uncomfortable with expressing tender feelings;  they generally see emotionality as a sign of weakness and lack of control. They are seldom spontaneous. They have multiple interests and talents however; they are self-reliant and seldom run out of things to do.

Ones are often intelligent and independent and can easily mistake themselves for Fives, but unlike Fives, Ones are primarily people of action, not thought. Ones tend to worry and are prone to anxiety and can sometimes mistype as Sixes, but they are far less affiliative than Sixes and their standards are not reached by seeking consensus with a group. Finally, the relentless pursuit of perfection can take its toll and lead to depression.  At such times, a One can mistype as a Four.  But Fours have a tendency towards self-indulgence whereas Ones are self-denying. Fours are emotionally expressive; Ones are emotionally constrained.

The Challenger.

People of this personality type are essentially unwilling to be controlled, either by others or by their circumstances; they fully intend to be masters of their fate. Eights are strong willed, decisive, practical, tough minded and energetic. They also tend to be domineering; their unwillingness to be controlled by others frequently manifests in the need to control others instead. When healthy, this tendency is kept under check, but the tendency is always there, nevertheless, and can assume a central role in the Eight's interpersonal relationships.

Eights generally have  powerful instincts and strong physical appetites which they indulge without  feelings of shame or guilt. They want a lot out of life and feel fully prepared to go out and get it. They need to be financially independent and often have a hard time working for anyone. This sometimes necessitates that the Eight opt out of the system entirely, assuming something of an outlaw mentality. Most Eights however, find a way to be financially  independent while making their peace with society, but they always retain an uneasy association with any hierarchical relationship that sees the Eight in any position other than the top position.

Eights have a hard time lowering their defenses in intimate relationships. Intimacy involves emotional vulnerability and such vulnerability is one of the Eight's deepest fears. Betrayal of any sort is absolutely intolerable and can provoke a powerful response on the part of the violated Eight. Intimate relationships are frequently the arena in which an Eight's control issues are most obviously played out and questions of trust assume a pivotal position. Eights often have a sentimental side that they don't even show to their intimates, such is their fear of vulnerability. But, while trust does not come easily to an Eight, when an Eight does take someone into the inner sanctum, they find a steadfast ally and stalwart friend. The Eight's powerful protective instincts are called into play when it comes to the defense of family and friends, and Eights are frequently generous to a fault in providing for those under their care.

Eights are prone to anger. When severely provoked, or when the personality is unbalanced, bouts of anger can turn into rages. Unhealthy Eights are frankly aggressive and when pushed, can resort to violence. Such Eights enjoy intimidating others whom they see as "weak" and feel little compunction about walking over anyone who stands in their way. They can be crude, brutal and dangerous.

( BONUS ) The Achiever.

People of this personality type need to be validated in order to feel worthy; they pursue success and want to be admired. They are frequently hard working, competitive and are highly focused in the pursuit of their goals, whether their goal is to be the most successful salesman in the company or the "sexiest" woman in their social circle. They are often "self-made" and usually find some area in which they can excel and thus find the external approbation which they so desperately need. Threes are socially competent, often extroverted, and sometimes charismatic. They know how to present themselves, are self-confident, practical, and driven. Threes have a lot of energy and often seem to embody a kind of zest for life that others find contagious. They are good networkers who know how to rise through the ranks. But, while Threes do tend to succeed in whatever realm they focus their energies, they are often secretly afraid of being or becoming "losers."

Threes can sometimes find intimacy difficult. Their need to be validated for their image often hides a deep sense of shame about who they really are, a shame they unconsciously fear will be unmasked if another gets too close. Threes are often generous and likable, but are difficult to really know. When unhealthy, their narcissism takes an ugly turn and they can become cold blooded and ruthless in the pursuit of their goals.

Because it is central to the type Three fixation to require external validation, Threes often, consciously and unconsciously, attempt to embody the image of success that is promoted by their culture. Threes get in trouble when they confuse true happiness, which depends on inner states, with the image of happiness which society has promoted. If a Three has a "good" job and an "attractive" mate, she might be willing, through an act of self-deception which is also self-betrayal, to ignore the inner promptings which tell her that neither her job, nor her mate are fulfilling her deeper needs. Even the most "successful" Threes, who generally appear quite happy, often hide a deeply felt sense of meaninglessness. The attainment of the image never quite satisfies.

[lime-be4n]

So this is a concept I have for the B.B.S.

So I came up with this idea a while back, it’s nothing big and I prolly won’t do anything with it? Maybe the occasional doodle of it and some small concept comics but, again, prolly not any writing/storytelling. But I still want to, I guess, say what I want about it and kinda see if it gets any attention? I mean I don’t want any attention but rather the concept. Okie dokie? Cool, fools!

So imagen, a world exactly like ours but something's different! Everyone, or everyone who is visible, is beautiful! The world is run by a different scale of social and hierarchical structure. The more attractive a person is, the higher they are on the scale! So society felt challenged when youtube popped up; it gave the hidden attractives a way to rise up, and allowed those people to make a living doing the things they enjoyed! Now this is where the story begins!

Jonathan Gormon Dennis, the anomaly, the gamer, the clown, the youtuber H2O Delirious. To Evan, Vanoss Gaming, he was a spectacle; he somehow flew up the ranks without showing his showing his face! He’s gone to Luke, but he obviously said nothing. “He’s just your normal guy!”, “ It’s not my secret to share,”, and more; All of were criticizing Evan over his inability to respect his friend’s wishes.

The boys, the B.B.S., Banana Bus Squad! They are a mixture of uncertainty, and elated emotions.

David, Daithi De Nogla, is happy for him, and certainly encourages is behavior. David sees no wrong in what his friend is doing, and has said in the past “Del’s face doesn’t make him my friend. He’s my friend ‘cause he’s funny! And he’s got a good personality — but don’t tell him is said that! He’ll use it against me!” And then proceeded to laugh. Mr. Nagle has had quite the simple life for the Irish to admit. A triplet, hobbyist musician, and a good looking face. YouTube helped him and his family some. A very nice dorky boy...

Tyler, I am Wildcat, he’s,,, well he’s something. He doesn’t seem to approve of what Jonathan’s doing, throughout videos he would tend to tease and pick on him. He was and is often found saying,” Damn! I really hope you don’t look like that in real life!” And, “I bet your damn awful ugly!”. Then proceed to laugh it off. A character for sure but he is known to, off camera, apologise to Jonathan, who is heard to awkwardly laugh it off and would would say it was okay. Mr. Wine, is well off. Not inherently living off of his paycheck and had a well off life on a farm. He’s upfront and tend to come off a abrasive, but he’s shows he cares differently than people...

Marcel, BasiclyIDoWrk, supports Jonathan all the way. And he will continue to respect him. But he does tend to touch the line, asking for some hints and little clues about his features, which he never reveals. Mr.Cunningham has been heard about his thoughts and has said, “He’s my friend, I’m not gonna let he ‘lack of face’ interfere with that!” And proceed to be frustrated with questionnaires. Marcel has had a bit of an outlash as a kid, but he got by with the help of his family. He’s cute and now settled! Happy as can be…

Brock, Moo (formally Moo Snuckel), is a very easy going man. Worry some but easy. His relationship with Jonathan is good, healthy, with a heavy load of paternity. Mr. Barrus is heard telling Jonathan stuff such as, “Make sure to eat before ten o'clock!”, “Did you put your laundry loads to wash before joining?” Which Jonathan admires about him, and his skill of fathering. Brock’s life is a happy life; settled, easy on the eyes, a father figure to the group, what’s not to love! He’s has many friends who love him and a stable, satisfying career, what’s not to love…

Brian, The Gaming Terroriser, is not one to go against social rules. And for some reason doesn’t do anything with them. He is completely on the fence with Jonathan’s decision. He doesn’t let that get in the way of his friendship, he doesn’t treat him anymore or any less in comparison to the others. He has been heard in past videos saying things in order to avoid the topic of his face like, “ Let’s not talk about that guys!”, and, “Woah did you guys see that? That was insane!” By completely abound the topic has often led Jonathan smiling. Mr. Hanby has had a good life, somewhat spoiled by his parents but still humble, especially after the death of his father. He continues to have a good life, with the help of his buds and his precious dog. Humble as can be…

Craig, Mini Ladd, is quite the enthusiast. If he see something he like he hyped it up, now if it was something he didn’t like… well that was a different story. And unusual. Mr.Thompson has a habit of showing off things he doesn’t like and then likes to see what happens to said things. If society deems it wrong, he laughs at it, if society deems is right, well he just goes on his day. Jonathan is unsure about Craig, he likes him but the feeling may now be mutual; often giving off hints, “Sorry I didn’t hear you. Could you repeat that but slower?” And “Check me out guys!” Then proceeds to show off something new. Craig isn’t a bad guy. He just flows with society. A great beginning, moving to different countries, learning new things everywhere, taking some culture with him. Settled and happy. He just flows with society…

Ryan, OhmWrecker, is another crypted. Not as secretive as Jonathan, and has been seen once in a blue moon. The closest to Luke and close with Jonathan, not as close as Luke, David, or Evan but pretty close. He loves to have little inside jokes with Jonathan about being ‘Masked’ like, “Doesn’t that make us some purgers?” And, “...just sticky note the camera!” With each comment being followed with giggles. Now Ryan has had a good life, great parents, great life, an amazing dog, very good life. He has let Luke visit him and of course Luke is respectful of Ryan’s wishes. Making them closer than before. What a good life...

Luke, Cart00nz, is exactly what a brother would be like in Jonathan’s eyes. Supporting him in tough and rough times and helping him push through! Luke loves his little brother, and is willing to do anything for him. Not sharing his secret is not the hardest thing for him to do for his little brother. Mr. Patterson is very close to the Dennis’, at one point even dating Jonathan’s older sister! He’s had a normal life that increase for him into a great life. He’s a good man, not sharing Jonathan’s secret isn’t the hardest thing he did for him…

Jonathan’s fandom can seem to quite get enough of it though. With the small April fools videos and the click-bait titles, it makes them wild. Most of them (75% roughly) joke about hoping for a real, not fake, click-baited video and proceed to respect his wishes. Another amount (17% roughly) don’t really do much about it, but without disregarding his wishes and beg for a real face reveal. And lastly and certainly the worst, the 8%. The small amount that continues to bark and lather Mr. H2O with insults. He’s blocked always half of them, he’s sure of it…

Welp!

That’s all I got at the moment but like, yeah. This is not meant to offend anybody! This is just some consent I came up with. Nothing more, nothing less!

Feel free to ask questions! I will 100% answer them! Thank you for your time!

[bountyofbeads]

Coronavirus Exposes Core Flaws, and Few Strengths, in China’s Governance https://nyti.ms/38FTXIO

Effects of Coronavirus Begin Echoing Far From Wuhan Epicenter

Hong Kong closed its schools for several weeks, Beijing began limiting bus travel in and out of the capital and China’s travel association suspended tour groups of citizens heading overseas.

By Chris Buckley and Tiffany May | Published Jan. 25, 2020Updated 6:11 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 25, 2020 |

WUHAN, China — The repercussions from a mysterious virus that has sickened hundreds of people began reverberating far from its epicenter in central China on Saturday, as Hong Kong closed its schools for several weeks, Beijing began restricting buses in and out of the capital, and the country’s travel association suspended Chinese tour groups heading overseas.

The new measures, coming on top of previous travel restrictions that had effectively penned in tens of millions of people in Hubei, the province at the heart of the outbreak, are certain to further dampen celebrations of the Lunar New Year, which began on Saturday.

They came, too, as China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, who had said little publicly about the crisis despite growing criticism of the response, pledged Saturday that officials would “stand at the front line to safeguard social stability.”

The illness linked to the virus has killed at least 42 people and sickened more than 1,300 in China, according to official reports. Cases have been confirmed in all but one of China’s provinces and autonomous regions, as well as in at least 10 other countries as the virus has spread to Europe, the United States and, most recently, Australia.

Among the newest victims in China was a 62-year-old ear, nose and throat specialist, who died on Saturday, according to state news media. The state-owned television network said the doctor had been at the “front line” of the outbreak, despite retiring from a Wuhan hospital in March 2019.

And officials in the southern city of Hechi said on Saturday that a 2-year-old girl suffering from the coronavirus had been admitted to a hospital, becoming the youngest person known to be infected.

In a sign of how the coronavirus has shaken China, Mr. Xi convened a meeting of Communist Party leaders on Saturday to try to stem the outbreak.

“We’re sure to be able to win in this battle to beat the epidemic,” said Mr. Xi, according to a summary of his remarks by state media, offering some of his most extensive remarks to date on the crisis.

Mr. Xi called for stronger efforts to provide medicine and other supplies to affected areas. Shortages have angered doctors and medical workers, particularly in Wuhan, the Hubei provincial capital where the outbreak began. Hospitals have issued pleas for donated supplies.

Party leaders also directed railway stations, airports and ports to step up measures to deter the spread of the virus, through ventilation, disinfection and body temperature checks.

Chinese officials announced later Saturday that more than 1,200 medical personnel would be sent to Wuhan and over 10,000 beds in 24 local hospitals would be requisitioned for treating confirmed and suspected cases of the virus.

But the official response so far has drawn stinging rebukes on social media, where people are questioning whether the authorities are accurately reporting the number of cases or doing enough to rein in the outbreak. In particular, people have denounced the perceived indifference of local, provincial and even national authorities.

“Where is that person? He is not on the front line,” one user wrote on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, in an apparent reference to Mr. Xi.

State media has maintained a steady drumbeat of positive news about the outbreak, praising the sacrifices of responders and everyday people. But there was little doubt that the disease had derailed celebrations of the Lunar New Year, the country’s biggest holiday and busiest travel period.

Travel constraints imposed earlier in Wuhan and 12 nearby cities have effectively penned in 35 million people. Wuhan tightened its restrictions further on Saturday, with a ban on most vehicle traffic in the city center.

The restrictions began spreading far beyond Wuhan, too: In Beijing, the city government said it would halt all inter-province buses beginning on Sunday, effectively limiting road travel into the capital.

The association of China’s travel agencies said that it would suspend all tour groups and the sale of flight and hotel packages for citizens headed overseas, starting on Monday. Groups already on their trips were allowed to continue, with the directive that travelers’ health be closely monitored.

The move to cut off group tours could have a ripple effect across countries that depend on Chinese tourists. While China is now home to an increasingly sophisticated population ready to hit the tourist routes by themselves, a large number of Chinese do not feel comfortable traveling abroad unless they are with a group.

New measures were also imposed in Hong Kong, where its leader, Carrie Lam, declared a health emergency. Five coronavirus patients connected to Wuhan are being treated in Hong Kong, and more than 100 others are suspected of having the viral pneumonia.

Lunar New Year celebrations are being canceled in Hong Kong, schools will be closed until mid-February and the Hong Kong Marathon has been called off. The city is also suspending flights and train services to Wuhan.

A study by the medical journal The Lancet, published on Friday, raised new concerns that people infected with the coronavirus might be able to spread it even if they do not have flu-like symptoms.

Researchers studied a family in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, five of whom had traveled to Wuhan and two of whom had come in contact with an infected relative in a hospital there. Testing conducted after the family flew home found that six members had the coronavirus, including one who had not gone to Wuhan.

One infected family member, a child, had no symptoms, suggesting that people with the virus might be spreading it without knowing that they have it, the study found.

“It shows this new coronavirus is able to transfer between person to person, in a hospital setting, a family home setting, and also in an intercity setting,” Yuen Kwok-yung, an author of the study, said in an interview. “This is exactly what makes this new disease difficult to control.”

The United States Embassy said on Saturday that all American employees at its consulate in Wuhan have been ordered to leave. The United States government is arranging a charter flight to evacuate American diplomats and citizens on Sunday, according to a person familiar with the plan.

For people in the United States with close ties to China, the outbreak has brought worry, disappointment and scrutiny. Some Chinese-Americans have had their Lunar New Year plans waylaid, as travel schedules for the coming week and beyond are interrupted.

Chinese-Americans have scrambled, though, to send aid to their friends and family in China.

Sean Shi, of Issaquah, Wash., said he shipped several boxes of masks to China in a friend’s luggage, hoping that they could reach friends in the Wuhan area. Later in the day, Mr. Shi was back at a hardware store, buying another 46 masks for some of his former peers at Wuhan University.

“We understand it’s a tough situation over there — the panic, the shortage of equipment,” Mr. Shi said. “We just realized the situation is very serious — more serious than we thought.”

______

Christopher Buckley reported from Wuhan, and Tiffany May from Hong Kong. Reporting was contributed by Steven Lee Myers, Vivian Wang, Raymond Zhong, Carlos Tejada, Rick Gladstone, Mike Baker, Jeffrey E. Singer and Elian Peltier. Yiwei Wang and Claire Fu contributed research.

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Coronavirus Exposes Core Flaws, and Few Strengths, in China’s Governance

While China can mobilize a huge national response to the outbreak, its response to the crisis is also a lesson in how the country’s political weak points can carry grave consequences for world health.

By Max Fisher | Published Jan. 25, 2020 Updated 4:13 p.m. ET |New York Times|

Posted January 25, 2020 |

It was the initial news reports that first suggested China’s political system might be getting in the way of its ability to confront the coronavirus outbreak.

The outbreak seemed to already be a full-blown crisis, infecting dozens in China and even some abroad, by the time it became widely reported.

This seeming delay was of a familiar pattern in China, one suggesting that local officials may have played down early warning signs or simply did not coordinate enough to see the problem’s scope.

While outsiders might suspect an attempted cover-up as the cause, experts see something much more worrying: weaknesses at the very heart of the Chinese system.

Its rigidly hierarchical bureaucracy discourages local officials from raising bad news with central bosses whose help they might need. And it silos those officials off from one another, making it harder to see, much less manage, the full scope of spiraling crises.

“That’s why you never really hear about problems emerging on a local scale in China,” said John Yasuda, who studies China’s approach to health crises at Indiana University. “By the time that we hear about it, and that the problem reaches the central government, it’s because it’s become a huge problem.”

While much remains unknown about the outbreak, a common theme is emerging.

Any political system is better at solving some problems than others. But the coronavirus, like other health crises before it, is bringing out some of the deepest flaws and contradictions in a Chinese system that, for all its historic feats, remains a work in progress.

Those flaws, which have long frustrated Chinese leaders, appear to have played a role in everything from the pace at which officials responded to the coronavirus outbreak, to China’s yearslong inability to address the health risks that experts have long warned could lead to an outbreak just like this one.

While the country is now mobilizing a nationwide response — one of the system’s strengths — the incident is already a lesson in the political weak points that can bring grave consequences for China and, as infections spread, the world.

A System at Odds With Itself

“When you look at the coronavirus, it looks a lot like what happened with SARS. It involves a very similar template,” Mr. Yasuda said.

The SARS epidemic, which killed hundreds of people in 2002 and 2003, initially spread unchecked when local Chinese officials minimized early reports.

Their fear was not public unrest, it later emerged, but getting in trouble with the party bosses who controlled their careers.

Guan Yi, a professor of infectious diseases in Hong Kong who helped identify SARS, has accused Chinese authorities of once more delaying action, including by obstructing his own efforts to investigate the outbreak.

“This is a continuous theme in central-local relations in China. You do not want to be the one to bring bad news,” said Vivienne Shue, a prominent China scholar at Oxford University.

That gulf between central leaders in Beijing and local officials who run the country day-to-day, Ms. Shue said, is “the core conundrum in how that system works.”

It leads officials on both sides of the center-local divide “to do many counterproductive, irrational things,” she said, in their efforts to manage and manipulate one another.

That has included holding back reports of potential crises, in the hopes of solving things without the bosses finding out.

At the same time, China’s quasi-imperial system leaves the top party bosses in Beijing with little direct power over what happens in the provinces — policy proclamations are sometimes ignored or defied — other than promoting or punishing subordinates.

The two ends of the system are engaged in a constant push-pull dynamic, putting them occasionally at odds — particularly in moments of crisis, when each is looking to blame the other.

This has been an issue throughout China’s modern history, Ms. Shue said, with power fluctuating between the center and the periphery. Xi Jinping, China’s current leader, has sought to centralize power, setting up Beijing-based working groups to exert more control outside the capital.

But the system’s underlying contradiction remains. Mr. Xi’s tightening grip may make local leaders all the more wary of releasing information that could invite his wrath.

As China modernizes, integrating its once-disparate provinces and cities, local mistakes can become national crises before Beijing is even aware that something has happened, as may have happened with the coronavirus outbreak.

“As logistics and the distribution systems have expanded, you really see how the local and national have been linked together,” Mr. Yasuda said, referring to the hastening rate at which health, environmental and economic crises can now spread.

That is not all downside. The central government has enormous capacity to mobilize in a crisis, as it is doing now, locking down several major cities to slow the disease’s spread.

“Once a clear problem has emerged, it’s very good at diverting resources,” Mr. Yasuda said of China’s political system. “But it’s not good at dealing with emerging problems. So it’s built to be reactive instead of proactive.”

WHEN CHINA’S STRENGTHS BECOME A SOURCE OF PERIL

In some ways, China’s system has been a source of strength.

Party bosses set priorities, then reward the institutions and officials who best carry them out.

And since the days of Mao Zedong, China has operated under a system known as fragmented authoritarianism, in which even the most local leaders have near-absolute authority over their remit.

That has led to a culture of what Elizabeth J. Perry, a Harvard University scholar, has called “guerrilla governance,” in which results take precedence over procedure or accountability, and in which it is all leaders for themselves.

This approach is seen as crucial in having enabled China to lift hundreds of millions of citizens out of poverty and turn itself from global backwater into world power.

But it can be disastrous when it comes to managing health and environmental issues.

Disease and pollution don’t respect provincial or municipal borders. And because of the way they spread, it often takes a unified, nationwide policy to prevent or stop them — something for which guerrilla governance is ill-suited.

“It’s very difficult to come together to create a clear actionable plan,” Mr. Yasuda said, adding that, for any health or environmental regulation to work, “you want it to be standardized, you want it to be transparent, you want it to be accountable.”

But China’s system de-emphasizes those concerns, sometimes to disastrous effect.

In the mid-2000s, Beijing demanded a drastic increase in milk production. When factory farms were unable to meet their targets, officials conscripted vast numbers of rural farmers. Some of the farmers, struggling to meet their quotas, watered down their milk, then added an industrial chemical known as melamine to fool quality sensors. The tainted milk poisoned thousands of infants.

Experts fear a similar regulatory failure may have enabled the coronavirus outbreak: the longstanding inability to clean up so-called wet markets, which are stuffed with livestock living and dead, domesticated and wild. Though the outbreak’s cause is still being studied, Wuhan’s wet market is considered a prime suspect.

The markets have long been considered a major threat to public health, particularly as a vector for transmitting diseases from animals to humans. And they are a lesson in the perils of patchwork, decentralized regulations like China’s: While some markets are more carefully policed than others, all it takes is one to cause an outbreak.

In another echo of the tainted milk scandal, top-down political priorities provide an incentive to look the other way. Taking down the markets, which are popular, would risk a public outcry. Local officials had every reason to fear that their bosses, who have not made the markets a priority, would punish them for causing trouble.

Aligning With Public Good, Or Not

A foundational mission of any political system is to align its leaders’ incentives with the needs and desires of the wider public.

Democracies seek to do this through “the competition of interests,” Ms. Shue said, on the belief that inviting everyone to participate will naturally pull the system toward the common good. This system, like any, has flaws, for example by handing more power to those with more money.

Within China, Ms. Shue added, the common good “is seen as something that should be designed from above, like a watch being engineered to run perfectly.”

But sometimes the watch can be designed in ways that harm the public good.

In 2001, for instance, Beijing ordered provincial officials to reduce water pollution from factories. Many provinces simply moved the factories to their borders, ensuring pollutants would flow into the next district. Nationwide, water pollution worsened.

So far, the coronavirus outbreak seems to highlight both the strengths and perils of China’s model. Beijing, apparently having learned from the SARS epidemic, has pushed for faster and more drastic action.

But the same systemic problems, from gun-shy local officials to weak health regulations, appear to be recurring as well — a reminder that the system remains, Ms. Shue said, “a work in progress.”

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China’s Omnivorous Markets Are in the Eye of a Lethal Outbreak Once Again

The coronavirus that has spread from Wuhan has been linked to the sale of live wildlife at a market that experts describe as a perfect incubator for novel pathogens.

By Steven Lee Myers | Published Jan. 25, 2020 Updated 8:06 p.m. ET | New York | Posted January 25, 2020 |

LANGFANG, China — The typical market in China has fruits and vegetables, butchered beef, pork and lamb, whole plucked chickens — with heads and beaks attached — and live crabs and fish, spewing water out of churning tanks. Some sell more unusual fare, including live snakes, turtles and cicadas, guinea pigs, bamboo rats, badgers, hedgehogs, otters, palm civets, even wolf cubs.

The markets are fixtures in scores of Chinese cities, and now, for at least the second time in two decades, they are the source of an epidemic that has spread fear, taxed the Communist Party bureaucracy and exposed the epidemiological risks that can spawn in places where humans and wildlife converge.

The novel coronavirus that has already killed at least 56 and sickened more than 1,370 in China and around the world is believed to have spread from exactly one of these places: a wholesale market in Wuhan, a city in central China, where vendors legally sold live animals from stalls in close quarters with hundreds of others.

“This is where you get new and emerging diseases that the human population has never seen before,” said Kevin J. Olival, a biologist and vice president of research with EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization, who has tracked previous outbreaks.

[ UPDATES ON THE CORONAVIRUS: Xi Jinping warned that China faced a “grave situation” as the epidemic “accelerated.”]

While the exact path of the pathogen has not yet been established, government officials and scientists said the new contagion had ominous similarities with the outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, in late 2002, which killed nearly 800 people and sickened thousands more around the world.

Now, as the government struggles to contain public anger over the outbreak, it is facing calls to do more to regulate or even ban the sale of wildlife — and growing questions about why so little has changed in the 17 years since SARS.

That disease was ultimately traced to a coronavirus that jumped from bats to Asian palm civets, a catlike creature prized as a delicacy in southern China, and then to humans involved in the wildlife trade there. According to officials and scientists, the new virus also appears to have originated in bats and made the jump to another mammal, though which one is not yet clear.

The latest outbreak — the scope of which is still unfolding — has led to calls inside and outside of China for better regulations or even an end to this kind of culinary adventurism. While turtle and boar meat are not uncommon in Chinese restaurants, game meats such as civet cats, snakes or pangolins tend to be considered specialties only in some regions. Their consumption is driven as much by the desire to flaunt wealth as by a mix of superstition and belief about the health benefits of wildlife.

Once the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was identified as the most likely source of this outbreak in December, the authorities promptly closed it, though it was not clear what happened to the animals that had been for sale there. Officials announced only on Wednesday that they had banned the sale of wild animals throughout the province. Two other provinces, Henan and Inner Mongolia, also imposed suspensions on the trade this past week.

On Friday, officials from three national agencies announced tighter controls, including a suspension nationally of the sale and transport of animals possibly linked to the new coronavirus. The statement specified only badgers and bamboo rats, a species of rodent found in southern China that lives in (and eats) bamboo thickets. Both had been advertised for sale in the market in Wuhan.

The flurry of government action came after an unusual outpouring of public sentiment against the trade of live animals. A campaign on Weibo, the social media platform, drew 45 million views with the hashtag #rejectgamemeat.

“Eating game does not cure impotence or have healing powers,” Jin Sichen, a television presenter in Nanjing, a city in southeastern China, wrote on his Weibo page on Wednesday. “Game not only doesn’t cure disease, it can also make you, your family, friends and even more people sick.”

“One must be mentally sick to eat game in order to show off and flaunt,” Mr. Jin added.

A group of 19 Chinese scholars also called on the government to do more to regulate the trade and the public to stop eating wild animals.

The Wildlife Conservation Society, an advocacy organization based in New York, called for a global ban on the commercial sale of wildlife, especially in markets like those in China, saying that the latest outbreak proved the public health threat.

Christian Walzer, the organization’s executive director of health, said that the astonishing diversity of wild animals in markets like these, packed in small cages in crowded market stalls, created a perfect laboratory for the unintentional incubation of new viruses that can enter human cells. Viruses can be spread through saliva, blood or feces.

“Each animal is a package of pathogens,” he said in a telephone interview.

But some Chinese consumers ascribe traditional medicinal benefits to the animals. Vendors and even officials in state news media have touted wildlife as alternative sources of protein and sources of revenue in impoverished regions.

An article by the Xinhua news agency last fall, for example, said that farming bamboo rats was helping to lift people out of poverty in Guangxi, another southern province.

Worries about meat supplies surged last year over the outbreak of African swine fever, which led to the killing of 40 percent of the country’s pigs. Production of domesticated livestock on the country’s farms is, compared to the sale of wildlife, subjected to far more regulation and inspection. Outbreaks still occur, but they are identified more quickly.

Part of the problem with the wildlife trade is that there is far less regulation, despite the greater risk of live animals’ infecting each other and people, especially in markets that can be unsanitary.

Mr. Walzer said that one problem with the legal production of some species is that it can blur the lines between those raised in captivity and those captured in the wild, where unknown viruses have existed for years without contact with humans.

“It’s a public health hazard, not only in China but everywhere,” he said.

At the peak of the SARS outbreak in 2003, the authorities banned the sale of civets and culled the existing stocks, but within months they ended the ban and trade had resumed as before.

“It is driven by interests,” Qin Xiaona, president of the Capital Animal Welfare Association, an advocacy organization in Beijing, said of the current outbreak. “Many people profit from the wildlife trade today.”

According to a medical blog posted on WeChat, the health authorities in Wuhan visited the market in September and inspected eight vendors selling frogs, snakes and hedgehogs, among other animals. All were licensed to sell wildlife, and no violations were found.

Despite the spread of the virus around the country, a Hong Kong television network, I-Cable News Channel, found scores of wild animals still for sale on Wednesday at a market in Qingyuan, a city in Guangdong, the province where SARS originated.

THE EPIDEMIC HAS NOW PUT SELLERS ON THE DEFENSIVE.

“Are you sure it is eating wild animals that has caused the epidemic?” said Zheng Ming, the sales manager of James Gorman contributed reporting from New York. Zoe Mou in Beijing and Claire Fu in Chengdu contributed research. selling animals in Yichang, a city 180 miles west of Wuhan. Until the ban on sales announced this past week, he sold porcupines, civets, guinea pigs and bamboo rats among others.

“We observe the law,” he said. “This is a completely legal business.”

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Coronavirus Spurs China to Suspend Tours Abroad and Xi to Warn of a ‘Grave Situation’......Concern over the outbreak has crept closer to central government offices and the ruling Communist Party’s seat of power.

PUBLISHED Jan. 25, 2020 Updated 8:32 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 25, 2020 |

CHINA MOVES TO RESTRICT TRAVEL, INCLUDING TOURS ABROAD.

China said on Saturday that it would suspend all tour groups and the sale of flight and hotel packages for its citizens headed overseas, starting on Monday.

The association for China’s travel agencies said tour groups that were in the middle of their trips could proceed with their itineraries but should closely monitor the health of their travelers.

This measure may come as welcome news to countries that have been gearing up to screen travelers from China for fevers and other signs of infection.

The Beijing city government also announced on Saturday that it would suspend all inter-province buses from Sunday, effectively limiting road travel into the capital.

The measures, taken hundreds of miles from Wuhan, where the outbreak of a novel coronavirus began, were a sign that concerns over the spread of the outbreak have crept close to central government offices and the ruling Communist Party’s seat of power.

Wuhan also tightened its restrictions further on Saturday with a ban on vehicle traffic in the city center, to begin at midnight.

The local government said some vehicles would be exempted, including shuttle buses and trucks moving supplies. Residents responded with frustration on social media. One woman, who said she was pregnant and near her due date, asked if she was supposed to walk to her gynecologist’s office.

All the reported deaths from the outbreak have been in mainland China, but travelers have spread the virus to numerous other places. Cases have been confirmed in Australia, Malaysia, Nepal, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, France and the United States.

The authorities in Wuhan said they would also speed up the customs process for donated supplies, as hospitals in the city raise the alarm about a shortage of hospital gowns, surgical masks and other necessities.

A notice posted Saturday on the website of the city’s customs agency said that new channels were being put in place to ensure that donations were put to immediate use. Overseas donations will be exempted from tax duties, the notice said.

During past crises, the authorities in China have been criticized for their reluctance to accept overseas assistance, apparently preferring to project a sense of control. As China has grown more affluent, it has become a provider of aid rather than a recipient, particularly to regions like Africa.

China has made exceptions during some past disasters, including a devastating earthquake centered on Sichuan Province in 2008.

SCHOOLS IN HONG KONG AND THE MAINLAND POSTPONE CLASSES

On Saturday, Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, declared a health emergency in the semiautonomous Chinese city and said schools would be closed until mid-February.

Two American universities with campuses in China also postponed their start dates. Duke Kunshan University, a partnership between Duke University in North Carolina and Wuhan University, said it would not resume classes until Feb. 17.

Classes had originally been scheduled to resume Feb. 3, after the Lunar New Year vacation. (Duke Kunshan University is not in Wuhan, but in Jiangsu Province, more than 400 miles away.)

New York University also announced that its Shanghai campus would start its spring semester one week later than planned, at the request of municipal authorities.

Schools in Hubei Province, where Wuhan is and where the outbreak has hit the hardest, had already decided to delay the start dates at all schools, from kindergarten through college.

Fifteen more deaths are reported, including one in Shanghai.

China on Sunday morning announced 15 more deaths from the new coronavirus, including one in Shanghai, the first to be reported so far in the metropolis.

Thirteen more deaths were also announced in Hubei Province, where the outbreak began, and one was announced in Henan Province. The latest deaths brought the toll in China to 56.

Across the country, 688 cases of the new virus were diagnosed on Saturday, the government said early Sunday.

That brings the total number of confirmed cases to 1,975. Deaths from the coronavirus had previously been reported outside of Hubei, the outbreak’s epicenter.

But the death in Shanghai, which is amoung China’s most populous cities and a major commercial hub, is likely to add to anxieties about the disease’s spread.

Shanghai’s municipal health commission said on Saturday that the patient who died was an 88-year-old man.

Nationwide, more than 400 new cases of the virus were diagnosed, officials said early Saturday, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in China to more than 1,370.

Travel restrictions in Wuhan and 12 other cities have essentially penned in 35 million people on the country’s biggest holiday, normally a time for traveling to visit family.

WHY IS THERE SO MUCH PANIC?

Though the number of coronavirus cases and deaths is alarming, public health experts have so far warned against mass anxiety. After all, the common flu kills roughly 35,000 people a year and hospitalizes about 200,000 in the United States alone.

It is too soon to know the mortality rate of the virus in the new outbreak. But there are signs that this outbreak could be far more serious than the common flu. For one, the virus has been identified as a coronavirus, named for the spikes that protrude from its membrane. Other coronaviruses have far higher mortality rates than the common flu, and have also led to global outbreaks.

Chinese citizens are also haunted by the memory of the SARS epidemic in 2002 and 2003, a coronavirus outbreak that also started in China and eventually killed more than 800 people worldwide. During that epidemic, Beijing at first played down the crisis and withheld information, eventually drawing widespread criticism.

And conclusive evidence about how the outbreak started is lacking. While officials in Wuhan first traced it to a seafood market, some patients who have fallen ill never visited the market. Researchers have also offered disparate explanations for what animals may have transmitted the virus to humans.

The Chinese government has promised far more transparency than in the SARS crisis, and the World Health Organization has praised its cooperation with the scientific community.

Still, mistrust of the local and national authorities is evident on Chinese social media. And China’s health system has already struggled under the new virus’s strain, with hospitals in Wuhan issuing urgent requests for help and donations.

Xi Jinping, China’s leader, says the nation will ‘beat the epidemic.’

In a sign of how the spread of the coronavirus has deeply shaken China, the nation’s top leader, Xi Jinping, convened a meeting of the Communist Party leadership on Saturday to begin an offensive to stanch the spread of the outbreak, improve treatment of victims and speed supplies to areas under lockdown.

“We’re sure to be able to win in this battle to beat the epidemic through prevention and control,” Mr. Xi said, according to an official summary delivered on Chinese television.

Until now, Mr. Xi had said little publicly about the growing crisis, even as confirmed cases of infection with the new and little understood coronavirus multiplied over the past week and Wuhan — the city in central China where the virus first spread — and nearby areas came under a net of travel restrictions intended to contain the outbreak.

Mr. Xi issued brief orders about the emerging epidemic five days ago. Now, though, he has ordered mobilization across the country and drastic measures to hold back the virus, which is linked to pneumonia symptoms that can be deadly.

The China television report showed Mr. Xi speaking to the six other members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the Communist Party’s topmost decision-making body, and a circle of other grave-faced officials. The leadership meeting took place on the first full day of China’s weeklong Lunar New Year holiday, a time when the entire country, including party leaders, usually take time off for family get-togethers and relaxation.

“Confronted with the grave situation of this accelerating spread of pneumonia from infections with the novel coronavirus, we must step up the centralized and united leadership under the party central” leadership, Mr. Xi said.

The Communist Party will establish a top-level team, called a leadership small group, to grapple with the crisis, the meeting said, giving efforts to fight the outbreak greater urgency and centralized coordination. Here are some of the other measures and main points announced:

Mr. Xi demanded strong efforts to provide medicine and other supplies, a point of anger among many doctors and medical workers in Wuhan who have complained about a shortage of protective masks, gowns and other safety equipment.

Officials in Hubei Province, where the outbreak began, received an implicit telling off. Residents and many other Chinese people have said that officials did not respond seriously enough. Hubei, the meeting said, “must make containment and control of the epidemic its topmost priority, adopting even stricter measures to prevent it expanding within and spreading outward.”

The meeting called for concentrating resources, experts and treatment to cope with the surge of infections, including sending patients with serious symptoms to designated medical units. This suggests that there may be more hospitals built or modified to deal solely with the outbreak.

LOCAL AND MILITARY MEDICAL RESOURCES ARE TO BE POOLED FOR THE RESPONSE.

Public spaces across China, including railway stations, airports, and ports, were told to step up measures to deter the spread of the virus, including ventilation, disinfection, and body temperature checks for people. “When suspected cases are found they must be held for observation locally,” the meeting ordered.

Beijing response highlights longstanding tensions between national and local officials.

In his remarks on Saturday, Mr. Xi also seemed to address Chinese citizens’ growing dissatisfaction with the official response. On Chinese social media, users have asked whether the authorities have accurately reported the number of cases or taken enough steps to rein in their spread.

Commenters have especially condemned the perceived absence of the local, provincial and even national authorities in the heart of the outbreak. Mr. Xi had made few public remarks about the disease before Saturday, when he called for officials to “stand at the front line to safeguard social stability.”

“Where is that person? He is not on the front line,” one user wrote on Weibo, a Twitterlike platform, an apparent reference to Mr. Xi. The posts were quickly deleted.

A professor of infectious diseases in Hong Kong who helped identify SARS, Guan Yi, has accused Chinese authorities of delaying action and of obstructing his efforts to investigate the outbreak.

Local officials in China have long had incentives to avoid revealing problems that might invite the wrath of party bosses. But Mr. Xi’s efforts to centralize power in Beijing have further weakened local authorities and increased their incentive to deny problems.

It’s part of a longstanding pattern that can make both levels of government slow to acknowledge problems, then blame each other once a problem is revealed.

State media has maintained a steady drumbeat of positive news as the outbreak has spread, praising the sacrifices of responders and everyday people.

“This is a continuous theme in central-local relations in China. You do not want to be the one to bring bad news,” said Vivienne Shue, a prominent China scholar at Oxford University.

U.S. ORDERS THE EVACUATION OF AMERICAN CONSULATE EMPLOYEES.

The State Department has ordered all American employees at the United States Consulate in Wuhan to leave the city, as a lockdown imposed on central China expanded, the United States Embassy said on Saturday.

It said the evacuation of its American staff members and their families was necessary because of the spreading outbreak of the coronavirus, the disruptions caused by the restrictions on transportation in Wuhan and the overwhelming of hospitals.

The evacuation order, made on Thursday, according to a statement from the United States Embassy, was a sign that the measures imposed by the Chinese authorities to try to contain the outbreak of the mysterious coronavirus may be escalating alarm and confusion.

Lines have formed at hospitals and residents have complained that the traffic restrictions have made it nearly impossible to seek timely medical help.

The United States government is arranging a charter flight to evacuate American diplomats and citizens on Sunday, according to a person familiar with the plan. The plane would likely take evacuees to the West Coast of the United States, this person said.

Medical staff would be aboard the plane to screen passengers, and evacuees who were not American diplomatic officers would be responsible for the cost of the flight, according to the person briefed on the plan.

The French Consulate in Wuhan also told its citizens on Friday that it was considering setting up bus rides for those who wished to leave the city, in cooperation with the Chinese authorities, according to France’s Foreign Ministry.

Hong Kong declares a state of emergency and shuts schools.

On Saturday, Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, declared a health emergency in the semiautonomous Chinese city and said schools would be closed until mid-February.

The city is treating five coronavirus patients connected to Wuhan, and more than 100 others are suspected of having the viral pneumonia.

Hong Kong is also suspending flights and train services to Wuhan and will cancel all Lunar New Year celebrations. The Hong Kong Marathon, originally scheduled for early February, has also been called off.

Masks and hand sanitizers have sold out in most pharmacies in the city as residents have stocked up on supplies in a panic since last week.

Yuen Kwok-yung, a leading expert in infectious diseases who discovered the agent causing the coronavirus, had called for schools and universities to remain closed beyond the Lunar New Year holiday in an effort to contain the infection’s reach.

Recent cases have shown that people who do not show symptoms could transmit the disease, according to a study published in The Lancet on Friday of which he was a co-author.

“If there are local cases in Hong Kong that is not directly connected to Wuhan, this is a big issue,” Dr. Yuen said in a phone interview. “It would mean that this epidemic has reached another level of severity.”

[lsadvertising-blog]

Advertisers: Guide to The Digital World

Influencers.

The digital world has broadened the horizon of marketing techniques with the use of algorithms, social media influencers offer one of the best marketing skills. Influencers breakdown the regimented barrier between media producers and consumers; introducing an informal relationship whereby which they,‘attract and maintain..followings on social media platforms’ (Crystal, 2018. p.80) through ‘personalised content’ (Crystal, 2018. p. 72). With this ‘established’ (Crystal, 2018. p.71) credibility in a specific industry, influencers are able to form an emotional attachment with their followers based on trust.

This once transient fame can now transpire into a career path. ‘Online and mainstream celebrity cultures are now weaving together’(Crystal, 2018. p.73). Influencers are internet celebrities. As discussed in Crystal Abidin’s book ‘Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online’, influencers have capitalised on society’s dependancy to admire those of higher status than ourselves. In doing so, influencers project an opulent lifestyle to be desired, from the clothes they wear to the car fragrance they use.

According to the Wall Street Journal.

‘Advertisers can’t ignore social media’ (Kapner and Terlep, 2019). The digital world has created a space whereby consumers have ultimate control in terms of what content they want to see and how they want to see it. Dominating this current platform are influencers. Using this to their advantage ‘companies .. funnel’ (Kapner and Terlep, 2019) large funds directly to influencers who represent their industry field; in exchange influencers ‘pitch’ (Kapner and Terlep, 2019) products to their followers. Resulting in purchases of products.

The trickery of influencers.

As marketing systems go, this seems pretty smooth; but like any other prototype there are expected issues. As discussed by By Suzanne Kapner and Sharon Terlep, influencers are under constant fire in regards to how genuine they truly are. What would you expect when people are bombarded with selected content that only projects a well orchestrated lifestyle. Influencers are ‘just doing it for the money’. (Kapner and Terlep, 2019)

That damn sandwich.

Does this image jog your memory. (DeHaas, 2017)  

Influencers from the likes of Kendall Jenner to Emily Ratajkowski were among some of the influencers who were paid upwards of ‘$250,000 (£206,561)- $299,000 (£247,111)’ (Petter, 2019) to promote ‘the notorious Bahamas event’ (Petter, 2019)  Fyre Festival in 2017 on social media. As well as deceiving audience with promotional content that falsely advertised a fraudulent event. Influencers also failed to disclose to their followers that the promotional content was in fact paid. Later these influencers were sued.

So what’s the message.

Advertiser! Get on social media platforms, use influencers to your advantage to engage your intended audience.

But:

Only promote truthful content that reflects your actual product

Do assure that your influencers disclose that the promotional content is in fact an advert, to prevent misleading audiences

Don’t do a ‘Fyre Festival ‘

Bibliography

Abidin, Crystal (2018) Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online’,Jönköping University, Sweden: Emerald Publishing Limited

Kapner, S  and Terlep, S (2019) ‘Online Influencers Tell You What to Buy, Advertisers Wonder Who’s Listening’, The Wall Street Journal . 20th October, page 3.

DeHaas, T. (2017) Twitter . [Online] Available at: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/nza8yq/that-photo-of-the-fyre-festival-sandwich-is-fake

Petter, Olivia (2019) ‘KENDALL JENNER AND EMILY RATAJKOWSKI ‘SUED’ FOR PROMOTING FYRE FESTIVAL’ Independent , 2nd September, p.2

Algorithms.

Algorithms usurp an ‘ubiquitous part of contemporary life’ (David, 2018. p148). Through ‘routinely tracking…browser behaviour’ (Bucher, 2016. p.1), a users feed is presented to them in a way that will achieve ultimate pleasure from their experience of strolling through Facebook. Using ‘cybernetic categorisation’ (Bucher, 2016. p.12) Facebook attempts to drive ‘meaningful interactions’.

Why should advertisers care.

From developing an understanding of algorithms advertisers stand to gain more effective content. By achieving a more intimate documentation of their cliental ‘by virtue of their habits, experiences and personalities’ (Bucher, 2016. p.3) through online experience.

As commented on by Taina Bucher our daily digital life is full algorithmic ‘selected’ (Bucher, 2016. p.2) content. Through an orchestrated social experiment, it is understood that much of this content is ‘encountered through invisibilities’ (David, 2018. p144). Explained in Bucher’s ‘The Algorithmic Imagery: Exploring the Ordinary Affects of Facebook Algorithm’s’ Bucher’s participants such as Jessa, who was  subject to personalised content after ‘regular talks’ (Bucher, 2016. p.1) about a particular product.

So what’s the problem.

‘The problem is that Facebook doesn’t offer free speech; it offers free amplification’ (Evans, 2019). On a timeline feed riddled with ideologies. ‘Strict chronological’ (Evans, 2019) feeds make for the highest paid advertisers content to be most visible on a user’s feed; as opposed to posts created by friends. Oddly this goes against the mission of Facebook, who aim to allow users to ‘stay connected with friends [sharing and expressing] what matters to them’.(Facebook, 2019). But with the highest bidder getting more attention what chance does the average user have.

Facebook Did A Naughty. (well kinda.)

The most toxic word association you could lay eyes on : “Facebook”, “data”, “harvested”, “weaponised”, “Trump” and… “Brexit”. (Cadwalladr, 2019).  Cambridge Analytica, managed just that; infiltrating ‘leaked’(Cadwalladr, 2019) data of ‘tens of millions’(Cadwalladr, 2019) Facebook users in order to ‘target them in political campaigns’(Cadwalladr, 2019). Although Cambridge Analytic took most of the brunt for this scandal, Facebook also had a massive part to play. THEY LEAKED OUR DATA. Okay, yes feel free to collect data on a user to tailor their feed in order to make them get the best experience out of your platform. But DON’T exploit us… it’s just not cool Zuckerberg. Unfortunately, as users we cannot prevent what happens to our given data but in scandals such as these it makes us more precautions of who we trust with it.

Algorithms as nice as they are at making user’s experience flawless, they can also help contribute to a ‘world of manipulation and [misuse of] power’(Cadwalladr, 2019).  Accumulated data from user by any media producer is essential in making a product stand out, making the platform feel as if it is custom made. But misuse of this data and exploitation of trust is harmful to the reputation of the business, which can lead to a loss in customer loyalty.

Bibliography

Bucher, Tania (2016) The algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms ,INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION & SOCIETY, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Evans, Jon (2019) ‘Facebook isn’t free speech, it’s algorithmic amplification optimized for outrage’, TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/20/facebook-isnt-free-speech-its-algorithmic-amplification-optimized-for-outrage/

Facebook (2019/2019) Facebook Resources.Available at: https://investor.fb.com/resources/default.aspx (Accessed: December, 2019)

Beer, David (2018) The Social Power of Algorithms, Routledge, Milton Park

Cadwalladr, Carole (2019) The Great Hack: the film that goes behind the scenes of the Facebook data scandal. The Guardian. July 2019.Page 1

The Post Humanist subject.

As discussed by Katherine Halyes in her novel ‘ How We Became Posthuman Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics’. The post humanist subject ‘is an amalgam’ (Halyes,1999 p.18) of human nature with  ‘machine intelligence’ (Halyes,1999 p.23), however in order to be considered post human ‘the subject’ (Halyes,1999 p.19) doesn’t have ‘to be a literal cyborg’(Halyes,1999 p.19). The difference between post humanist subject and  humans is the ability of ‘owing nothing to society’(Halyes,1999 p.21)based on informational data collected from it surrounding, it continues to develop off the back of others without any need to repay those who provided the information.

What point do we as humans reach the natural limit in regards to the development of the humanist subject, it is too important to be left to academics any more. Advertisers should be aware of the developments in this Industry, it’s okay to ignore science-fiction cliches but they are are projecting a not too distant future. A demonstration of the post humanist subject is Charlie Brooker’s ‘Black Mirror’, a compilation series that revolves around a group of people’s personal lives and how technology ‘manipulates their behaviour’ (Mullane, 2016). In particular the episode ‘Nosedive’ is set in a world that functions based on a rating system of one another, henceforth in order to avoid a lower rating ‘everyone is sickeningly nice to each other at all times’(Mullane, 2016). It may seem exaggerated, however it in essence is an Avantgarde reflection of our society. The higher rated you are, the ‘more privileged and better quality of life’ you will have. (Mullane, 2016)

So how does this link to the post-humanist subject?

The subject as referred to before usurps data from its environment. Our current environment capitalises on a hierarchal system were the metric of success is determined by likes and shares, if a post humanist subject was to adopt this nature and over power us society is at risk of ‘technological augmentation’ (Maziarczyk, 2018 p.126).  This would result in humans become slaves to the system; much like that of those in ‘Nosedive’

What has this got to do with advertisers?

Good question , as advertisers it is important to foresee what the future holds in regards to both the advertising industry and society itself. If advertisers were to adopt the same nature as post-humanist subjects such as understanding users mannerism potentially this could be beneficial.

Biblography

Halyes, Katherine (1999) How We Became Posthuman, London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Mullane, A. (2016). Black Mirror review: ‘Nosedive’ has biggest twist yet. [online] Digital Spy. Available at: https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/cult/a811645/black-mirror-season-3-review-the-surprise-climax-to-nosedive-is-the-shows-biggest-twist-yet/ [Accessed 16 Nov. 2019].

Maziarczyk, G. (2018). Transhumanist Dreams and/as Posthuman Nightmares in Black Mirror. Roczniki Humanistyczne, 66(11 Zeszyt specjalny), pp.125-136.

[automatismoateo]

Cults should be illegal and its leaders are Sadistic Narcissistic Psychopaths. via /r/atheism

Cults should be illegal and its leaders are Sadistic Narcissistic Psychopaths.

The best examples of this are:

Scientology,

Mormons

Jehova's Witnesses.

The cults are ALWAYS led by Narcissistic Psychopaths, surrounded by like-minded Psychopaths. They are also ALWAYS sexual predators on a power trip, who often rape children too.

The group is led by one or a few individuals, charismatic, determined, and domineering. (Read, Narcissistic Psychopaths)

The leader(s) are self-appointed and claim to have a special mission in life. Frequently, that mission is messianic or apocalyptic. Leaders answer to no higher authority, such as an oversight board. They are sole interpreters of doctrine and policy -- which may change frequently and whimsically.

The group centres its veneration on the leader(s) directly, rather than on God, a higher political power, science, or whatever.

The group structure is hierarchical and authoritarian. Rarely will you find an open election in a cult?

The group tends to be totalitarian, with elaborate rules and rituals that occupy large parts of every day. To break a rule or ignore a ritual carries the danger of expulsion from the group.

The group usually has two or more sets of ethics: one for the leadership, another for the membership; one for outsiders, another for insiders; a relaxed set for recruiting purposes, a much more demanding set for the committed member.

The group usually presents itself as innovative and exclusive, even elitist.

The group has two main purposes: recruiting new members and fund-raising. It's unlikely to support or even encourage legitimate charity work, except as a front for recruitment.

It is all about power, control, and of course, being able to sadistically abuse mentally and physically while brainwashing and intimidating with whatever bullshit they come up with.

The group is focused on a living leader to whom members seem to display excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment.

The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.

The group is preoccupied with making money.

Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.

Mind-numbing techniques (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, debilitating work routines) are used to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).

The leadership dictates sometimes in great detail how members should think, act, and feel (for example: members must get permission from leaders to date, change jobs, get married; leaders may prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, how to discipline children, and so forth).

The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and its members (for example: the leader is considered the Messiah or an avatar; the group and/or the leader has a special mission to save humanity).

The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which causes conflict with the wider society.

The group's leader is not accountable to any authorities (as are, for example, military commanders and ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream denominations).

The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify means that members would have considered unethical before joining the group (for example: collecting money for bogus charities).

The leadership induces guilt feelings in members in order to control them.

Members' subservience to the group causes them to cut ties with family and friends, and to give up personal goals and activities that were of interest before joining the group.

Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group.

Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.

There is a reason, why great efforts are made to make Scientology illegal in Germany.

The worse still is when children are born into a cult, and are abused and indoctrinated and refused life-saving medical assistance, because "God and Reasons".

I consider Abrahamic religions to be cults too. The only difference between the Abrahamic Religions and other cults is the number of followers and the Abrahamic Religions read "Cults" are globally accepted. However, the basic principles are the same as listed in this post.

Submitted April 24, 2022 at 10:26AM by Man_Behind_The_Pen (From Reddit https://ift.tt/PcJ4iGw)

[nataliehegert]

I met Catherine Czacki in a Zoom yoga class. The instructor was our mutual friend Linnea Vedder, an artist based in New York whom I’ve known since we were both high school exchange students in Germany twenty years ago. Participants in the class were scattered around the U.S., from New York to Wisconsin, to California.

“Oh, you two should know each other,” Linnea said to me and Catherine, “I think you live really close to each other.”

I live in Lubbock, Texas, out in the middle of the high plains, far from pretty much everything. Turns out, Catherine lives in Portales, New Mexico, a mere hundred miles away. That day, Linnea sent us both an email with the subject line “connections.” “What a wild coincidence that you both live so close and are so like-minded and interested in similar things!” she wrote.

The isolating effect of the pandemic, with our bodies sheltering in our respective domestic spaces, has conversely allowed us, in some cases, to reach out and intermix with others in virtual spaces while geographically dispersed. If there is one bright spot from the pandemic, for me, it is that I have been able to seek connections with old friends in far-flung places, and participate in or watch events such as artist’s talks and readings that I would not have been able to attend otherwise, in any capacity. These social spaces, performed virtually, intimate yet removed, are one way I have been able to push against the motivation-sucking crisis-mode-reaction of my everyday life and try to regain a sense of being here, being present, and still listening.

As Catherine and I talked in a virtual “studio visit,” the sun set and our respective rooms darkened, with only the glow from our laptops illuminating our faces. We traced the orbits of our mutual friends, between San Francisco, New York, San Diego, and now the Southwest and Llano Estacado region. We would have met eventually, that much is certain, but our meeting would not have had the same emotional tenor.

Czacki moved to Portales in 2019 to teach art history and ceramics studio classes at Eastern New Mexico University. She lives with a large and lovable, mischievous dog named Big Buddy. She makes objects, sculptures, paintings, talismans, and wall hangings from a variety of different materials—clay, fabric, beads, found objects—and writes poetry and sews clothes and plays music and works in her garden. These multifarious practices find their ways in and around her oeuvre.

While the pandemic and the lockdowns hit many of us hard, coping with limitations and finding workarounds is a practice Czacki has honed over many years. “There have been so many times that I was going and going, and then suddenly everything fell apart and I just had to stop everything,” she says. “But going through it so many times, I know what to do.” Meditation, yoga, and other spiritual practices, and eating clean, healthy food are part of it, but the real trick is adaptability, switching tasks frequently, and finding ways to circumvent problems. Can’t type? Record with the voice. Right hand injured? Make a sculpture or play music with the left hand “and whatever comes out is the art.” “I think that is partly why my artwork is so idiosyncratic,” she says.

Czacki studied painting in undergraduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute, but soon switched to new genres, intending to focus on video and installation. At the time, she says, she wanted to make “big objects,” but it never really felt right. For many years she felt the pressure to “follow that bureaucratic hierarchical order” and “get really good at one thing,” as either a painter or a sculptor, or to go big-time contemporary artist-style and form a studio with hired assistants. None of this felt right. In grad school, at Columbia University in New York, a faculty member stated “We didn’t know if you were an outsider artist or a genius,” she reveals. “For a while I let it poison me, and then I gained my self-confidence back.” After New York, Czacki pursued a PhD in art history, theory, and criticism at the University of California, San Diego where she produced a dissertation that is part theory and art history, part experimental writing and poetry. Through all these experiences, as some of her peers abandoned object making in the name of Marxist critique, Czacki continued to be drawn to “the making impulse.” “I had read all the art history and theory, but what was missing was the making,” she says.

Returning to object making, and exploring craft, she felt she was accused of participating in “some kind of fetishism” with regards to material. “I did a lot of research on the idea of the fetish as a colonial concept,” she says. “This idea of us being separate from the material world has a lot to do with Cartesian dualism; it’s a very masculine and Western-centric concept of the world.” Western art history privileges history painting over craft, and hand-made ritual objects that existed outside of European aesthetics were denigrated as “fetishes” and eyed with suspicion. Contemporary art theory continues to support this negative view of the “fetish” with the primary means of discussing the value ascribed to objects as “commodities.” Czacki resists this ascribing of hierarchies of value as supporting entrenched institutional, bureaucratic powers. “How those things do and don’t get seen as serious art has a lot to do with people’s relationship to institutional power,” she claims.

“There’s something radically healing about making my own art, and taking the time, turning off my phone for a whole day and focusing on cooking a bunch of meals, making one or two ceramic objects and sewing a patch on a shirt,” she says. For Czacki, the pleasure of indulging in the material, the “beauty and magic” of making, has a subversive side. “I could have continued to launch a critique against Western art history and I still do feel that,” she says, “but in the work is that [critique] while also giving me the pleasure and the healing that I need.”

In her research, Czacki discovered a kind of ancestral link in her attraction to the handmade and her own family history, though she is wary of emphasis on biography. Czacki lived in Poland in her twenties and learned there were deeply complex and conflicting narratives to her family history. “A lot of what I’m doing feels recuperative,” she says. Her relations on the maternal side were farmers and quilters and exhibited a strong relationship to the land—something Czacki has returned to in some ways as well, in the form of growing her own food and creating artworks from leftover fabric and stolen beads (her mother has an impressive bead collection).

Czacki’s fabric works are created intuitively, sometimes suggesting clothing or referencing the body, sometimes taking the form of wall-hangings or tapestries. Her clay works range from the functional to the talismanic, including a whole series of what she calls her “demons.” “I’ll make them when I’m feeling frustrated,” she says, showing me a green-glazed clay object that fits in the palm of her hand. “When I was doing union organizing work I had my ‘union demon’; I had my ‘PhD demon,’ or my ‘person-I-was-dating-last-week demon,’ or ‘my-dog-ate-a-whole-bag-of-rice demon.’” The most planned works, she says, are the paintings, which start from a vision, a color, or a drawing. “I don’t have a hierarchy between the planned or the intuitive,” she notes. “I let myself flow. The art is the easy thing at this point.”

This flow continues through Czacki’s practice in poetry and music. “My poems are telling people verbal information about the art that’s not didactic or narrative or essayistic,” she notes. “It’s pretty simplified and it’s on purpose. I want it to be about a sort of resonance with the material world that I’m trying to have.” The poetry contains an anticolonial endeavor as well: in her dissertation, she references Audre Lorde in how poetry strives for an “irreducible form of knowledge,” and Aimé Césaire, that “Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.” Czacki recently published a 310-page book of poetry and images, entitled Creosote, with Line Script Diary Press, in collaboration with editor Adrienne Garbini.

Czacki is currently collaborating on an album of sounds with Andrew Weathers and Gretchen Korsmo of Full Spectrum Records, based in Littlefield, Texas—between Lubbock and Portales—who are more mutual friends between us (since 2019, Andrew and Gretchen have curated an experimental concert series at the gallery I co-founded in Lubbock). She met them by playing in the Llano Estacado Monad Band (LEMB), which bills itself as a “decentralized, asynchronous, collective, free” improvisational group, and discovered they all had friends in common from San Diego. “This is not uncommon in my life,” she says. “With a lot of my collaborators we will circle around each other in life, and then find a resonance. Collaboration is like everything else in my practice, I end up in a space and a time and a moment where you’re just around certain people and it makes sense.” The limitations of digital collaboration offer another opportunity to discover workarounds and circumventions. Since the pandemic began, LEMB has produced several improvisational pieces performed and recorded via Skype, as well as a couple of socially distant concerts. “I have learned to forgive the digital,” she says. “We’re all having this existential moment where we are learning the limits of the digital while at the same time we have to allow ourselves to let it be what we need.”

The real isolation Czacki felt after her move to Portales became a reality for most of us as we entered this age of social distancing. Czacki evocatively describes her dispersed social world as a “gummy tendrilled support network” or a “forcefield” of people scattered around the world that she can draw on for support. “These ways that we have these spread-out networks—this softness, these reserves—that we have to touch base with,” she gestures with her fingers inching forward. “At this moment we are feeling disjuncted in a lot of ways, so we are reconnecting with people that we’ve gathered along the way.” She adds, “If at any point in life we can take a positive view of something, it’s important, because life is shit and life is hard.”

As we talked, Czacki’s words struck chords of wisdom. Slowing down, pursuing contentment in everyday tasks, focusing on art every day, remaining optimistic—all are ways she has found to “deal with all the pain and trauma in life.” Everyday things become spiritual groundings—“write a poem, make a sculpture, do the wash.” Repeat, rotate, switch tasks. Work with the material, and find pleasure in it.

Feature Posted on 2/8/2021, Printed in Southwest Contemporary, Vol 1, Spring 2021

[johntropea]

What really mattered was less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together

SOURCE re:Work - Understand team effectiveness

Code-named Project Aristotle - a tribute to Aristotle’s quote, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" (as the Google researchers believed employees can do more working together than alone) - the goal was to answer the question: “What makes a team effective at Google?”

[...]

Work groups are characterized by the least amount of interdependence. They are based on organizational or managerial hierarchy. Work groups may meet periodically to hear and share information

Teams are highly interdependent - they plan work, solve problems, make decisions, and review progress in service of a specific project. Team members need one another to get work done.

Organizational charts only tell part of the story, so the Google research team focused on groups with truly interdependent working relationships, as determined by the teams themselves. The teams studied in Project Aristotle ranged from three to fifty individuals (with a median of nine members).

[...]

Once they understood what constituted a team at Google, the researchers had to determine how to quantitatively measure effectiveness. 

[...]

...the team decided to use a combination of qualitative assessments and quantitative measures. For qualitative assessments, the researchers captured input from three different perspectives - executives, team leads, and team members. While they all were asked to rate teams on similar scales, when asked to explain their ratings, their answers showed that each was focused on different aspects when assessing team effectiveness.

Executives were most concerned with results (e.g., sales numbers or product launches), but team members said that team culture was the most important measure of team effectiveness. Fittingly, the team lead’s concept of effectiveness spanned both the big picture and the individuals’ concerns saying that ownership, vision, and goals were the most important measures.

So the researchers measured team effectiveness in four different ways:

Executive evaluation of the team

Team leader evaluation of the team

Team member evaluation of the team

Sales performance against quarterly quota

The qualitative evaluations helped capture a nuanced look at results and culture, but had inherent subjectivity. On the other hand, the quantitative metrics provided concrete team measures, but lacked situational considerations. These four measures in combination, however, allowed researchers to home in on the comprehensive definition of team effectiveness.

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Using input from executives across the globe, the research team identified 180 teams to study (115 project teams in engineering and 65 pods in sales) which included a mix of high- and low-performing teams. The study tested how both team composition (e.g., personality traits, sales skills, demographics on the team) and team dynamics (e.g., what it was like to work with teammates) impact team effectiveness...

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The researchers then looked at existing survey data, including over 250 items from the annual employee engagement survey and gDNA, Google’s longitudinal study on work and life, to see what variables might be related to effectiveness.

Here are some sample items used in the study that participants were asked to agree or disagree with:

Group dynamics: I feel safe expressing divergent opinions to the team.

Skill sets: I am good at navigating roadblocks and barriers.

Personality traits: I see myself as someone who is a reliable worker (informed by the Big Five personality assessment).

Emotional intelligence: I am not interested in other people’s problems (informed by the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire).

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With all of this data, the team ran statistical models to understand which of the many inputs collected actually impacted team effectiveness. Using over 35 different statistical models on hundreds of variables, they sought to identify factors that:

impacted multiple outcome metrics, both qualitative and quantitative

surfaced for different kinds of teams across the organization

showed consistent, robust statistical significance

The researchers found that what really mattered was less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together. In order of importance:

Psychological safety: Psychological safety refers to an individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.

Dependability: On dependable teams, members reliably complete quality work on time (vs the opposite - shirking responsibilities).

Structure and clarity: An individual’s understanding of job expectations, the process for fulfilling these expectations, and the consequences of one’s performance are important for team effectiveness. Goals can be set at the individual or group level, and must be specific, challenging, and attainable. Google often uses Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to help set and communicate short and long term goals.

Meaning: Finding a sense of purpose in either the work itself or the output is important for team effectiveness. The meaning of work is personal and can vary: financial security, supporting family, helping the team succeed, or self-expression for each individual, for example.

Impact: The results of one’s work, the subjective judgement that your work is making a difference, is important for teams. Seeing that one’s work is contributing to the organization’s goals can help reveal impact.

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The Google researchers found that individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re rated as effective twice as often by executives.

SOURCE What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

...many of today’s most valuable firms have come to realize that analyzing and improving individual workers ­— a practice known as ‘‘employee performance optimization’’ — isn’t enough. As commerce becomes increasingly global and complex, the bulk of modern work is more and more team-based. One study, published in The Harvard Business Review last month, found that ‘‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’ over the last two decades and that, at many companies, more than three-quarters of an employee’s day is spent communicating with colleagues.

In Silicon Valley, software engineers are encouraged to work together, in part because studies show that groups tend to innovate faster, see mistakes more quickly and find better solutions to problems. Studies also show that people working in teams tend to achieve better results and report higher job satisfaction. In a 2015 study, executives said that profitability increases when workers are persuaded to collaborate more. Within companies and conglomerates, as well as in government agencies and schools, teams are now the fundamental unit of organization. If a company wants to outstrip its competitors, it needs to influence not only how people work but also how they work together.

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Project Aristotle’s researchers began by reviewing a half-century of academic studies looking at how teams worked. Were the best teams made up of people with similar interests? Or did it matter more whether everyone was motivated by the same kinds of rewards? Based on those studies, the researchers scrutinized the composition of groups inside Google: How often did teammates socialize outside the office? Did they have the same hobbies? Were their educational backgrounds similar? Was it better for all teammates to be outgoing or for all of them to be shy? They drew diagrams showing which teams had overlapping memberships and which groups had exceeded their departments’ goals. They studied how long teams stuck together and if gender balance seemed to have an impact on a team’s success.

No matter how researchers arranged the data, though, it was almost impossible to find patterns — or any evidence that the composition of a team made any difference. ‘‘We looked at 180 teams from all over the company,’’ Dubey said. ‘‘We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’’

Some groups that were ranked among Google’s most effective teams, for instance, were composed of friends who socialized outside work. Others were made up of people who were basically strangers away from the conference room. Some groups sought strong managers. Others preferred a less hierarchical structure. Most confounding of all, two teams might have nearly identical makeups, with overlapping memberships, but radically different levels of effectiveness. ‘‘At Google, we’re good at finding patterns,’’ Dubey said. ‘‘There weren’t strong patterns here.’’As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’ Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather

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Project Aristotle’s researchers began searching through the data they had collected, looking for norms. They looked for instances when team members described a particular behavior as an ‘‘unwritten rule’’ or when they explained certain things as part of the ‘‘team’s culture.’’ Some groups said that teammates interrupted one another constantly and that team leaders reinforced that behavior by interrupting others themselves. On other teams, leaders enforced conversational order, and when someone cut off a teammate, group members would politely ask everyone to wait his or her turn. Some teams celebrated birthdays and began each meeting with informal chitchat about weekend plans. Other groups got right to business and discouraged gossip. There were teams that contained outsize personalities who hewed to their group’s sedate norms, and others in which introverts came out of their shells as soon as meetings began.After looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year, Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams. But Rozovsky, now a lead researcher, needed to figure out which norms mattered most. 

...Which norms, Rozovsky and her colleagues wondered, were the ones that successful teams shared?

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What interested the researchers most, however, was that teams that did well on one assignment usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing seemed to fail at everything. The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘‘good’’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.

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In other words, if you are given a choice between the serious-minded Team A or the free-flowing Team B, you should probably opt for Team B. Team A may be filled with smart people, all optimized for peak individual efficiency. But the group’s norms discourage equal speaking; there are few exchanges of the kind of personal information that lets teammates pick up on what people are feeling or leaving unsaid. There’s a good chance the members of Team A will continue to act like individuals once they come together, and there’s little to suggest that, as a group, they will become more collectively intelligent.

In contrast, on Team B, people may speak over one another, go on tangents and socialize instead of remaining focused on the agenda. The team may seem inefficient to a casual observer. But all the team members speak as much as they need to. They are sensitive to one another’s moods and share personal stories and emotions. While Team B might not contain as many individual stars, the sum will be greater than its parts.

Within psychology, researchers sometimes colloquially refer to traits like ‘‘conversational turn-taking’’ and ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ as aspects of what’s known as psychological safety 

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The paradox, of course, is that Google’s intense data collection and number crunching have led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known. In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.