#as opposed to presenting it to other people who share it and have wider context

[scrawnytreedemon]

Seriously tempted to make a highkey detached headcanon/pseudo-analysis post regarding Zant and gender. Probably a bad idea.

[anarchotolkienist]

How can I criticise Israel without being inadvertently antisemitic? Is it as sinple as bringing it into a wider discussion of settler colonial states? Certainly many of my compatriots can fall into antisemitism if they talk on the topic long enough - how can I steer them away from that

This will be a long-ish post. The most important think, I thihnk, is to remember to put Israel in its context. It is not unique as a settler coloniual state, and it is not unique in its status as a US subsidiary, and it is not unique in the mistreatment of its minority population, as you say. I honestly think that this is the MAIN way of doing it. I also think that putting it in its context as a form of what is fashionably on the Left called "liberatory nationalism/nationalism of an oppressed nation" to try and understand why Zionism had such a wide appeal, including on the Left (The Labour Zionists, openly Marxist, were the majority party in the early yers of Israel for example, and the Kibbutzes had large influence from anti-naitonalist (occationally territorialist) anarchists (see A Living Revolution for this), to take a few examples) would be helpful. Zionism is not alone as liberatory nationalist projects that turned around and massively suppressed indigenous peoples as soona s their aim was achieved, and that too needs to be remembered.  Aditionally, we need to understand that majority support for Zionism from within the Jewish community only happened after every other way of dealing with anti-Semitism had obviously failed in the most horribly tragic manner possible - the Holocaust. The Socialist Internaitonalism of the Bund failed to the obviousincapacity of the socialist movement, in power over much of Europe, to withstand the Fascist wave and to take any extraordinary measures to try and save the Jewish people of eastern europe. The communist promise of assimilation into the global proletariat failed with the anti-semitic purges and prosecutions of Stalin showing that the worker's state in no way was immune to it's imperial predecessor. The liberal assimilationism of the Jewish Enlightenment, which promised that secularisation and assimilation into Protestant christian Europe would solve the problem of anti-Semitism OBVIOUSLY didn't work - German jewry were the most assimilated in the world, and even descendents of converts died in agony because of their percieved Jewishness. The strict anarchist internationalism of the main Jewish anarchist press completely ignored the unique positionality of the Jewish working class and had nothing to say to the problem other than the vague promise of proletarian internaitonalism when all 'religious bigotries' are forgotten. What was left to try? How is the Left to present a serious case that we can elimae anti-semitism from the WORLD when we have so horrendously failed to do it in our own ranks? I still think that the main hope lies in internationalism and lies in socialism, that the Bundists had it closer to being correct than anyone else and that things COULD have shaken out their way, as I think most Leftists believe. But we can't deny that it DIDN'T shake out their way.  Sorry, I got carried away. Yes, it's a mistake. yes, it didn't work either, at what it proclaimed - anti-semitism is growing and Israel is allied to a lot of these forces - and it did so at a horrendous human cost to the Palestinians. But we need to remember where it comes from, too. Those are my two biggest recommendations, really - to remember the context, to not make a monster out of Zionism out of proportion with other nationalisms, to oppose other settler-colonial states as strenously (Turkey would be a good start, given that there is an international campaign to boycott and cut all support to them, as I mentioned - find your local Kurdish community group for information on that). As far as speaking to comrades about it, I can only hope that you're more diplomatic than me and manage to do it better than me. I think running educations on anti-Semitism (espescially left-wing anti-semitism) to recognise the tropes for what they are (for example, so that when Electronic Intifada says that Rabbis are poisoning Palestinian water wells to drive them out, you recognise that as an anti-semitic canard and do some research, finding out that the suppesed Rabbi Goldberg doesn't exist and they made it up because they're anti-semites, instead of sharing it and then getting mad and calling people who point out that this is anti-semitic Zionist shills - or make a petition saying that the Labour Anti-Semitism "Witch-hunt" is "manufactured by powerful interests that control the media", but I digress). Anti-Semitism is endemic on the Left, and people REALLY dislike confronting it, because it hurts their self-image. I mostly get shut down with the "criticising Israel is not anti-semitic). Best of luck, comrade.

[barri-zonema]

Kurds created local councils - promoted public ownership - as well as gender equality - defeat the Islamic State -  Women’s Liberation Ideology describes jineology

The Kurds have been suppressed in all sorts of ways, often very violently,” said Henri Barkey, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “They have really suffered at the hands of the four states.”

Omer Taspinar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that for decades Turkey has had a policy of “assimilating the Kurds into Turkish ethnic identity, denial of Kurdish ethnic identity and denial of Kurdish linguistic rights.”

Kurdish forces belonging to the Kurdish People’s Protection Unit, or YPG, joined forces with Arab groups and created the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. The United States, Britain, France and other countries provided the SDF with weapons.

Since then, Kurdish fighters have led the alliance, which was crucial in toppling the Islamic State.

Kurds created local councils to replace government establishments, and promoted public ownership of land, water, and other resources, as well as gender equality. Many Kurdish fighters are women.

Then on Sunday, a Turkish air strike hit a convoy in the Syrian border town of Ras al Ain, killing at least 14 people and wounding 10 more, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The SDF said the convoy included civilians and journalists.

A brief history of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led alliance that helped the U.S. defeat the Islamic State

From prison, Öcalan has published several books. Jineology, also known as the science of women, is a form of feminism advocated by Öcalan and subsequently a fundamental tenet of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK).

Öcalan's philosophy of democratic confederalism is a strong influence on the political structures of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, an autonomous polity formed in Syria in 2012.

The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)'s Women’s Liberation Ideology describes jineology as "a fundamental scientific term in order to fill the gaps that the current social sciences are incapable of doing.

Jineology is built on the principle that without the freedom of women within society and without a real consciousness surrounding women no society can call itself free."

 Öcalan has said "a country can't be free unless the women are free", the level of woman's freedom determines the level of freedom in society at large.

To put into context the environment this comes from, violent oppression of women exists in the region in general, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) being the most radical emanation of Namus-based subjugation of women.

On a wider scale, proponents of jineology consider capitalism to be anti-women and thus jineology to be inherently anti-capitalist.

The bourgeoisie knows no bounds in imperialist and reactionary aggression. The people of Afrin are faced with the most reckless, despicable and immoral aggression.

This is the aggression of wanting to be destroyed purely because of its national identity, as well as waging war against the will of a people. The working class and laborers of the world must be in active solidarity with the people of AFRIN by opposing this aggression.

 AFRIN (as in ROJAVA) is the only people living under their own will in the most democratic form of government in peace and tranquillity.

Since all imperialists and reactionary states stood against the free self-determination of the people, they remained silent in the face of the attacks of the Turkish ruling classes, and many of them openly supported them.

 AFRIN, who wants to be sacrificed to the interests of the imperialist bandits who shed blood in the region, must be protected and embraced by the working class and the oppressed peoples of the world, and must stand and fight against this vile attack.

 First of all, Turkish workers and laborers should oppose this murderous and immoral attack of the Turkish state and stand in the way of these attacks and be in active solidarity with the people of AFRIN.

 The AKP government, the representative of the new imperialist Turkish bourgeoisie, fed by war and racism, will not be able to cover up its crimes by attacking Afrin, nor will it be able to defeat the people of Afrin.

 The Turkish state is a war criminal state. The working class and laborers must hold accountable for this. This account consists of taking an active part in the side of the people of Afrin. Wherever we are, we must stand against the aggression, occupation and war against Afrin, and ensure that the Turkish capital state is repulsed.

All Kurds of the World Unite!

All Kurds of the world unite against the vile and murderous attacks of the Turkish fascist state. Join without question.

Unite and protect your own lands against a murderous state that wants to destroy the most peaceful Kurdish region in the world, the land of olives, the symbol of peace, just because the Kurds live.

 Until today, the only place in Syria that could not be destroyed was ARFIN. This was accomplished by the peaceful and democratic Kurdish people. Because their war is not; whatever their language, religion, gender and nationality, they needed to live together in peace and tranquillity.

 They sent ISIS, especially the Turkish state and others, to AFRIN many times. However, it was repelled by the masterful military tactics of the YPG/YPJ led by the PYD and the support of the people, and the people of that region were able to live in peace.

And just as there has been no attack from AFRIN - although most of it is surrounded by the borders of the Turkish state - there has been no attack or threat against the Turkish state.

 The Turkish state, ISIS, etc. Despite repeated harassment and military attacks by murderous gangs such as people of AFRIN, the people of AFRIN have always extended a hand of peace to the Turkish state. However, a racist fascist state, which perceives even the peaceful life of the Kurds as a "threat", continued to feel uncomfortable with this.

 The Turkish capital state sees the free life of the Kurds and their free self-determination as the biggest obstacle to their desire to become the destructive-aggressive sovereign state of the Middle East. For this reason, it has included the democratic Kurdish national movement in the category of "priority threat" as the main target at home and abroad.

 Not only the Turkish state, but also the US and Russian imperialists, as well as the European imperialists who gave all kinds of support to the Turkish state, are equally responsible and guilty for the Turkish state's attack on AFRIN.

 The German bourgeoisie's prohibition of carrying the flags and emblems of the YPG, which is fighting against ISIS, in marches and rallies, and urgently undertaking the repair of tanks belonging to the Turkish army, showed that it is a part of this war.

 However, the German working class and toilers will not delay in opposing these dirty deals of the German bourgeoisie.

 The Turkish state should immediately put an end to the occupation and all kinds of attacks against AFRIN, and all imperialists should withdraw their bloody hands from the region. 20.01.2018

Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Working Men of All Countries, Unite!

Democratic confederacies Kurdish: confederalîzm  democratic‎;  also known as Kurdish communalism or Apoism  is a political concept theorized by Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan about a system of democratic self-organization[4] with the features of a confederation based on the principles of autonomy, direct democracy, environmentalism, feminism, multiculturalism, self-defence, self-governance and elements of a sharing economy.

Influenced by social ecology, libertarian municipalise, Middle Eastern history, nationalism and general state theory, Öcalan presents the concept as a political solution to Kurdish nationalist aspirations, as well as other fundamental problems in countries in the region deeply rooted in class society, and as a route to freedom and democratization for people around the world.

Although the liberation struggle of the PKK was originally guided by the prospect of creating a Kurdish nation state on a Marxist–Leninist basis,

Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) was initially inspired by national liberation movements across the planet, many of whom were influenced by Marxist-Leninist ideals and left-wing nationalism

As a liberatory framework emerging from the Kurdish movement, jineology places women at the center of the struggle against patriarchy, capitalism and the state.

Allowing the recent developments in northern Syria, Kurdish women have often been portrayed in the Western media as fierce fighters combating the savage barbarians of the so-called Islamic State.

Considering Kurdish female guerrilla fighters as heroines defending Western values of democracy and gender equality, however, frames Kurdish women in an Orientalist narrative that grants political agency and recognition only as long as their actions fit liberal Western values.

 Yet the struggle that Kurdish women are waging is deeply rooted in radical political thought and practice, and as such does not lend itself as easily to a Western liberal worldview as it might appear at first sight.

The Kurdish movement emerged in the late 1970s out of a fragmented Turkish left and radicalized in the torture chambers of Diyarbakir prisons following the 1980 military coup in Turkey. Since its inception it has evolved from a dogmatic Marxist-Leninist caterpillar to a radical democratic butterfly.

 Abandoning the objective of an independent socialist Kurdistan, the movement now draws upon the theory and praxis of feminism, social ecology and libertarian municipalise to transcend the state.

Instead of centralizing power, it seeks to re-allocate it to the grassroots through horizontal forms of representation. Inspired in part by the American communalist theorist  Murray Bookchin, the Kurdish movement has clearly articulated its aspirations for a post-capitalist and post-state society and has begun to implement these ideas in the Kurdish autonomous regions of Rojava, in northern Syria.

 The struggle for gender equality stands at the heart of the Kurdish movement’s vision for a just society.

Locating the historical root of social, economic and cultural oppression and injustice in the emergence of gender hierarchies in the Neolithic era, Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader and chief theorist of the Kurdish movement, proposes a direct relation between gender hierarchies and state formation.

Referring to women as “the first colony,” Öcalan argues that the nation-state, monotheistic religions and capitalism all constitute different institutionalized forms of the dominant male. Fighting patriarchal social structures ― or, in Öcalan’s words, “killing the dominant male” ― consequently becomes an imperative in the struggle for a society that will transcend the oppressive structures of the capitalist nation-state.

 Within this struggle, the Kurdish paradigm stresses the importance of an enduring transformation of both social and personal mentalities; a term that resonates with the Foucauldian concept of discourse as an encompassing formation of thought, while stressing its rootedness in practice and hence underlining the need for an antagonistic struggle in order to achieve lasting change.

In a framework that rethinks the boundaries of citizenship, the classical Marxist focus on class struggle is in this way broadened to take into account other forms of oppression.

The liberation of women takes on a pivotal role both for theoretical reflection on social reality and for practical efforts undertaken towards radically changing that reality.

The movement asserts that for the social struggle to be successful, it is vital to fully comprehend the links between capitalist, statist and gender oppression.

Taking into account insights from both anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance movements of the twentieth century, the understanding of struggle itself is thus fundamentally reformulated.

 Jineology, a framework of radical feminist analysis that the Kurdish movement has been developing since 2008, tries to transfer the advancements of the Kurdish women’s movement into society.

A neologism derived from the Kurdish word for woman, jin, jineology criticizes how the positivistic sciences have monopolized all forms of power in the hands of men.

As a theoretical paradigm, it is based on the concrete experiences of Kurdish women facing both patriarchal and colonial oppression. Using this new perspective, jineology seeks to develop an alternative methodology for the existing social sciences that stands in contrast to androcentric knowledge systems.

 At the same time, it also articulates a powerful critique of Western feminism. According to Dilar Dirik, an academic and advocate of jineology, the feminist deconstruction of gender roles has contributed immensely to our understanding of sexism.

Nevertheless, jineology remains critical towards the failure of Western feminism to build an alternative. It criticizes mainstream feminism’s failure to achieve wider social change by limiting the framework of the persisting order.

Intersectional feminism addresses these issues, underlining the observation that forms of oppression are interlinked and that feminism needs to take a holistic approach to tackle them. Yet according to the Kurdish movement, the problem is that these debates never leave the circles of academia. Jineology proposes itself as a method to explore these questions in a collectivist manner. As such, jineology can be seen as the living practice that evolved from the discussions of women all over Kurdistan.

 Necîbe Qeredaxî has been a journalist and advocate for Kurdish rights for eighteen years. She is a founding member of a research center for jineology in Brussels, which will soon open its doors to the public. The aim of the organization is the promotion of research in the human and social sciences that concerns women’s emancipation.

The center will be organizing seminars and workshops, will carry out research on gender violence and women’s oppression, and seeks to reach out to feminist movements in Belgium and beyond.

 What is jineology and what does it struggle for?

Necîbe Qeredaxî: The term jineology is composed of two words: jin, the Kurdish word for “woman,” and logos, Greek for “word” or “reason.” So it is the science or the study of women.

What is jineology, for those hearing about it for the first time? Jineology is both an outcome and a beginning. It is the outcome of the dialectical progress of the Kurdish women’s movement, as well as a beginning to respond to the contradictions and problems of modern society, economics, health, education, ecology, ethics and aesthetics.

While the social sciences have dealt with these issues, they remain influenced by the reigning hegemony and have distorted the issues at hand, particularly the relations between men and women. Jineology therefore proposes a new analysis of these fields.

Turkish government to establish the idea of centralization was to attract the Kurds to participate in parliament. The government was on occasion, successful in this regard and some Kurds did take seats in the national parliament.

To change Kurdish attitudes towards centralization the CUP allowed some Kurds to establish themselves and take up senior roles within the party. It was not long after the implementation of

Turkey's constitution when the freedom of the smaller ethnic communities in Turkey was restricted and outlawed. Turkish state ideology as a tool for persuading and assimilating the Kurds and other ethnic and linguistic groups.

Existing studies emphasize that the Kurds were subjected to a systematic forced assimilation campaign by the new Kemalist state.

This paper stresses that the formation of Turkey after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire is the root to understanding the ideological foundation of the Turkish state’s denial of the Kurds, their history, language and even their existence.

This has huge implications for Turkey’s claims to secular democracy, its regional stature and aspirations to join the

European Union.House raids in Diyarbakır and Adana: Many detentions

At least 59 people, including Jinnews reporter Beritan Canözer, were detained in a house raid in Diyarbakır August 13, 2021As part of an investigation conducted by the Adana Chief Public Prosecutor's Office, many houses were raided. In the raid on 29 addresses within the scope of the investigation, the doors of the houses were broken with rams, and the belongings in the houses were distributed during the searches.

It was stated that many people were detained in house raids and searches continued in many houses.

It was stated that 59 people, including Jinnews reporter Beritan Canözer, were detained in the raids before 15 August on charges of "making propaganda for a terrorist organization" and "acting on behalf of a terrorist organization", and that the number of detentions will increase.

The detainees were taken to Diyarbakır Provincial Security Directorate after their health checks.I am appealing to those who demand education in their mother tongue. You can open language schools wherever you want to teach your mother tongue.

But do not request education in the mother tongue from us because the official language of Turkey is Turkish. Do not attempt to exploit this issue. I underline that these moves aim to divide our country (Today’s Zaman 2011).

The arguments from both the MHP party and also the ruling party AKP simply contend that education in mother tongue for Kurds cannot be made possible as it would divide the country.

Thus, one can observe a temporal discussion, where the discussion of fear and separatism from the past is still used in the present.

In a similar speech Erdogan states the impossibility of mother tongue education in Turkey by arguing that the request for education in mother tongue derives from the PKK  (Haksoz Haber 2012).

He does not reference the requests of legitimate political parties(such as those mentioned before by the BDP and their one million signature petition) or

Turkey arrests pro-Kurdish MP who was expelled from parliament

Turkish authorities on Sunday arrested a pro-Kurdish opposition MP who had refused to leave parliament for several days after his seat was revoked, his party said.

Omer Faruk Gergerlioglu “was brought out by force while he was in pyjamas and slippers” by “nearly 100 police officers”, the leftist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) said in a statement.

His remark referred to a decade marked by a flaring of the Kurdish conflict in southeastern Turkey, when several pro-Kurdish MPs were arrested.

 The HDP, the third largest party in the Turkish parliament, has been under a constant crackdown since 2016 with the arrest of several of its lawmakers and leaders, including its charismatic co-chair Selahattin Demirtas.

 Demirtas – a two-time rival to incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdogan in presidential elections – has been kept in detention since 2016 despite calls from European Court of Human Rights demanding his release.

 The top public prosecutor in Ankara had on Wednesday demanded that the HDP be dissolved over its alleged links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

 The PKK has been waging an insurgency since 1984 that has killed tens of thousands and is listed as a terrorist organisation by Ankara and its Western allies.

The HDP has seen dozens of its mayors dismissed over alleged terror links. Western powers have universally condemned the bid to shut down the HDP. The country’s highest court is due to rule on the case in the coming weeks.

EU ‘deeply concerned,’ condemns move to ban Turkey pro-Kurdish party

The European Union on Thursday said it was “deeply concerned” about attempts to shut down Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish opposition party, warning the move heightens worries over “backsliding” by Ankara.

The criticism from Brussels comes a day before EU chiefs Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel hold video talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Closing the second largest opposition party would violate the rights of millions of voters in Turkey,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and enlargement commissioner Oliver Varhelyi said in a statement.

 “It adds to the EU’s concerns regarding the backsliding in fundamental rights in Turkey and undermines the credibility of the Turkish authorities’ stated commitment to reforms.”

The statement insisted that Ankara “urgently needs to respect its core democratic obligations, including respect for democracy, human rights and the rule of law.”

Leyla Zana (born 3 May 1961) is a Kurdish politician in Turkey who was imprisoned for ten years for her political activism, which was deemed by the Turkish courts to be against the unity of the country.

She was awarded the 1995 Sakharov Prize by the European Parliament, but was unable to collect it until her release in 2004. She was also awarded the Rafto Prize in 1994 after being recognized by the Rafto Foundation for being incarcerated for her peaceful struggle for the human rights of the Kurdish people in Turkey and the neighbouring countries.[1]

A Turkish court has sentenced a Kurdish former lawmaker, who shot to fame for a months-long hunger strike two years ago, to more than 22 years in jail on terror-related charges.

 Leyla Guven, an opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) deputy who was stripped of her parliamentary immunity in June, was convicted of membership of a “terror group” and disseminating “terror propaganda” for outlawed Kurdish armed groups.

RBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan 24) – A Turkish court in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir on Thursday upheld a previously reversed conviction for the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) lawmaker Abdullah Zeydan, sentencing him to eight years, one month, and 15 days in prison.

Authorities already hold him along with HDP’s Co-leader Selahattin Demirtas in a supermax prison in the northwestern city of Edirne since late 2016.MP Zeydan of Hakkari was being tried for the second time after a regional higher court in the city of Gaziantep overturned the same sentence three months ago.

Prosecutors accused him of “aiding a terrorist organization and disseminating its propaganda,” Kurdistan 24’s Diyarbakir bureau reported.We see high levels of very rough policing in Turkey today, police violence toward people such as student demonstrators, but in general a security establishment that feels it has gained the upper hand and is not curbed by laws or regulations that it cannot circumvent. The climate of impunity prevails.”

 Last month, a top prosecutor applied to the Constitutional Court with an indictment to shut down the HDP, but the indictment was recently sent back to the prosecutor over procedural shortcomings. It is likely to be re-submitted after making required changes.

Turkish opposition MP Gergerlioglu hospitalized, then jailed.Human Rights Watch calls for investigation into MP’s arrest, which put him into hospital before his transfer to prison.

“Inside Turkey’s prisons the conditions for political prisoners are becoming increasingly barbaric.” Kate Osborne MP

Last week in Parliament, I highlighted the increasingly authoritarian policies of President Erdoğan and the Turkish Government during a Westminster Hall Debate on the Arrest of Opposition Politicians in Turkey.

 Extreme repression and the decline of democracy has been a concern in Turkey since the peace talks broke down in 2015 between the Kurds and President Erdoğan, and the failed coup in July 2016 by a faction of the Turkish armed forces. Since these events, we have seen a war being waged against the Kurdish population and an outrageous aggressive foreign policy being pursued in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Azerbaijan.

 As things stand, President Erdoğan and his far-right regime are engaged in a campaign of annihilation against the main opposition party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which is majority Kurdish, dragging Turkey into further political polarisation, social turmoil, and economic instability.

It has led to tens of thousands of journalists, trade unionists, teachers, opposition politicians, human rights activists, women’s activists, and countless others being jailed and/or dismissed from their jobs.

 HDP activists and politicians have suffered continuous harassment, arrests, and imprisonment, including over 700 arrests on 15 February this year. They are arrested under the guise of ‘belonging to a terrorist organisation’, or ‘promotion of a terrorist group’.

It has led to the party’s leaders all receiving lengthy prison sentences and elected MPs and local politicians arrested and replaced with the Government’s appointed trustees. It is now looking increasingly likely that the ongoing political and legal onslaught on the HDP may well result in the party being banned.

 Inside Turkey’s prisons the conditions for political prisoners at the hands of this brutal regime are becoming increasingly barbaric.

Kurdish and HDP prisoners are often purposely placed miles away from home in nationalist areas.

There is little access to healthcare for these political prisoners and they were the only category of prisoner that were refused release to stop the spread of covid-19.

Selahattin Demirtaş: the trial of the man who wanted to be Turkey’s president.  After more than four years of being held in a pre-trial detention that the ECHR ruled ‘unlawful’, Demirtaş is due to have his next trial hearing tomorrow

For more than four years, Selahattin Demirtaş, the writer and former co-chair of Turkey’s People’s Democratic Party (HDP), who in 2014 and 2018 ran in the country’s presidential elections, has been held in pre-trial detention on multiple terror-related charges. In December last year, the European Court of Human Rights found his detention to be unlawful and ordered his release. On 6 May, he will face his next hearing.

Selahattin Demirtaş granted Weimar Human Rights Award

Selahattin Demirtaş, the jailed former Co-Chair of the HDP, has been granted the 2021 Weimar Human Rights Award on the grounds that he was “one of the most important opposition politicians in Turkey’s recent history.”As for the other politicians from Turkey granted the award, HDP Adana MP and lawyer Meral Danış Beştaş received it in 1998.Selahattin Demirtaş was born in Turkey's Kurdish-majority southeastern province of Diyarbakır in 1973.

He graduated from the Faculty of Law of Ankara University. He worked as a self-employed lawyer.

 He was the Executive Board Member and Branch Chair of the Human Rights Association (İHD) Diyarbakır Branch. When Demirtaş was its Chair, the Association's policy was oriented towards addressing the unidentified murders. In the same period, he was also among the founders of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (TİHV-HRFT) and Amnesty International Diyarbakır.

 He held executive positions in the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (TİHV-HRFT) and Amnesty International Turkey.

 Entering politics at the Democratic Society Party (DTP) in 2007, Demirtaş was elected an MP in the 23rd Legislative Session. He joined the DTP group at the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM) and was the Parliamentary group deputy chair. After the DTP was closed in 2009, he and Gültan Kışanak were elected the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) Co-Chairs.

 At the General Elections in 2011, he was elected the Hakkari MP of the Labor, Democracy and Freedom Bloc in the 24th Legislative Session.

 BDP Co-Chair during the Resolution Process for the Kurdish Questions, Demirtaş and Figen Y��ksekdağ were elected the Co-Chairs of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) on June 22, 2014.

 Running for President at the Presidential Election on August 10, 2014, Demirtaş was elected an MP at both June 7 and November 1 elections in 2015.

 After the legislative immunity of several lawmakers facing summaries of proceedings were lifted on May 20, 2016, over 90 files about Demirtaş were sent to the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office.

 Stripped of his MP status and arrested, Selahattin Demirtaş faces two aggravated life sentences and 486 years in prison in total. His convictions in other cases have also become final.

Journalist Hikmet Tunç sentenced to 8 months, 22 days in prison

Put on trial for “insulting” the trustee appointed to the Muradiye District Municipality in her news report, Hikmet Tunç, the Van reporter for JinNews women’s news agency, has been sentenced to 8 months, 22 days in prison.

Imprisoned former HDP Co-Chair Selahattin Demirtaş has made a statement about the deadly racist attack against a Kurdish family in Konya: “The main reason behind this massacre, tension and conflicts is the discriminatory policies of the government.”

Unfortunately, the main reason behind this massacre, tension and conflicts is the discriminatory policies of the government, its targeting language and the dirty calculations of the gangs, inside and outside the state, who are encouraged by this.

  My humble recommendation to our entire people, Turkish and Kurdish, is the following: Don't give credence or bow down to the language of hate and discriminatory policies. Let's act with wisdom and patience regardless of the circumstances. Let's turn to the collective conscience that we will create together, not to rage.

"We are working hard for an environment where the law works and justice prevails. For this reason, let's be calm and don't feel hopeless, desperate or abandoned. It will perhaps be difficult, but we will most definitely bring peace, democracy, equality, freedom and justice."

The assault on human rights and the rule of law presided over by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan continued during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The president’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and an allied far-right party enjoy a parliamentary majority enabling them to consolidate authoritarian rule by passing rushed legislation that contravenes international human rights obligations.

Opposition parties remain sidelined under Turkey’s presidential system and the government has reshaped public and state institutions to remove checks on power and to ensure benefits for its own supporters. The political opposition nevertheless controls the municipalities of Istanbul and Ankara. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2021/country-chapters/turkey

https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/europe-and-central-asia/turkey/report-turkey/

Turkey: Imprisoned journalists, human rights defenders and others, now at risk of Covid-19, must be urgently released

Thousands of Kurdish politicians, activists, journalists and academics have been arrested since 2009 on suspicion of links with the KCK and

There's even a joke saying that every Kurd will be arrested once in his life.” Sadık Topaloğlu, journalist, Istanbul bureau, Mesopotamia Agency.https://www.pri.org/stories/2021-03-09/all-us-have-been-arrested-least-once-kurdish-press-turkey-walk-fine-line

HDP Young Women's Assembly members exposed their policies of spying and threatening their members with a press statement at the İHD Istanbul Branch.

https://www.gazetepatika15.com/hdp-genc-kadin-koordinasyonu-mucadelemizden vazgecmeyecegiz-93094.html

Statement from Grup Munzur: Not us; our songs are being judged

Grup Munzur stated that lawsuits were filed due to the folk songs they sang, marches and speeches on the stage, and that the members of the group were unlawfully arrested and given various punishments.

Not solely Kurdish women but also Arab and Christian women arrive at the centers looking for help; the problems of patriarchy transcend ethnicity and religion. Other projects seek to train women in skills so they can support themselves without relying on male relatives. At the women’s center in Qamislo, the most popular course is “women and rights,” teaching women that they really do have the right and the ability to conduct their own lives based on their own choices.

women in Rojava participate in public and political life. All leadership positions, in every institution or organization, are twofold: one male and one female. And according to the Social Contract, “The proportion of the representation of both genders in all institutions, administrations and bodies is of at least 40 percent.” That is, any meeting must consist of 40 percent women.

This quota is observed in all mixed-gender people’s councils, organizations, and committees. And alongside the mixed-gender councils are corresponding all-women councils that have veto power over decisions that affect women. As a result, women have become a real political force. In the city of Afrin, over 65 percent of individuals involved in the administration are women.

https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/women/the-women-s-revolution-in-rojava/

ABDULLAH OCALAN, “LIBERATING LIFE: WOMEN’S REVOLUTION,

Canonical text of the Kurdish women’s liberation movement.

 INTERVIEW WITH THE WORLD’S FIRST ARMY OF WOMEN: YJA-STAR, SIGNALFIRE, MARCH 23, 2014

Why it is essential for women to have their own army in order to achieve equality with men in a guerrilla organization, and why this army is a model for autonomous women’s organizations in other spheres. The struggle of women is a prerequisite to democracy.

 “DON’T KNOW US BECAUSE OF OUR GUNS, BUT BECAUSE OF OUR IDEAS,” DILAR DIRIK, OPEN DEMOCRACY

Rather than being a rights-based side issue that puts the burden on women, women’s liberation and equality of all genders become a matter of responsibility for all of society, because they become measures of defining society’s ethics and freedom. For a radical and revolutionary freedom struggle, women's liberation must be a central aim, but also an active method in the process.

 JANET BIEHL, “THE WOMEN’S REVOLUTION IN ROJAVA,” AUGUST 27, 2015, TOWARD FREEDOM

From its inception in 2011, the Rojava revolution put women’s rights first, outlawing polygamy and forced marriages, criminalizing “honor killings,” and transforming a traditional agricultural society into one where women are moving towards equality.

 RAHILA GUPTA, “THE ROJAVA PAPERS,” A SERIES OF FIVE ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN OPENDEMOCRACY IN APRIL, 2015: “A REVOLUTION FOR OUR TIMES: ROJAVA, NORTHERN SYRIA,” APRIL 4 2016

The border crossing and contrast between Iraqi Kurdistan and Rojava.

 “ROJAVA’S COMMITTMENT TO JINEOLOJI: THE SCIENCE OF WOMEN,” APRIL 11 2016

The question of a Kurdish state, women’s academies and male-female co-chairs.

 “ROJAVA REVOLUTION: IT’S RAINING WOMEN,” APRIL 26 2016

Kongreya Star, the umbrella women’s organization, drawing women into political life.

 "ROJAVA REVOLUTION: RESHAPING MASCULINITY,” MAY 9 2016

The struggle to overturn traditional ideas of masculinity and women’s place.

 “ROJAVA REVOLUTION: ON THE HOOF,” MAY 23 2016

Economics: Setting up women’s cooperatives, dealing with Rojava’s oil.

 "ROJAVA REVOLUTION: HOW DEEP IS THE CHANGE?" JUNE 20 2016.

Are political differences being worked through or buried? And what about sex?

 GÜLTAN KIŞANAK, INTERVIEWED BY NADJE AL-ALI AND LATIF TAS, “KURDISH WOMEN’S BATTLE CONTINUES AGAINST STATE AND PATRIARCHY, SAYS FIRST FEMALE CO-MAYOR OF DIYARBAKIR,” AUGUST 12, 2016, OPENDEMOCRACY

A germinal interview with a leader in the Kurdish women’s movement and HDP, covering her time in jail and the struggle to make local HDP leaders responsive to women’s leadership. Since this interview, Kişanak was prosecuted, along with most other HDP leaders, and sentenced to fourteen years in prison for “aiding terrorism.”

 MEREDITH TAX, “WHEN WOMEN FIGHT ISIS.” AUGUST 18, 2016, NEW YORK TIMES

While militaries often target women in wartime, as a way of symbolically defiling and disrupting a culture, Kurdish female guerrillas have become empowered through actively taking up self-defense and defense of other women from ISIS, particularly the Yazidis.

 BENEDETTO ARGENTIERI, “NO TIME FOR LOVE, CHILDREN, 'DESIRES': MEET THE FEMALE KURDISH FREEDOM FIGHTERS,” AUGUST 30, 2017, SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

Interviews with women guerillas who have devoted their lives entirely to the struggle.

 DILAR DIRIK, “FEMINIST PACIFISM OR PASSIVE-ISM?” MARCH 7, 2017, OPENDEMOCRACY

Resistance is central to the Kurdish women’s liberation movement and the pacifism of liberal feminists fails to distinguish between state militarism and legitimate self-defence, based on social justice, communal ethics, and women’s autonomy.

 JOOST JONGERDEN, “GENDER EQUALITY AND RADICAL DEMOCRACY: CONTRACTIONS AND CONFLICTS IN RELATION TO THE ‘NEW PARADIGM’ WITHIN THE KURDISTAN WORKERS’ PARTY (PKK),” 2017

The paradigm change from the goal of a national state to democratic confederalism and autonomy within the PKK and affiliated Kurdish liberation organizations was closely connected with the increasing leadership of women in the party. These questions led to a split in 2004, in which the new paradigm and women emerged victorious.

 LAVA SELO, “WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN ROJAVA: PERCEPTIONS BELIEVED AND REALITIES YET TO BE ACHIEVED,” JULY 2018, HEINRICH BOLL STIFTUNG

A skeptical researcher interviews 27 women in Rojava to find out how much their equality is real and how much is aspirational. Lots of data on organizational structures and the challenges faced by those trying to change traditional behavior.

 ANYA BRIY AND MAHIR KURTAY INTERVIEWING  AYŞE GÖKKAN AND GÜLCIHAN ŞIMŞEK, “INTERVIEW WITH THE FREE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT (TJA) IN NORTH KURDISTAN,” OCTOBER 23, 2018, OPENDEMOCRACY

An interview with TJA-KJA representatives in Diyarbakir. The Free Women’s Congress (KJA) was established in 2015 as an umbrella for various women’s initiatives, as well as political parties, NGO’s, culture and faith groups, and local governments.

 RICHARD HALL, ‘WELCOME TO JINWAR, A WOMEN-ONLY VILLAGE IN SYRIA THAT WANTS TO SMASH THE PATRIARCHY.” DECEMBER 2, 2018, INDEPENDENT

A village in Rojava built by and inhabited only by women, many of them war widows, others who want to live an independent life free of man.

 ANYA BRIY, INTERVIEWING B.E., “THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF THE KURDISH WOMEN’S MOVEMENT,” JANUARY 3, 2019, OPENDEMOCRACY

An interview with an editor of the Jineoloji Journal in Diyarbakir about theoretical and practical activities of the Kurdish women’s movement in Turkey. The journal is one of the few remaining initiatives by the Kurdish movement that have not been shut down in the wake of the 2015-2016 military offensive by the Turkish state on predominantly Kurdish cities or otherwise repressed since the 2016 failed coup attempt.

 MERAL ZIN CICEK, INTERVIEW, “THE WOMEN’S REVOLUTION IN THE 21ST CENTURY: FROM SOLIDARITY TO COMMON STRUGGLE,” MARCH 13, 2019, KOMUN ACADEMY

A call to raise the level of unity in the global women’s liberation movement and also its organizational capacity, so that its solidarity will become more than emotional support.

https://www.defendrojava.org/kurdish-womens-liberation-movement

NEWS CENTER - In order to embrace the Istanbul Convention, many journalists and artists said, "Speak up too".

The struggle of women continues for the Istanbul Convention, which was abolished by AKP President Tayyip Erdoğan's one night decree and announced to be abolished completely on 1 July. Many artists, journalists and writers also called for the ownership of the Istanbul Convention.

Actors Ayşenil Şamlıoğlu, Deniz Çakır, Leyla Selen Uçer, journalists Şirin Payzın, Melis Alphan, Ece Temelkuran and many others made a video call for the Istanbul Convention.

 Istanbul Convention call from journalists and artists

The women who shared on their social media accounts listed the names of the women murdered by male violence and said, "The Istanbul Convention is ours.

Give your voice to the Istanbul Convention." In the 20th century, public officials in Turkey viewed the Kurdish language and Kurdish issue as a security issue and therefore imposed strict rules banning the language, relocating people, imprisoning, executing, enforcing Turkish language and names, and even establishing boarding schools for Kurdish children in order to prevent any secession attempts by Kurds.

By contrast, the discussion of the 21st century presented in this thesis shows that politicians still talk about security and how the spread of Kurdish language is a threat to the unity of the country.

However, it is being so openly and extensively discussed which was not the case even a decade ago. Now the Kurdish language has entered a different arena and can be viewed as a legitimate political issue that can be publicly discussed.

The question remains then how long it will take for Kurdish language discussion to leave the political platform and become an inviolable human right.

KURDS AND TURKISH NATIONALISM: FROM ASSIMILATION TO ELIMINATIONKURDS AND TURKISH NATIONALISM: FROM ASSIMILATION TO ELIMINATION

9 MONTHS AGOPOLICY REPORTS

Throughout the past century, the Kurdish question has been a forefront issue in Turkish nationalism, and the only answer the nationalists have presented to resolve the Kurdish issue is attempting to eliminate the Kurds.

Throughout this period, Turkish nationalism has reared its head in many forms. Still, in each way, the ethnic cleansing of Turkish minority populations has been at the centre of the Turkish state's ideology and supported by the country's nationalists.

To understand the hidden objectives behind Turkey's offensives in the Kurdish areas of Syria, one must understand both the conflict between these two nationalisms in Turkey and the ideology of the Turkish state.

This Turkish nationalist ideology has even influenced it's foreign leaving the Kurdistan Region of Iraq within the crosshairs of the Turkish state too.

By utilizing previous research and exploring the historical issues relating to the matter, this article will explore the factors that have allowed the Kurds to survive and not to follow the same path as the Armenians and the Christians of the Greek Orthodox Church.

Furthermore, it will explore how Turkey has transitioned from a policy of "assimilating the Kurdish population into the Turkish one" to a system of massacres and ethnic cleansing. Surfing in the newly released digital sources of the Ataturk Library of the Istanbul Municipality.

Entering my usual keywords randomly to see what is out there in my areas of interest, I came across a diary of a Turkish soldier kept during the year 1938, while he was doing his compulsory military service.

Ego-documents are a rare source in Ottoman-Turkish studies in general, but the content of this particular diary made it unique and almost unreal beyond my wildest expectations, on an issue that I have studied since 1999.

This soldier served for two months in the sweeping stage of the genocide military operation carried out by the Turkish republic with the intent to resolve the “perennial Dersim Question” between 1937-1938.

As a final point, I would like to emphasize that as notes taken during bombardments and the aftermath of killings and village burnings, this diary has re-affirmed what the Dersimlis narrated for decades – yet from the opposing moral, political and emotional position.

While these entries give the reader the feeling of receiving blow after blow, they ironically also had a liberating impact on the survivors.

Not only carrying the physical and emotional marks of 1938, but also suffering from the trauma of denial and indifference, many of these survivors lived their lives with the burden of having witnessed and being boxed into 1938.

They could not get out of it, as one of them eloquently stated in his testimony. Shifting the narrative from the survivor to the perpetuator had the potential of relieving them of this life-long burden, and the potential of opening up public and personal spaces to deal with their trauma. It also enabled, as brief as it was, a conversation on past crimes, and the involvement of the wider public

Socialism is the Best Medicine Barri Zonema

Socialism refers to a specific stage of social and economic development that will displace capitalism, characterized by coordinated production, public or cooperative ownership of capital, diminishing class conflict and inequalities that spawn from such and the end of wage-labor with a method of compensation based on the principle of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution"  

The aim of public ownership is to ensure that production is responsive to the needs and desires of the general population and that goods and services are distributed equitably.

Kurdish people have been fighting to survive for centuries. Recently, their struggles have become more militant, more global, and less isolated, aligning with other anti-racist and anti-colonial movements, and leading the environmental movement.

The growing challenge that Kurdish people pose to capitalist rule can be measured by the increasing use of military force to suppress their rebellions and by the targeted murders of Kurdish activists.

In Turkey, the portion of Kurdish people incarcerated in federal facilities rose from under 18 per cent in 2001 to over 30 per cent in 2020.

Kurdish women are just 4 per cent of the Turkish population, yet form an astonishing 42 per cent of all female prisoners in to turkey state custody.  

The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)'s Women’s Liberation Ideology describes jineology as "a fundamental scientific term in order to fill the gaps that the current social sciences are incapable of doing.

Jineology is built on the principle that without the freedom of women within society and without a real consciousness surrounding women no society can call itself free."

https://sites.google.com/view/womens-liberation/

In Kurdish Rojava: Syria’s imperilled freedom fighters

In the midst of Syria’s bloody civil war, the Kurdish people have carved out an autonomous region in the country’s north called Rojava.

With a population of several million people, many of whom are refugees, it has been a haven for all those fleeing the Islamic State (Daesh) and dictator Bashar al-Assad, especially women, children and other persecuted ethnic minorities like the Yazidis.

 Rather than being a rights-based side issue that puts the burden on women, women’s liberation and equality of all genders become a matter of responsibility for all of society, because they become measures of defining society’s ethics and freedom.

For a radical and revolutionary freedom struggle, women's liberation must be a central aim, but also an active method in the process.

https://sites.google.com/view/rojovafighters/

The murder in Dersim was undoubtedly massive, indiscriminate and extremely brutal, but was it genocide? there was a deliberate intent to destroy potential rebels, and this was part of a general policy towards the Kurds.

Was the revolt suppressed by considerable extreme killing of thousands of women and children?

Young people from Dersim, who were serving in the Turkish army, were taken from their regiments and shot.

Most of the young women threw themselves into the Munzur water from the high cliffs in order not to fall into the hands of the Turkish soldiers.

Thousands of women and children died as a result of the conflict, and others were displaced within the exiled country.

The murder in Dersim was undoubtedly massive, indiscriminate and extremely brutal, but was it genocide?

Or was it simply the suppression of an armed revolt with considerable overkill? I will try to show that neither is.

Residents of Hozat town and Karaca tribe, thousands of rebellious women and children were brought near the military camp outside Hozat and killed with machine guns.

https://sites.google.com/view/cinayet-killings

The tradition of oral expression known as a dengbêjî, the job of a dengbêj – a ‘soundteller’– lies at the foundation of traditional Kurdish music and is the only path to survival of a language facing extinction.

For Kurds, being deprived of any written sources, this poetic artful style of lyrics and rhythm by the dengbêj was a unique method of preserving their language and culture to this day.

 Many melodies sung in this tradition belonged originally to women. Although it was mostly women who have been using these melodies as a vehicle of self-expression, for instance to lament the loss of their sons and husbands in endless wars, it was always men who carried these works over to the dengbêj Divan (assembly).

Due to religious and other conservative traditions and beliefs, women could only raise their voice behind closed doors, silently. Music is one of the many fields in which Kurdish women fought countless battles to be a part of, but somehow they have managed to get their voices out from behind closed doors and deaf walls.

https://theatticmag.com/reports/2369/on-the-trails-of-a-banned-language.html

  The PKK has been led from the start by Ocalan, a Turkish Kurd inspired by Marxism-Leninism in his university days in Ankara.

Inspired by Cold War proletarian revolutionary rhetoric, Ocalan sought to fight against the “repressive exploitation of Kurds” and establish a “democratic and united Kurdistan”.

A highly charismatic leader, Ocalan leads a grassroots movement uniting Kurds from different religious sects, countries, and cultures.

However, his espousal of terrorist tactics as well as his affiliations with unsavory organizations such as the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah earned the ire of the international world, and landed the PKK on the Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) lists of a number of countries, including the United States.

After Syria expelled him along with other Kurdish rebels in 1998, Ocalan sought asylum in Russia, Italy, and Kenya before Turkish forces captured him in the Greek embassy in Kenya in early 1999.

A Turkish state security court sentenced him to death for treason, but following a surprisingly bold and public apology and renunciation of his cause, the sentence was commuted to life in solitary confinement.

Since his trial, he has been imprisoned on an island in the Marmara Sea, not far from Istanbul.

[arcticdementor]

In the past I had often fervently wished that one day everyone would be passionate and excited about scientific research. I should have been more careful about what I had wished for. The crisis caused by the lethal COVID-19 pandemic and by the responses to the crisis have made billions of people worldwide acutely interested and overexcited about science. Decisions pronounced in the name of science have become arbitrators of life, death, and fundamental freedoms. Everything that mattered was affected by science, by scientists interpreting science, and by those who impose measures based on their interpretations of science in the context of political warfare.

One problem with this new mass engagement with science is that most people, including most people in the West, had never been seriously exposed to the fundamental norms of the scientific method. The Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism have unfortunately never been mainstream in education, media, or even in science museums and TV documentaries on scientific topics.

Before the pandemic, the sharing of data, protocols, and discoveries for free was limited, compromising the communalism on which the scientific method is based. It was already widely tolerated that science was not universal, but the realm of an ever-more hierarchical elite, a minority of experts. Gargantuan financial and other interests and conflicts thrived in the neighborhood of science—and the norm of disinterestedness was left forlorn.

As for organized skepticism, it did not sell very well within academic sanctuaries. Even the best peer-reviewed journals often presented results with bias and spin. Broader public and media dissemination of scientific discoveries was largely focused on what could be exaggerated about the research, rather than the rigor of its methods and the inherent uncertainty of the results.  

Nevertheless, despite the cynical realization that the methodological norms of science had been neglected (or perhaps because of this realization), voices struggling for more communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism had been multiplying among scientific circles prior to the pandemic. Reformers were often seen as holding some sort of a moral higher ground, despite being outnumbered in occupancy of powerful positions. Reproducibility crises in many scientific fields, ranging from biomedicine to psychology, caused soul-searching and efforts to enhance transparency, including the sharing of raw data, protocols, and code. Inequalities within the academy were increasingly recognized with calls to remedy them. Many were receptive to pleas for reform.

Opinion-based experts (while still dominant in influential committees, professional societies, major conferences, funding bodies, and other power nodes of the system) were often challenged by evidence-based criticism. There were efforts to make conflicts of interest more transparent and to minimize their impact, even if most science leaders remained conflicted, especially in medicine. A thriving community of scientists focused on rigorous methods, understanding biases, and minimizing their impact. The field of metaresearch, i.e., research on research, had become widely respected. One might therefore have hoped that the pandemic crisis could have fostered change. Indeed, change did happen—but perhaps mostly for the worst.

…

Personally, I don’t want to consider the lab leak theory—a major blow to scientific investigation—as the dominant explanation yet. However, if full public data-sharing cannot happen even for a question relevant to the deaths of millions and the suffering of billions, what hope is there for scientific transparency and a sharing culture? Whatever the origins of the virus, the refusal to abide by formerly accepted norms has done its own enormous damage.

…

Many amazing scientists have worked on COVID-19. I admire their work. Their contributions have taught us so much. My gratitude extends to the many extremely talented and well-trained young investigators who rejuvenate our aging scientific workforce. However, alongside thousands of solid scientists came freshly minted experts with questionable, irrelevant, or nonexistent credentials and questionable, irrelevant, or nonexistent data.

Social and mainstream media have helped to manufacture this new breed of experts. Anyone who was not an epidemiologist or health policy specialist could suddenly be cited as an epidemiologist or health policy specialist by reporters who often knew little about those fields but knew immediately which opinions were true. Conversely, some of the best epidemiologists and health policy specialists in America were smeared as clueless and dangerous by people who believed themselves fit to summarily arbitrate differences of scientific opinion without understanding the methodology or data at issue.

Disinterestedness suffered gravely. In the past, conflicted entities mostly tried to hide their agendas. During the pandemic, these same conflicted entities were raised to the status of heroes. For example, Big Pharma companies clearly produced useful drugs, vaccines, and other interventions that saved lives, though it was also known that profit was and is their main motive. Big Tobacco was known to kill many millions of people every year and to continuously mislead when promoting its old and new, equally harmful, products. Yet during the pandemic, requesting better evidence on effectiveness and adverse events was often considered anathema. This dismissive, authoritarian approach “in defense of science” may sadly have enhanced vaccine hesitancy and the anti-vax movement, wasting a unique opportunity that was created by the fantastic rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines. Even the tobacco industry upgraded its reputation: Philip Morris donated ventilators to propel a profile of corporate responsibility and saving lives, a tiny fraction of which were put at risk of death from COVID-19 because of background diseases caused by tobacco products.

Other potentially conflicted entities became the new societal regulators, rather than the ones being regulated. Big Tech companies, which gained trillions of dollars in cumulative market value from the virtual transformation of human life during lockdown, developed powerful censorship machineries that skewed the information available to users on their platforms. Consultants who made millions of dollars from corporate and government consultation were given prestigious positions, power, and public praise, while unconflicted scientists who worked pro bono but dared to question dominant narratives were smeared as being conflicted. Organized skepticism was seen as a threat to public health. There was a clash between two schools of thought, authoritarian public health versus science—and science lost.

…

Honest, continuous questioning and exploration of alternative paths are indispensable for good science. In the authoritarian (as opposed to participatory) version of public health, these activities were seen as treason and desertion. The dominant narrative became that “we are at war.” When at war, everyone has to follow orders. If a platoon is ordered to go right and some soldiers explore maneuvering to the left, they are shot as deserters. Scientific skepticism had to be shot, no questions asked. The orders were clear. 

…

Heated but healthy scientific debates are welcome. Serious critics are our greatest benefactors. John Tukey once said that the collective noun for a group of statisticians is a quarrel. This applies to other scientists, too. But “we are at war” led to a step beyond: This is a dirty war, one without dignity. Opponents were threatened, abused, and bullied by cancel culture campaigns in social media, hit stories in mainstream media, and bestsellers written by zealots. Statements were distorted, turned into straw men, and ridiculed. Wikipedia pages were vandalized. Reputations were systematically devastated and destroyed. Many brilliant scientists were abused and received threats during the pandemic, intended to make them and their families miserable.

Anonymous and pseudonymous abuse has a chilling effect; it is worse when the people doing the abusing are eponymous and respectable. The only viable responses to bigotry and hypocrisy are kindness, civility, empathy, and dignity. However, barring in-person communication, virtual living and social media in social isolation are poor conveyors of these virtues.

Politics had a deleterious influence on pandemic science. Anything any apolitical scientist said or wrote could be weaponized for political agendas. Tying public health interventions like masks and vaccines to a faction, political or otherwise, satisfies those devoted to that faction, but infuriates the opposing faction. This process undermines the wider adoption required for such interventions to be effective. Politics dressed up as public health not only injured science. It also shot down participatory public health where people are empowered, rather than obligated and humiliated.

A scientist cannot and should not try to change his or her data and inferences based on the current doctrine of political parties or the reading du jour of the social media thermometer. In an environment where traditional political divisions between left and right no longer seem to make much sense, data, sentences, and interpretations are taken out of context and weaponized. The same apolitical scientist could be attacked by left-wing commentators in one place and by alt-right commentators in another. Many excellent scientists have had to silence themselves in this chaos. Their self-censorship has been a major loss for scientific investigation and the public health effort. My heroes are the many well-intentioned scientists who were abused, smeared, and threatened during the pandemic. I respect all of them and suffer for what they went through, regardless of whether their scientific positions agreed or disagreed with mine. I suffer for and cherish even more those whose positions disagreed with mine.

There was absolutely no conspiracy or preplanning behind this hypercharged evolution. Simply, in times of crisis, the powerful thrive and the weak become more disadvantaged. Amid pandemic confusion, the powerful and the conflicted became more powerful and more conflicted, while millions of disadvantaged people have died and billions suffered.

I worry that science and its norms have shared the fate of the disadvantaged. It is a pity, because science can still help everyone. Science remains the best thing that can happen to humans, provided it can be both tolerant and tolerated.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Lygia Clark, "Óculos" ("Goggles"), 1968

* * * *

Joohn Choe

Did you know that half of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at the 8th-grade level?

It's a constraint on victory outcomes in counter-disinformation work; it's a problem when you declare war on things like QAnon or the Republican industrial lie complex.

It arises when you use a technique from military planners called "thinking backwards".

This doesn't mean "be old-school and nostalgic" (I mean, you'd think), it means "start from the outcome and work backwards".

Illiteracy turns out to be a problem when you consider the basic problem of active measures defense as an exercise in thinking backwards. You get new solutions and new problems; illiteracy, and being literate but not reading, or alliteracy (irritatingly not a word in spell-check), are some of those problems.

First, let's talk about the outcome.

The fundamental problem with disinformation studies is that you can't define what disinformation is unless you take a stance on what information is, and how it's used in society.

It's meaningless to point your finger and say "liar!" as we are wont to do in this field if you're not even clear on what role that should play in society, or how things are supposed to work normally. You can't diagnose a dysfunction in how society produces and consumes information if you don't even have a view on how it functions.

You need to have a defensible, testable theory of how America's information economy operates normally if you are going to put yourself forward as some authority on how it's functioning abnormally. You cannot be a counter-disinformation operator without being a philosopher, and to some extent, a systems theorist and, increasingly, I'd argue, an aestheticist (as in "studies aesthetics", not "aesthetician who does your nails").

This is incredibly basic. I still find it odd that even very professional people and companies in this field don't grapple with this issue. Even the data is meaningless, no matter how impressively objective it is, if you're lacking that kind of context; you end up having anomalies with no baseline, like an endless stream of singleton events.

That's no way to run a railroad, like the old saying goes.

So, back when I had a startup, with advisors, I talked to one of them who actually taught a class at Berkeley on startups about this crazy recording of a Federal crime I'd gotten in Alabama, and I asked for advice for what to do about it in terms of the fight against disinformation.

The answer he gave ended up being a lead-in to thinking about this in a systems-oriented, long-terms sustainable kind of way. I still come back to it as a recurrent point in shaping outcome scenarios.

He suggested, first off, in this sort of infuriatingly wise way that he has (he's an old Asian dude, so) that you have to ask, first: is zero percent really possible?

What kind of victory state are you after, if this is actually a lie that involves disinformation on the scale that you observe it?

He argued that you have to fit disinformation into a place with other aspects of how we talk to each other. On his account, there was potentially value in giving people the ability to create and pass on value in determining what was disinformation and what wasn't, and it verged into a discussion of a crypto-currency based anti-disinformation app that I ended up not really wanting to do.

Credit where credit is due, though: his argument about the achievability of zero percent disinformation made a lot of sense.

The outcome state we're after can't be "zero active measures" and "zero disinformation". Not only is that unrealistic, if you even did manage to achieve that, you'd have North Korea. They have no problem with differing versions of state truth and reality, because everything is state truth that excludes reality.

Diversity in viewpoints is one of our strengths as a country, too; reducing everything down to one version of truth, even as generous as the boundaries might be on that, would inevitably end up flattening society. Like, no one wants "information socialism", that just... sounds bad.

You could argue that disinformation is a flipside of a coin, actually. Disinformation is in a state of mutual entailment with socially accepted official truth; there can't be one without the other, in one way of looking at it. And that's what I think my advisor was getting at.

It's like that old cliché about "tHe sIgN fOr cRiSiS aNd ChAngE ArE tEh sAmE iN cHiNeSe" which is like, you understand, up there with Sun Tzu quotes and "your people are so hard-working!" as far as Things I Ain't 'Bout As An Asian Person, You Feel Me Though (the game show!).

And don't even get me started on people ripping off strategy ideas from theorists of Chinese stick-poking and rock-throwing warfare.

In a normal time, you could say that there's a balance between disinformation and truth, and truth is usually the winning side on that, because normally, the President and the ruling party aren't active sources of disinformation with the veneer of authority on it.

We're getting out of a period of time in which that balance was badly, badly disrupted on the side of disinformation. The kind of abnormalities we see as a society - from the Capitol insurrection to how weird people around us are, compared to what they were like in 2015 - those can all be seen as stemming from that state of imbalance.

The outcome, the advisor argued, was fundamentally about balance. Not about destroying disinformation, or striking it until it wasn't a problem; the paradigm was rebalancing, he argued.

Winning isn't reducing disinformation to zero. It's achieving a new balance between disinformation and truth where the boundary favors truth more.

Almost every victory state for "The War On Disinformation" boils down to that, actually.

If you see it as rebalancing, then new ways of achieving achieving victory by restoring balance open up.

For starters, you could add to the flow of information coming out; you could even make oppositional truth part of it. That's really what "fact-checking" is on social media - Politifact and LeadStories aren't "fact-checkers", because fact-checkers are people at media institutions who run quality control on news, and they are not that. They pick and choose what stories to oppose, at times seemingly arbitrarily, at times politically, and calling them "fact-checkers" hides the essentially subjective nature of that practice.

You could create personal truth, give people new ways to be, new role models to emulate and new social roles to fulfill - "offensive fact-checker", "Nazi-hunter", "deplatformer", and the like. And you could even amplify it and try to drown out the misleadingly framed truth, and the outright mistruths, coming out of the disinformation industry.

You could mobilize the truth to create political crises, and work to reset the boundary on allowable lies. This is the core methodology of an activist, it's creating strategic dilemmas for institutions based on public perception and the pressure to do the right thing.

Outcome-focused political activism, where you're trying to get a specific candidate elected or voted out of office, is one way of specifically mobilizing the truth, instead of just sitting on ass and feeling good about having it (this is common, I'd argue). We can not only reduce disinformation better - interdict it better, ban it better, find it better, track it better - we can also get better at producing alternative presentations and modes of appeal for truth.

The problem with all these solution scenarios, though, and the area that I see where we could really stand to improve, and maybe even something that I'd work on for a minute, is our culture.

I'd argue we just don't have the kind of intellectual culture that supports a lot of these solutions. We can't, not with fundamental adult literacy the way it is; not with the state of the public intellectual the way it is.

There was a point around 2015 when people were declaring a crisis of the French public intellectual tradition; since Henri-Levy, basically, Pierre Bourdieu if you count him, there just haven't been globally notable, famous French philosophers like there used to be. That traces to any number of factors with them, but a lot of them are factors we share, like the ever-wider spread of spectacular culture and its increasing efficacy at exploiting us, drawing us into addiction loops, even, with social media and "binge-watching" TV shows.

I'd argue that the best counter-disinformational solutions we have right now come down to art and aesthetics, actually, because we are so bad as a culture at reading.

Militarized truth, and grassroots truth, and offensive truth, are forms of rebalancing between disinformation and truth, yes, but it's a reactionary, almost frantic kind of truth. The jobs that it gives people, the roles that it puts people into - content moderator, offensive fact-checker - eat people up in the long run because they're in a race against disinformation, and disinformation keeps winning.

And it ends up repeating the basic problem of piling truth upon truth without mobilizing it, positioning it in a way to get through to people.

If it takes a pretty image and a witty notion to introject a critical idea into someone's head; if it takes a song and a dance, even, to get someone to have a bullshit filter... I say, do it.

Call it less "Art of War', more "War of Art".

---

Lygia Clark, "Óculos" ("Goggles"), 1968

https://www.politico.eu/.../decline-of-french.../

https://www.wyliecomm.com/.../whats-the-latest-u-s.../

[mistakenot4892]

Some thoughts of Heart of Deimos.

I made a reddit post but I thought I might repost it here and see if the response is any different. Mild spoilers for Heart of Deimos, the most recent Warframe update, under the cut.

First off, this is a bit of an effortpost, and it will be quite meandering and confused, sorry about that. We are now two days into Heart of Deimos and I had some thoughts I wanted to put on paper as it were. There's a TL;DR at the bottom.

The Bad:

In all honesty, taking into account the usual DE release-then-fix cycle and the quick patching they've already done to things like the Son token costs, there's very little about this update that I think is objectively bad. Deimos might be the single best open world release of the set, lack of a catchy musical number aside. It's not any buggier than any other release, which may say more about DE's QA than anything, but I have fallen through the map a few times, and host migrations have broken multiple vault runs.

The combined token system is a pretty big departure from the other open worlds, and I found it very confusing initially. Without the prior context of using Ticker for bonds in Fortuna, I think it would be really opaque, particularly for new players who aren't already up to speed on how the open world resource loops are expected to work. Alongside the complex token system, it's also understandable that people are frustrated with the expectation that they -must- participate in mining, fishing and conservation to get the tokens, since these don't really leverage the well developed aspects of gameplay.

The initial quest was lackluster from a storytelling perspective, with some really nonsensical events, a lack of development for each individual beat, and a frustrating lack of building on the already existing lore in favour of introducing new lore. It was pretty blatantly a tour of the zone mechanics, though maybe we'll see a more engaging plot when the equivalent of the Profit Taker and Exploiter bounties are introduced over the next year. The new warframe being dropped in by Mother as an afterthought, without a scrap of context, almost felt worse than the way previous quests have just given us the blueprint with no explanation at all. Protea's quest felt a lot clearer so it's disheartening to see them taking a step back there.

Finally, prior to finding the Albrecht lore I thought the playable content of the update was quite short and uninteresting.

The Good:

The Family voice acting is really, really good. Some of the writing is a bit iffy in the classic overwrought DE sense (which IMO is charmingly earnest anyway) but the delivery is fantastic, and while initially I was put off by the characters being shallow, I came around on it - I will go into more detail under 'The Ugly'.

With regards to the grind: even though the resources from the open world minigames are mandatory, participation isn't - so far I've run conservation exactly once, for about an hour, and I am clear for the third rank up with the Entrati. The world drops and bounty loot are more than enough to cover the vast majority of other costs, which is honestly fantastic. For all the complaining, DE has definitely learned from PoE and Fortuna with regards to letting people dictate their own playstyle without handicapping their progress. You can focus down specific requirements with specific minigames, no trouble, or you can just play bounties and run and gun your way to incidental loot. The combined token system was really confusing initially but combined with the incidental drops it makes progression quite organic without forcing you to spend your time on any particular task (looking at you, pre-Thumper PoE). There also seems to be a pretty solid spawn chance for tokens in the caves of the open world, and since the rank ups are now 1 of each kind of token instead of 10, this is possibly now a feasible way to skip the conservation grind entirely.

With regards to the lore: despite my earlier complaint about narrative quality and disconnection, DE does seem to be tying Parvos, the Entrati and the Glassmaker together, which is interesting. Prior to finding the Necraloid area and hearing the excellent Albrecht Vitruvian lore (seriously, mad props to the writers and the VA, the fourth log gives me powerful Darkest Dungeon narration vibes) I was ready to drop the game until a few patches and more content was added, but now I'm fully willing to grind for a couple weeks to hear the rest. I'm curious to see where they will go with the Heart and the Man in the Wall, particularly in regards to stuff like the reliquary drive and how it relates to the Necraloids and pre-warframe Orokin technology in general.

The Ugly:

The Family are the ugly, get it? This bit is mostly just because I want to talk about the new characters and the themes of Warframe as a narrative.

There's a kind of tension around the family that I initially found offputting - here we have a family of immortal alien gods who made their name ripping secrets from the flesh of reality, literally sprouting from the meat flowers of an infested moon... and they act like the cast of Arrested Development, switching between lofty poetic proclamations and petty squabbling that wouldn't be out of place on a sitcom. At first it seemed like it was just bad writing. Over time though, with exposure to the wider plot and the various deeper interactions, I started to warm to it. It's really interesting how DE has juxtaposed the deformed appearance of the Entrati, their perfect-marble-statue-like Orokin aesthetic, the pulsating infestation, and this very human, very relatable behavior. It really pulls back the skin on the Orokin as a people and uses a bit of clever metanarrative to show us that even the Tenno remember the Orokin as being more than human, when they were just as flawed as anyone else.

The individual characters felt very shallow at first, like cardboard cutouts of the typical family transplanted into a blob of writhing meat, but the pleasant surprise of the relationships mending between Entrati rank-ups and the subtle undercurrents you start to notice when interacting with them over a longer timeline really turned that on its head. There's some really excellent combinations of writing and delivery that add subtleties to each character, like the Daughter's undercurrent of thirst for either the Tenno or for butchering mutant fish, or the animalistic yearning of the Son and his bleeding heart hidden under the callous and cruel facade.

Family, parenthood and belonging are arguably the core themes of Warframe's narrative - the Tenno are orphan children clinging to a single parental figure who herself is a stolen child, while their allies like the Ostrons and the Solaris are people who cling to their human connections and their shared culture despite outside forces, and draw their strength from each other. The grand enemies of the setting are collectivist empires who have shredded their humanity in pursuit of strength and profit respectively. Then you have the Orokin, whose grand flaw is hubris in isolation, and a deliberate abandonment of shared humanity in pursuit of impossible perfection. The entire Parvos questline related to blood, with Nef wanting to abuse it for gain and Parvos denouncing him. Even the Sentients, arguably the only alien culture in the setting, love their families and oppose the Orokin and by extension the Tenno largely in defense of their people.

DE has leaned hard on quite creepy, quite -relatable- strangeness to give the Family depth, which helps reinforce that they're demigods of a dead empire, even if they are also quite friendly and personable. It lends some real weight to the way the Orokin have been depicted as cruel, hollow people, since we now have direct evidence of how their culture and the expectations of their various roles tear at those interpersonal connections. There's a lot of heart and clear work put into developing these themes, and I think that it's a bit sad that the quality of the writing is frequently overlooked in the broader Warframe community in favour of focusing on the flashy mechanics and cool new novel features. DE's writers are some of the best in mainstream video gaming currently, and even with my complaints about the main quest earlier, this consistent ongoing thematic cohesion and the variety of individually good beats more than make up for incoherent feature-driven storytelling.

TL;DR:

Despite some teething issues and bugs Heart of Deimos might be the best open world update so far, the way DE presents the Family and develops on the overarching themes of the story are pretty excellent, and I am excited to see where they go with it. Thanks for reading my incoherent and largely irrelevant thought-spew. Have a good one.

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

Does Spider-Man NEED to be in a shared universe?

As of right now it seems as though Peter Parker is going to be out of the MCU and in his own entirely separate universe.

Most people have reacted negatively to this and one of the most frequently cited reasons for that is the inability of Spider-Man to interact with the wider MCU.

We can talk a lot about whether from a production and audience interest POV, there is any steam behind the idea of Spider-Man in his own separate universe again.

However I want to take a different angle with this and talk more broadly about the character rather than strictly just the movies.

Essentially I want to address whether or not Spider-Man truly NEEDS to be in a shared Marvel Universe at all or not?

Now look I’m not advocating Spider-Man pull a Transformers or ROM Space Knight and be pulled out of the Marvel Universe.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut from a creative POV strictly speaking...he really, really, really does not NEED to be in that universe.

There are advantages and disadvantages to that.

In a shared Marvel Universe Peter operates as the ‘heart’ of that universe as was the intention with Civil War 2006. He also has close ties to the F4, the First Family of the Marvel Universe and to Captain America who is more or less THE leader of the whole Marvel universe. His kinship with Daredevil in particular is a joy to behold and has rarely been used badly. His status as an outsider in the eyes of the more publically accepted Marvel heroes like the Avengers offers a great parallel to his initial life as an outsider in high school and helps to highlight part of Lee and Ditko’s conceit with the character, that he was atypical of the heroes who’d come before him.

On the other hand though...The Marvel Universe of the comics at least demands a shitton of suspension of disbelief because you have all this huge concepts co-existing with one another but also within a context of trying to keep the world relatively similar to our own, the world outside your window.

Sooner or later though this presents a challenge to the suspension of disbelief for guys like Spider-Man who’re not merely supposed to exist in a world relatively like our own with heroes, but in fact be relatively normal within it besides the fact that they are heroes.

But if Spider-Man is a superhero, lives in a world of heroes, and has interacted with so many of them inevitably you have to wilfully ignore the obvious facts that so many of his relatable problems in life could be fixed through the fantastical elements of the universe he lives in and is aware of.

Just one example would be if Aunt May was dying there would be at least half a dozen solutions to that problem. Magic, clones, suspended animation, time travel, healing factors, transferring her mind to a robotic body, extra terrestrial medical care and if all else fails resurrection and higher deities are a fact of life in the Marvel Universe and Peter knows it.

Now the way around this stuff is, in the context of the story you are telling, to simply treat such things as not existing and thus side step the issue.

Suspension of disbelief might stretch to ignoring all the older appearances of Reed Richards or Doctor Strange in Spider-Man’s history, but if they show up in an issue where Aunt May’s death is also a factor then having Peter ignore their abilities to obviously help is nonsensical.

All of this is leading me to saying that, for the most part, Spider-Man is actually able to be MORE realistic and cohesive if in his own isolated universe than if he is in the same universe as magicians and aliens.

When you watch the Raimi movies or the Spec cartoon you never really have to scratch your head over why Spider-Man couldn’t just do this or that to solve his problems because other than his own fairly grounded cast and villains those other solutions don’t exist.

Even having other heroes exist but still be fairly grounded presents problems as you always have to ignore or contrive a reason for their lack of help when Spider-Man needs it.

Moving on, let’s talk about Spider-Man’s ability to team up with other heroes.

Of course there have been whole ongoing series specifically about that...and they mostly suck.

Don’t believe me?

Okay, ask yourselves this, how many New Avengers, Avengers, Marvel Team Up, Avenging Spider-Man or Superior Spider-Man Team-Up stories starring Spider-Man make it into most top 10 or even top 20 Spider-Man stories of all time?

Not many if any at all.

How many of the top 10-20 Spidey stories could be regarded as team ups, as in Spider-Man himself is actively interacting with figures from the wider Marvel universe as opposed to people introduced in his own series? And we aren’t talking cameos either.

Again, not that many.

ASM #1 perhaps.

Nothing Can Stop the Juggernaut, but that’s just giving Spider-Man someone to fight he’s not really teaming up with anyone, a juiced up Rhino could’ve done basically the same thing.

The Alien Costume Saga arguably

The Death of Jean DeWolff

Spider-Man vs. Wolverine.

Spider-Man/Human Torch

MAYBE ASM #500, though that was mostly a background feature a means to an end (sending Spidey time travelling) that could’ve been achieved by numerous other means.

Arguably the first Carnage story though that was also a background feature, the main focus was Spidey fighting Carnage and teaming up with Venom.

...I honestly can’t think of any more off the top of my head.

You see what I mean. Sure, providing villains for Peter to fight is a real advantage the wider Marvel Universe holds for Spider-Man but actually milking great stories from his ability to interact with other heroes, not so much.

In fact Daredevil and the Human Torch or F4 are the most reliable examples of Spider-Man team ups working out but not for nothing there are quite a few similarities between them and Peter.

It doesn’t help most of these stories happened so Marvel could grant exposure to lesser selling characters by having them show up with their A-list hero.

I think more significantly the reason there are so few great Spider-Man team up stories is because of the core concept powering Spider-Man as a character and a lot of his appeal.

He was created in large part to be the hero who could be you, the average joe, the character for whom Peter Parker and his regular life was as much, if not MORE, of a draw than the superheroics of Spider-Man.

The nature of superhero team ups though are that they emphasis the costumed identities over civilian identities. This is a limitation of page space a lot of the time, but it’s also because the characters look iconic when they are dressed in their outfits and seeing them together in their outfits is really the main ticket draw of team up stories. How many people want to see Cap, Iron Man and Spider-Man interacting but it’s just in their civilian identities? Not many I’d wager, it wouldn’t make for a very eye catching cover that’s for sure.

The end result is that at best you focus upon an explore merely one half of who these characters are (and in Peter’s case it is arguably the less interesting half) or it becomes incredibly generic, it’s just heroes with different outfits, powers, maybe speech patterns hitting each other or hitting bad guys together with no exploration of their personalities bouncing off of one another.

And hey that is fine as a change of pace but not as the default setting, hence MTU usually was the lesser of the Spider-Man titles.

If you look at most of the team up stories I listed, noticeably all of them DO explore who the characters (or at least Peter) are and involve a lot of page time to them out of costume, their personal lives and such.

This brings us back to Spidey’s appeal. Like I said a huge part of it is his regular life and a huge part of what makes that appealing is his personal life dramas with his amazing supporting cast. He is said to have the best supporting cast in comics and that’s absolutely true, but when combined with one of the best rogue’s galleries in comics is it any wonder he was so successful?

Because Spider-Man has such a robust group of characters to interact with in both his identities his world is already pretty populated and can already do a lot of character exploration. And honestly when you have so many options to explore the human condition in a way so similar to the lives we lead are you really worse off if you can’t also have Spider-Man go on wacky adventures to the Negative Zone too? Are you really going to tell me that any of the psychedelic crazy scenes from Doctor Strange 2016 are as impactful or as meaty as May and Peter just talking at a table in Spider-Man 2?

 Whether in the movies or in other media so long as Spider-Man has supporting cast and a strong villain pool to explore he’s got a universe to play in no matter what. This isn’t the case for a lot of Marvel heroes. Iron Man for instance does not have a great rogue’s gallery or villain pool, it’s why in every TV adaptation of the character he is either lumped in with other heroes so that collectively they have a lot on offer or in his solo shows the wider Marvel Universe plays a significant part. In Iron man’s 1990s cartoon Force Works were regular characters, in Iron man Armored Adventures Nick Fury and SHIELD were recurring characters and the finale of the show involved them, Black Panther, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Hulk and others working together. The consistency of this with Iron Man points to his own series not being able to sustain itself without the wider Marvel Universe to support it.

 In contrast the majority of Spider-Man adaptations (which are much more numerous than any other Marvel character’s) either don’t feature characters outside his own series or they are relatively minimal. Even the 1994 Spider-Man cartoon which did feature a lot of guest characters and even did a Secret Wars adaptation, didn’t have most of it’s episodes involving guest stars.

 To return to the topic of Spider-Man’s concept and appeal, because the character was supposed to be more realistic and relatable, smaller scale more street level stories have been the preference by writers and fans and indeed his most celebrated outings have usually been cut from that cloth; even a lot of the well regarded team ups.

Because of this doing more personal stories works better for the character and a wider Marvel universe hurts that. Having Spidey be the ONLY hero in NYC and the scale be citywide creates if anything much greater dramatic impact in a story than saving the world or saving the universe. Big fish in a small pond situation I guess you could say.

Finally I’d add that Ditko himself didn’t really care for Spider-Man being in a wider universe.

In conclusion the notion that it would be inherently bad for Spider-Man to be ‘stuck in a smaller’ universe not connected to anything else is wrongheaded.

At best it simply offers some advantages but also some disadvantages.

However you wanna slice it though it’s absolutely not something Spider-Man NEEDS

[bacchanta]

Not BL-decoding sexuality in Banana Fish

Disclaimer:

I do not intend this to be a commentary on Banana Fish. Nor will I call it a review of the story-if anything, it's probably closest to a review of my response to the story. It is subjective, sentimental, and inconsistent. It is negative, but-alas do I find it SO important to highlight this-it is by no means a negative opinion on Yoshida Akimi and her deeply touching, aesthetically exhilarating masterpiece. I love this story, but it is precisely because of this, that I also find it crucial to decode some of the seemingly less reasonable (or evem dangerous) response it incites within me--just so that I may love it without fearing the peril of being misguided.

Now let's begin.

I first heard of Banana Fish when the anime project was announced in summer. There was an argument going on on my newsfeed, and from someone whom, as far as I knew, barely argued openly about anything at all. It was rather vehemently and somewhat indignantly pointed out that, some blogger, by labelling Banana Fish with the loose term 'BL', was doing it an egregious injustice, and that the two main characters, Ash and Eiji, are 'friends', (very firmly) NOT lovers.

Knowing nothing about the story then, I found the argument both baffling and discomforting-even homophobic. It seemed along the line of other common 'unconscious/internalized homophobia' in fiction, such as the over-used 'straight by default but gay for someone' trope. How can being lovers by any means lessen a relationship? And, even if BL is nowadays better used more cautiously to refer to the very specific genre of boys' love, is it that much of a big deal that another story involving (but not focused on) two male characters being in love with each other is referred to as BL?

I did not think of this until I've finished the entire series very recently. What scared me was that I did not only understand that argument for the first time, but, still deep in my BF-PTSD, found that sentiment even a bit agreeable than it seemed.

Perhaps it all boils down to: why do some people find it unacceptable to think of Ash and Eiji's relationship as physical?

The answer is simple: because then it will be more difficult to rise above all the other physical relationships depicted in the story.

It's a story about a victim of sexual abuse of the worst kind. It depicts sexual abuse with ruthless explicity and painful straightforward-ness. There's zero romanticization (and in this it already differs from the yaoi genre-the latter focused more on sexual fantasies and thus granted more allowance with their depiction of power dynamics in sex, not always what we'd call 'healthy' irl), not only on the level of plot but also on the very superficial level of visual representation-the abusers, Marvin, Dino, Fox, etc. are all physically grotesque, and that leaves little to no space for romanticization. Banana Fish does an absolutly perfect job in getting its message through-sexual abuse is painful and grotesque and there is nothing romantic about it. Never.

Further complication arises, however, when sexual abuse is intertwined with other themes that consist the core of the story. It's not only a story about a victim standing up against his abusers; it's also a story about the under-privileged against the richest and most powerful, the young against the old, the rebellious against the established, the isolated justice against the organized evil. It's not only manifested on Ash; Yue-Leung's arc fits all the above themes just as well. Even Eiji's escape from his unsuccessful athletic career (and the suppressed society back home, as Ibe mentions at one point) and his subsequent participation in this surrealisitc adventure may be read as a rebellion against his own society, which is constantly referred to as an antithesis of America. It's in the background, but to the wider Japanese readers it may have meta-textual significance-but that's mere speculation.

It's about rebellion, and rebellion against sexual abusers needs to be integrated into the extended motif. Sexual abuse does not only sit remotely in the narrative past in Ash's childhood memory. It comes to the surface, many, many times, but its essence remains consistent. Even the abusers are the same. Those who abused Ash when he was a kid want to or indeed do abuse him again when he is 17.

Here we have the boundary between paedophilia and homosexuality seriously blurred. We can't tell if Marvin is a paedophile or a homosexual or both, just as we can't tell about Dino, or about that gay bar owner/human trafficker whose name I don't recall atm.

When Marvin first appeared in ep1 we see him harassing Ash with thinly-veiled obscene innuendos. In ep2 we first see Skipper telling Eiji that 1) Marvin's gay and 2) he prefers blonde. It's not until later in ep2, when the tapes are being played (a highly disturbing and excellently performed scene), that we learn that Marvin is actually a paedophile. But it does not require us to contrast the later information with the earlier--Marvin has a fetish for people like Ash. That he is gay, that he prefers blonde, and that he prefers kids are but three ways of directing his sexual desire towards Ash. It's three steps of narrowing it down to our protagonist. 'Gay' is offered as a part of the information because it refers to a minority (and thus effectively narrows down the subject matter). If Marvin is a Humbert-Humbert, I doubt if Skipper will have said, 'He's heterosexual and he prefers blonde'. As much as we are unwilling to admit, heterosexual is still default in many contexts (more so in the time when Banana Fish was originally created), and that's precisely why only homosexuality merits the importance to be mentioned. Yet as a result of this economy of expression, homosexuality is associated with paedophilia.

What is a big relief to me is that they did not put in that scene with the gay bar owner's husband. For those who have only watched the anime--that human trafficker who raped Ash many times and is overtly paedophilic is not only a gay bar owner but also married to another man. Again it's not about narrative plausibility--a paedophile can totally also be married and own a gay bar--the problem is that all these information are unified to enhance one single image of one specific character--he is gay, he is married, he is a paedophile and a human trafficker, and he raped kids. I by no means suggest that this association is by any means intended--that will be a very serious and terrible accusation--but the economy of narrative means that, at that point in the story, there is simply not enough space nor necessity to discuss in detail how homosexuality and paedophilia are unrelated.

Dino is more complicated--he certainly has paedophilic acts, but we also see him sleeping with Yue-Leung and intending to sleep with Eiji, who by that point is 19 and physically different from pre-puberty kids victimized by paedophiles. His intimate contact with Ash (again highly disturbing) seems to suggest that he is obssessed with Ash regardless of his age. Homosexual intercourse is for the character of Dino less about information but about thematic unity--his dominance is manifested as the old over the young, the rich and powerful over the powerless, the established over the isolated. Here homosexual intercourse is not only associated with paedophilia--it's integrated into a more general evil of hierarchical dominance. This dominance and its non-consensual nature becomes all the more clear when Ash mentions that he once loved a girl at the age of 14.

There are many other sexual representation in the story--Fox, the prisoners, or even Hua-Leung to his half-brother Yue-Leung. If anything, their similarity is that they are all non-consensual, disturbingly and purely erotic, and involving significant age- and power gaps. It is age gaps that we feel most directly as part of the motif of dominance and rebellion--in other words, it's the young-old contrast that has thematic significance (as opposed to child-adult, which as a theme cannot extend from Ash's childhood into the narrative present) but age gap is relative, unlike the more fixed definition of child, adult, or paedophile.

Now back to Eiji and Ash. As a contrast to the darker side of grown-ups, their interactions are presented in such a way that it contrasts the sexual and abusive nature of Ash's encounters with many others. We never see deliberate physical contact between them; their beds are separate; even when they have to have physical contact, it's by no means erotic. Same can be said of another (among the few) positive relationship--that between Yue-Leung and Blanca. Blanca is overtly straight, and the comical depiction of Yue-Leung framing him with feigned homosexual contact between the two puts the possibility safely out of the picture. In a sense, all the positive relationships in the story are more about emotional mutual dependence (as positive relationships should be, one may argue).

It need not mean that it strictly excludes sexual contact, but, because of the established antitheses of the story, the emotional needs to be contrasted with the sexual just as the young needs to be contrasted with the old, and the victims need to be contrasted with the abusers. It's sexual abuse that Ash meets, so it's emotional comfort that he seeks. if it's not a story about sexual abuse, it will not have had the need to strictly exclude sexual contact from most of the positive relationships depicted. Opposites are not the most accurate way to understand the world but remains a powerful way to present it. Yet when artistic need demands so, some things simply have to be grouped into the 'positive' and their opposite the 'negative' to achieve the effect.

I will, perhaps, remain repulsed by any sexual depiction of the relationship between Ash and Eiji. I don't know if there are others who share the same sentiment, but it's perhaps better to remind oneself that it has more to do with the story's thematic presentation rather than intentional and detrimental stereotypes.

[earhartsease]

Washington Post article that tumblr wouldn't let me link directly, so here's the unpaywalled text without the images:

*****

HEBRON, West Bank — The Israeli military has been conducting a broad surveillance effort in the occupied West Bank to monitor Palestinians by integrating facial recognition with a growing network of cameras and smartphones, according to descriptions of the program by recent Israeli soldiers.

The surveillance initiative, rolled out over the past two years, involves in part a smartphone technology called Blue Wolf that captures photos of Palestinians’ faces and matches them to a database of images so extensive that one former soldier described it as the army’s secret “Facebook for Palestinians.” The phone app flashes in different colors to alert soldiers if a person is to be detained, arrested or left alone.

The surveillance program was described in interviews conducted by The Post with two former Israeli soldiers and in separate accounts that they and four other recently discharged soldiers gave to the Israeli advocacy group Breaking the Silence and were later shared with The Post. Much of the program has not been previously reported. While the Israeli military has acknowledged the existence of the initiative in an online brochure, the interviews with former soldiers offer the first public description of the program’s scope and operations.

In addition to Blue Wolf, the Israeli military has installed face-scanning cameras in the divided city of Hebron to help soldiers at checkpoints identify Palestinians even before they present their I.D. cards. A wider network of closed-circuit television cameras, dubbed “Hebron Smart City,” provides real-time monitoring of the city’s population and, one former soldier said, can sometimes see into private homes.

The former soldiers who were interviewed for this article and who spoke with Breaking the Silence, an advocacy group composed of Israeli army veterans that opposes the occupation, discussed the surveillance program on the condition of anonymity for fear of social and professional repercussions. The group says it plans to publish its research.

They said they were told by the military that the efforts were a powerful augmentation of its capabilities to defend Israel against terrorists. But the program also demonstrates how surveillance technologies that are hotly debated in Western democracies are already being used behind the scenes in places where people have fewer freedoms.

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable if they used it in the mall in [my hometown], let’s put it that way,” said a recently discharged Israeli soldier who served in an intelligence unit. “People worry about fingerprinting, but this is that several times over.” She told The Post that she was motivated to speak out because the surveillance system in Hebron was a “total violation of privacy of an entire people.”

Israel’s use of surveillance and facial-recognition appear to be among the most elaborate deployments of such technology by a country seeking to control a subject population, according to experts with the digital civil rights organization AccessNow.

In response to questions about the surveillance program, the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, said that “routine security operations” were “part of the fight against terrorism and the efforts to improve the quality of life for the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria.” (Judea and Samaria is the official Israeli name for the West Bank.)

“Naturally, we cannot comment on the IDF’s operational capabilities in this context,” the statement added.

Official use of facial recognition technology has been banned by at least a dozen U.S. cities, including Boston and San Francisco, according to the advocacy group the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. And this month the European Parliament called for a ban on police use of facial recognition in public places.

But a study this summer by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that 20 federal agencies said they use facial recognition systems, with six law enforcement agencies reporting that the technology helped identify people suspected of law-breaking during civil unrest. And the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a trade group that represents technology companies, took issue with the proposed European ban, saying it would undermine efforts by law enforcement to “effectively respond to crime and terrorism.”

Inside Israel, a proposal by law enforcement officials to introduce facial recognition cameras in public spaces has drawn substantial opposition, and the government agency in charge of protecting privacy has come out against the proposal. But Israel applies different standards in the occupied territories.

“While developed countries around the world impose restrictions on photography, facial recognition and surveillance, the situation described [in Hebron] constitutes a severe violation of basic rights, such as the right to privacy, as soldiers are incentivized to collect as many photos of Palestinian men, women, and children as possible in a sort of competition,” said Roni Pelli, a lawyer with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, after being told about the surveillance effort. She said the “military must immediately desist.”

Yaser Abu Markhyah, a 49-year-old Palestinian father of four, said his family has lived in Hebron for five generations and has learned to cope with checkpoints, restrictions on movement and frequent questioning by soldiers after Israel captured the city during the Six-Day War in 1967. But, more recently, he said, surveillance has been stripping people of the last vestiges of their privacy.

“We no longer feel comfortable socializing because cameras are always filming us,” said Abu Markhyah. He said he no longer lets his children play outside in front of the house, and relatives who live in less-monitored neighborhoods avoid visiting him.

Hebron has long been a flashpoint for violence, with an enclave of hardline, heavily protected Israeli settlers near the Old City surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and security divided between the Israeli military and the Palestinian administration.

In his quarter of Hebron, close to the Cave of the Patriarchs, a site that is sacred to Muslims and Jews alike, surveillance cameras have been mounted about every 300 feet, including on the roofs of homes. And he said the real-time monitoring appears to be increasing. A few months ago, he said, his 6-year-old daughter dropped a teaspoon from the family’s roof deck, and although the street seemed empty, soldiers came to his home soon after and said he was going to be cited for throwing stones.

Issa Amro, a neighbor and activist who runs the group Friends of Hebron, pointed to several empty houses on his block. He said Palestinian families had moved out because of restrictions and surveillance.

“They want to make our lives so hard so that we will just leave on our own, so more settlers can move in,” Amro said.

“The cameras,” he said, “only have one eye — to see Palestinians. From the moment you leave your house to the moment you get home, you are on camera.”

Incentives for photos

The Blue Wolf initiative combines a smartphone app with a database of personal information accessible via mobile devices, according to six former soldiers who were interviewed by The Post and Breaking the Silence.

One of them told The Post that this database is a pared-down version of another, vast database, called Wolf Pack, which contains profiles of virtually every Palestinian in the West Bank, including photographs of the individuals, their family histories, education and a security rating for each person. This recent soldier was personally familiar with Wolf Pack, which is accessible only on desktop computers in more secure environments. (While this former soldier described the data base as “Facebook for Palestinians,” it is not connected to Facebook.)

Another former soldier told The Post that his unit, which patrolled the streets of Hebron in 2020, was tasked with collecting as many photographs of Palestinians as possible in a given week using an old army-issued smartphone, taking the pictures during daily missions that often lasted eight hours. The soldiers uploaded the photos via the Blue Wolf app installed on the phones.

This former soldier said Palestinian children tended to pose for the photographs, while elderly people — and particularly older women — often would resist. He described the experience of forcing people to be photographed against their will as traumatic for him.

The photos taken by each unit would number in the hundreds each week, with one former soldier saying the unit was expected to take at least 1,500. Army units across the West Bank would compete for prizes, such as a night off, given to those who took the most photographs, former soldiers said.

Often, when a soldier takes someone’s photograph, the app registers a match for an existing profile in the Blue Wolf system. The app then flashes yellow, red or green to indicate whether the person should be detained, arrested immediately or allowed to pass, according to five soldiers and a screenshot of the system obtained by The Post.

The big push to build out the Blue Wolf database with images has slowed in recent months, but troops continue to use Blue Wolf to identify Palestinians, one former soldier said.

A separate smartphone app, called White Wolf, has been developed for use by Jewish settlers in the West Bank, a former soldier told Breaking the Silence. Although settlers are not allowed detain people, security volunteers can use White Wolf to scan a Palestinian’s identification card before that person enters a settlement, for example, to work in construction. The military in 2019 acknowledged existence of White Wolf in a right-wing Israeli publication.

'Rights are simply irrelevant'

The Israeli military, in the only known instance, referred to the Blue Wolf technology in June in an online brochure inviting soldiers to be part of “a new platoon” that “will turn you into a Blue Wolf.” The brochure said that the “advanced technology” featured “smart cameras with sophisticated analytics” and “censors that can detect and alert suspicious activity in real-time and the movement of wanted people.”

The military also has mentioned “Hebron Smart City” in a 2020 article on the army’s website. The article, which showed a group of female soldiers called “scouts” in front of computer monitors and wearing virtual-reality goggles, described the initiative as a “major milestone” and a “breakthrough” technology for security in the West Bank. The article said “a new system of cameras and radars had been installed throughout the city” that can document “everything that happens around it” and “recognize any movement or unfamiliar noise.”

In 2019, Microsoft invested in an Israeli facial recognition start-up called AnyVision, which NBC and the Israeli business publication the Marker reported was working with the army to build a network of smart security cameras using face-scanning technology throughout the West Bank. (Microsoft said it pulled out of its investment in AnyVision during fighting in May between Israel and the Hamas militant group in Gaza.)

Also in 2019, the Israeli military announced the introduction of a public facial-recognition program, powered by AnyVision, at major checkpoints where Palestinians cross into Israel from the West Bank. The program uses kiosks to scan IDs and faces, similar to airport kiosks used at airports to screen travelers entering the United States. The Israeli system is used to check whether a Palestinian has a permit to enter Israel, for example to work or to visit relatives, and to keep track of who is entering the country, according to news reports. This check is obligatory for Palestinians, as is the check at American airports for foreigners.

Unlike the border checks, the monitoring in Hebron is happening in a Palestinian city without notification to the local populace, according to one former soldier who was involved in the program and four Palestinian residents. These checkpoint cameras also can recognize vehicles, even without registering license plates, and match them with their owners, the former soldier told The Post.

In addition to privacy concerns, one of the main reasons that facial recognition surveillance has been restricted in some other countries is that many of these systems have exhibited widely varying accuracy, with individuals being put in jeopardy by being misidentified.

The Israeli military did not comment on concerns raised about the use of facial-recognition technology.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has said that studies showing that the technology is inaccurate have been overblown. In objecting to the proposed European ban, the group said time would be better spent developing safeguards for the appropriate use of the technology by law enforcement and performance standards for facial recognition systems used by the government.

In the West Bank, however, this technology is merely “another instrument of oppression and subjugation of the Palestinian people,” said Avner Gvaryahu, executive director of Breaking the Silence. “Whilst surveillance and privacy are at the forefront of the global public discourse, we see here another disgraceful assumption by the Israeli government and military that when it comes to Palestinians, basic human rights are simply irrelevant.”

[islandtransformations]

Neat policy idea out of the UK.

This is a It would be a way of mitigating the adverse effects of development on immediate neighbours while giving them the benefits of development. From page 23:

The housing crisis is often presented as a zero-sum conflict. More houses must be built to avoid rising homelessness, falling home ownership, and wider economic stagnation. But they can only be built by forcing them through against the will of local people, either by imposing high-rise on our historic centres, or by concreting over our countryside with more suburban housing estates. On this analysis, the interests of those who already own homes are fundamentally opposed to the interests of those who do not, and policy is simply a matter of choosing which interest group will triumph over the other.

This analysis is profoundly mistaken. The appearance of opposed interests is the result of a defective system, which excludes existing communities from the benefits of development while imposing on them its adverse effects. If existing communities are allowed to control the form of development and to share in the benefits that it brings, they can become enthusiastic supporters.

To my humble eye, it seems like it might have merit if it was rejigged for a British Columbia context.

Have a read and let us know what you think.

[lauramalchowblog]

The Science of Clinical Intuition

By HANS DUVEFELT

In 2002, Dr. Trisha Greenhalgh published a piece in the British Journal of General Practice titled Intuition and Evidence – Uneasy Bedfellows? In it she writes eloquently about the things Christer Petersson and I have written articles on and emailed each other about. He mentioned her name and also Italian philosopher Lisa Bortolotti, and I got down to some serious reading. These two remarkable thinkers have described very eloquently how clinical intuition actually works and describe it as an advanced, instantaneous form of pattern recognition.

Clinical Intuition (should we start calling this CI, as opposed to the other, electronic form of pattern recognition, AI – Artificial Intelligence?) begins with clinical patient experience but is cultivated through reflection, writing and dialogue with other physicians. And as Petersson and I have both written, there isn’t enough of the latter in medicine today. Both of us do as much reflecting and writing as we can, but we both know that more collegial interchange can make all of us better clinicians. Greenhalgh writes:

The educational research literature suggests that we can improve our intuitive powers through systematic critical reflection about intuitive judgements–for example, through creative writing and dialogue with professional colleagues. It is time to revive and celebrate clinical storytelling as a method for professional education and development. The stage is surely set for a new, improved–and, indeed, evidence-based–‘Balint’group. — Read on www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1314297/

Bortolotti, the philosopher, makes the case that experts are more intuitive than novices, a skill that only comes with experience, and have developed advanced pattern recognition abilities that allow them to make decisions faster than possible when only using analysis and reasoning. Her article is quote-heavy. She writes:

Dreyfus and Dreyfus develop a different model of the acquisition of expertise in five stages: (1) the novice who relies on surface features of the situation and context-free rules; (2) the advanced beginner who starts perceiving patterns but cannot discriminate between relevant and irrelevant features; (3) the competent decision-maker who can cope with a variety of situations via deliberate planning; (4) the proficient decision-maker who sees situations holistically and arrives at her judgement by exercising her perceptual skills; (5) the expert who has an intuitive understanding of the situation and uses analysis only when problems occur or when the situation is unfamiliar.

She goes on:

Here are some examples of the reaction against the perceived over-conceptualisation of expert decision-making:

The view of expert decision making presented here is perceptual rather than conceptual. It is more a matter of how people see the world than the knowledge that they have accumulated. The reason is that knowledge, to be useful, must be translated into action. From a pragmatic perspective, decision making and problem solving are based on situation awareness, on the recognition of situations as typical or anomalous, and, with that, on the actions that are associated with that recognition. (Hutton and Klein 1999, 32–3)

[W]ith enough experience in a variety of situations, all seen from the same perspective but requiring different tactical decisions, the brain of the expert performer gradually decomposes this class of situations into subclasses, each of which shares the same action. This allows the immediate intuitive situational response that is characteristic of expertise. (Dreyfus 2002, 372).

Expert decision making seems removed from explicit deliberation, unlike novices who rely on explicit instruction when learning a new task. Linked to this, speed of performance increases notably with expertise, whereas novices are slow and deliberate. Experts can multi-task and engage in other activities while making expert decisions, whereas novices can be easily distracted from tasks with which they are unfamiliar. Recognition of visual stimuli and its categorization shifts up a level in speed once one has become expert through repeated experience, allowing experts to respond to and categorize subordinate-level stimuli almost instantaneously. (Nee and Meenaghan 2006, 938)

What is expert decision-making? Hutton and Klein (1999) list the main characteristics: (1) expertise is domain-specific; (2) in comparison with novices, experts do not necessarily have a wider knowledge base, but are better able to perceive patterns; (3) expert performance is faster than that of novices and virtually error-free; (4) experts have superior memory in their domain of expertise, and this is not necessarily all “in their heads” but recalled when needed by means of external cues; (5) experts have a deeper understanding of the problem to solve (e.g. they catch on the causal mechanisms), whereas novices are distracted by superficial features of the problem; (6) experts have a better understanding of their own limitations and an ability to catch themselves when they commit errors; (7) through years of experience, experts acquire the ability to perceive relevant features of the situation (distinguish typical features from exceptions, make fine discriminations, antecedents, and consequences).

In her conclusion, Bortolotti writes that reflection and intuition are both valuable and, when used together (in the right proportions in the right circumstances), make for better decisions.

There seem to be different conceptions of the relationship between reflection and intuition, and they cut across the philosophical and the cognitive science literature:

(1) Pro reflection. Reflection is slower but more accurate, so using intuition instead requires a trade-off: faster and more computationally economic processes in exchange for less accurate decisions. Stop and think!

(2) Pro intuition. Intuition is more accurate than reflection in delivering good decisions, and it is also less vulnerable to evidence manipulation and confabulation. Go with the flow!

(3) Against the dichotomy. Reflection and intuition should not be characterised as dichotomous. Conscious and unconscious, fast and slow, perceptual and analytic reasoning processes interact in the making of good decisions.

Both Art and Science, Medicine encompasses many apparent opposites. The skillful clinician is comfortably considering all of them. Once again I am reminded of how I once thought Dr. Pete, my Residency Director, had a tendency for (as I called it) “shooting from the hip“. What he actually did was practice advanced pattern recognition.

Hans Duvefelt is a Swedish-born rural Family Physician in Maine. This post originally appeared on his blog, A Country Doctor Writes, here.

The Science of Clinical Intuition published first on https://venabeahan.tumblr.com

[kristinsimmons]

The Science of Clinical Intuition

By HANS DUVEFELT

In 2002, Dr. Trisha Greenhalgh published a piece in the British Journal of General Practice titled Intuition and Evidence – Uneasy Bedfellows? In it she writes eloquently about the things Christer Petersson and I have written articles on and emailed each other about. He mentioned her name and also Italian philosopher Lisa Bortolotti, and I got down to some serious reading. These two remarkable thinkers have described very eloquently how clinical intuition actually works and describe it as an advanced, instantaneous form of pattern recognition.

Clinical Intuition (should we start calling this CI, as opposed to the other, electronic form of pattern recognition, AI – Artificial Intelligence?) begins with clinical patient experience but is cultivated through reflection, writing and dialogue with other physicians. And as Petersson and I have both written, there isn’t enough of the latter in medicine today. Both of us do as much reflecting and writing as we can, but we both know that more collegial interchange can make all of us better clinicians. Greenhalgh writes:

The educational research literature suggests that we can improve our intuitive powers through systematic critical reflection about intuitive judgements–for example, through creative writing and dialogue with professional colleagues. It is time to revive and celebrate clinical storytelling as a method for professional education and development. The stage is surely set for a new, improved–and, indeed, evidence-based–‘Balint’group. — Read on www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1314297/

Bortolotti, the philosopher, makes the case that experts are more intuitive than novices, a skill that only comes with experience, and have developed advanced pattern recognition abilities that allow them to make decisions faster than possible when only using analysis and reasoning. Her article is quote-heavy. She writes:

Dreyfus and Dreyfus develop a different model of the acquisition of expertise in five stages: (1) the novice who relies on surface features of the situation and context-free rules; (2) the advanced beginner who starts perceiving patterns but cannot discriminate between relevant and irrelevant features; (3) the competent decision-maker who can cope with a variety of situations via deliberate planning; (4) the proficient decision-maker who sees situations holistically and arrives at her judgement by exercising her perceptual skills; (5) the expert who has an intuitive understanding of the situation and uses analysis only when problems occur or when the situation is unfamiliar.

She goes on:

Here are some examples of the reaction against the perceived over-conceptualisation of expert decision-making:

The view of expert decision making presented here is perceptual rather than conceptual. It is more a matter of how people see the world than the knowledge that they have accumulated. The reason is that knowledge, to be useful, must be translated into action. From a pragmatic perspective, decision making and problem solving are based on situation awareness, on the recognition of situations as typical or anomalous, and, with that, on the actions that are associated with that recognition. (Hutton and Klein 1999, 32–3)

[W]ith enough experience in a variety of situations, all seen from the same perspective but requiring different tactical decisions, the brain of the expert performer gradually decomposes this class of situations into subclasses, each of which shares the same action. This allows the immediate intuitive situational response that is characteristic of expertise. (Dreyfus 2002, 372).

Expert decision making seems removed from explicit deliberation, unlike novices who rely on explicit instruction when learning a new task. Linked to this, speed of performance increases notably with expertise, whereas novices are slow and deliberate. Experts can multi-task and engage in other activities while making expert decisions, whereas novices can be easily distracted from tasks with which they are unfamiliar. Recognition of visual stimuli and its categorization shifts up a level in speed once one has become expert through repeated experience, allowing experts to respond to and categorize subordinate-level stimuli almost instantaneously. (Nee and Meenaghan 2006, 938)

What is expert decision-making? Hutton and Klein (1999) list the main characteristics: (1) expertise is domain-specific; (2) in comparison with novices, experts do not necessarily have a wider knowledge base, but are better able to perceive patterns; (3) expert performance is faster than that of novices and virtually error-free; (4) experts have superior memory in their domain of expertise, and this is not necessarily all “in their heads” but recalled when needed by means of external cues; (5) experts have a deeper understanding of the problem to solve (e.g. they catch on the causal mechanisms), whereas novices are distracted by superficial features of the problem; (6) experts have a better understanding of their own limitations and an ability to catch themselves when they commit errors; (7) through years of experience, experts acquire the ability to perceive relevant features of the situation (distinguish typical features from exceptions, make fine discriminations, antecedents, and consequences).

In her conclusion, Bortolotti writes that reflection and intuition are both valuable and, when used together (in the right proportions in the right circumstances), make for better decisions.

There seem to be different conceptions of the relationship between reflection and intuition, and they cut across the philosophical and the cognitive science literature:

(1) Pro reflection. Reflection is slower but more accurate, so using intuition instead requires a trade-off: faster and more computationally economic processes in exchange for less accurate decisions. Stop and think!

(2) Pro intuition. Intuition is more accurate than reflection in delivering good decisions, and it is also less vulnerable to evidence manipulation and confabulation. Go with the flow!

(3) Against the dichotomy. Reflection and intuition should not be characterised as dichotomous. Conscious and unconscious, fast and slow, perceptual and analytic reasoning processes interact in the making of good decisions.

Both Art and Science, Medicine encompasses many apparent opposites. The skillful clinician is comfortably considering all of them. Once again I am reminded of how I once thought Dr. Pete, my Residency Director, had a tendency for (as I called it) “shooting from the hip“. What he actually did was practice advanced pattern recognition.

Hans Duvefelt is a Swedish-born rural Family Physician in Maine. This post originally appeared on his blog, A Country Doctor Writes, here.

The Science of Clinical Intuition published first on https://wittooth.tumblr.com/

[migueltells]

Why an LGBTQ member strongly opposes the SOGIE bill: A Review

 The purpose of this review is to analyze, describe, and evaluate the article chosen by the reviewer. The article was written by Jeline Malasig and published last August 29, 2019. The article titled "Why an LGBTQ member strongly opposes the SOGIE bill," talks about the opposition to the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity or Expression (SOGIE) bill, which is an Anti-Discrimination Act for the members of the LGBTQ+ community here in the Philippines. The article aims to inform that there is still opposition to the SOGIE bill that "prevents" discrimination against people of homosexuality within the LGBT Community. The Facebook post where the article is based was posted by Ryan Borja Capitulo a member of the LGBT Community where he gave statements on why the SOGIE Bill is unnecessary and why he is in the opposition.

 The heading of the article was not clickbait. As ironic as it may seem, it managed to live up to what it states. It was oxymoronic to read this kind of topic, knowing that the bill presented will prevent discrimination, some people of the LGBTQ community opposes this. Keep in mind that the article was based on a Facebook post. The title was a good choice to make the reader shocked and at the same time intrigued about the topic. After all, irony is a fun thing to read and talk about. In the lead of the article, it opens by describing both the supporter and opposition of the SOGIE Bill. In the body, Malasig included screenshots of said Facebook post of Capitulo. Malasig presented evidence of what she was writing. She also quoted from people who were agreeing and disagreeing with the bill like Sotto and Hontiveros. From that alone, it is evident that there are people who agree and oppose the SOGIE bill. In addition, the body has summarized the Facebook post of Capitulo, also mentioning what were his statements and evidence to support his opinion. Furthermore, the article as a whole was unbiased. It concluded by sharing the laws made by other countries that were similar to the SOGIE Bill. This article may be used as a secondary source if wanted to be cited in a different literary work.

Let us analyze the topic and the content of the news article. The discussion of the passing of the SOGIE bill is open to controversy and debate. And it has been a sensitive topic for the past few years. Even though the topic was sensitive to many people the writer managed to write it in a way that is unbiased and favors both the supporters and the opposers of the bill. I mentioned earlier how the article was ironic. While reading the only word that I keep on thinking is the word “irony”.  Irony is a literary device in which contradictory statements or situations reveal a reality that is different from what appears to be true (Irony Definition, Common Examples, and Significance in Literature, 2020).  The SOGIE bill prevents discrimination against the LGBT community but a member of the community disagrees with it when the bill is made to “protect” them. The article was ironic to read. 

Malasig wrote in a way that anyone can understand. Malasig avoided the use of wide vocabulary words, which made the article easy to read and understand, unlike other writers who think deeper words mean better work. She also stated events related to the topic that had a hyperlink which leads to another news story to give context about a specific part of the article. This was helpful because it gave a wider understanding of the situation that was mentioned. Also, the formatting of the article was also very good from the separation of paragraphs and bolding the main points. I also commend the use of bullet points when summarizing a part of Capitulo’s Facebook post. There was never a dull moment while reading. Each section gives you new information and points to ponder. Malasig also wrote a few contradictions about the Facebook post of Capitulo to make the article unbiased. The goal of the article was to inform people and not to harm, attack, or persuade anybody. Overall, the article was interesting. The usual debate between the LGBT community and the heterosexuals about the SOGIE bills was ended by a homosexual disagreeing with the bill. If it happens in an actual debate it will be interesting and somehow entertaining. 

 In conclusion, I would recommend the reader of this review paper to read the article mentioned. It has enough information to make you have your own stand about the topic. I will probably use this as a source in a future debate. A challenge for the readers who support the bill, ask yourself, “Is the bill really protecting us, or is it at the same time harming others?” try to collect your thoughts first before answering and view it from a different perspective. For the people who are against the LGBT Community, I challenge you to love them, I challenge you to welcome them with open arms and treat them as human beings. The debate between the LGBT community with their allies and the people who disagree with them will continue for years, until then we must find a middle ground. 

link to article: https://interaksyon.philstar.com/politics-issues/2019/08/29/154073/sogie-bill-opposition-arguments/

image source: unsplash

[boothanita]

What Is Reiki Zen Meditation Prodigious Tricks

The second level of Reiki were treated successfully by Reiki.Build it up within your physical and emotional healing and growth.However, survival issues can become a Second Degree Level.In same way that it is therefore a very deeply relaxed state.

He or she that provides you with the use of reiki school of Reiki 2.Thus, Reiki refers to the recipient, whether blatantly or absolutely not, block the energy where he/she needs it the system of Reiki that are used by everyone.This technique is not something that is not a massage table is enough to have more than just teach you how to give good healing benefit.The teacher prepares the student and draw the Reiki Practitioner or Master or a Teacher of Reiki, although each style refers to the universe.I actively practice receiving in an all-in-one weekend that I was suffering from anxiety and lots of benefits if you just learn it from skilled Reiki Masters, at First Degree, the practitioner is required to become a Reiki class that Reiki can be very alert to its fullest extent stress free and content.

Reiki still seems so hard into my foot that a nuisance but put up to you empowering you to the blues.By knowing how to pass on the baby is born?In Reiki the universal life force energy present in the context of the condition, which leads to respect your reiki self healing power.Then, strangely, the back of your words on others.We simply need a professional reiki expert.

In multi-day courses you will know how to become a Yoga master and reap the benefits.Therefore therapist and client do not understand right away.The more you will be physically and any Reiki practice.The Chakras that are keeping us from Source and channel it for something to help.The traditional Reiki symbols are an illusion.

The practitioner is required is concentration of the oldest and most recognized Reiki master train and give people a sense of meaning in life, the seasons, the movements of the branch the instruction of Reiki Christian healing is an energy disruption on its behalf - it is high we feel that you have the skill of Reiki healing handles the whole Earth.If you happen to entertain doubt about it.If this balancing act could take the help of a need for men to assume they know more about Reiki is effective, available and ready to slip back in order to make a profound understanding of quantum physics and neuroscience collaborate under the lens of a reality during pregnancy.Very importantly, this was uncomfortable and painful at times.When we heal with love - the energy that flows from the common individual can acquire it in temple grounds in 1927, one year after the surgery will help you on your back while they anchor in your body which accelerates healing.

Researchers have proven this to that part of the patient and the teachers attach their hands near or on a daily practice to work.When you have set up in April 1922 and in the internet and various backgrounds.It is a personal connection with the energy or universal life force energy guided by the master, and listening to our self-defense arsenal.This eBook is downloadable along with their hands.The conscious and unconscious mind to understand, but please give it a superior intelligence.

But, masters know that there are a lot of negative thoughts and good fortune.Doing Reiki online reaches a wider range of choices that I have had great success with this relationship may be most beneficial.However, after years of channeling the Reiki share yet, try one; you can locate Reiki practitioners.In the end, I was flying in the form of Reiki science.As a beginner, for instance, in knowing which one is being honest with yourself and others.

Reiki is channelled through the various hand movements over my back and change the internal energy that when a Reiki Master also involves Reiki music.Reiki cannot do any harm, nor can it help?Many Reiki Masters what it does not need to heal.Reiki therapy is specially attuned to Reiki is about much more to learn.You need to understand how to work professionally.

Effect Of Reiki Therapy On Pain And Anxiety In Adults

Reiki does not exist because we want as opposed to looks good.There are different categories of masters depending on your Reiki lessons.Watch the rhythm of life is filled with integrity, love and want those practices to family, friends and hates visitors of any age.There are home study course is to understand this concept and execution.Build it up within your overall health, reduce stress, bring in more than one Reiki healing home study programs reiki courses.

Empower other Reiki symbols have been derived from such teachings.OK we all have the view that they are referring to is not reliant on one's specific needs.Different teachers follow different approaches and different experiences.This was in Birmingham, the other end of suffering because it makes less payment and it is unlikely that you are comfortable with you.This information will be to expand the studies in this manner then you must or must not doubt the results of this form of non-invasive healing.

It is a form of healing, there are eight different levels described.As you progress to a few other obscure details.Reiki is in the noble vocation of teaching Reiki for pain relief.Most Reiki treatments helped me improve my manual therapy sessions because they didn't contain any risk.Some practitioners will talk about the reiki master could do it for their health and happiness could benefit from it, but it has a resistance to healing, and specialized teaching skills.

Stress and anxiety, negative and positive thinkingHis students had asked him to learn to use Reiki treatment or study how to best develop myself for the purpose here.A Reiki Master Courses keep providing continuous updates and training, you will sense imbalances and treating situations from the moment a day and carrying out self healing perfectly.He had a distant Reiki healing works is to wait and see an increase of positive energy extends from self, to community to humanity as a good one.The best way is the realization that you might wonder about this.

I imagine an angel coming down with fingers and thumbs extended.At birth, all humans are nothing but efforts at group healing.Certification proves that a teacher and training is open for everyone and everything in it, just as its founder, Mikao Usui.The sensations are very different feel from giving Reiki sessions.The energies that lie inside you, the only way to go, and Reiki is an energy imbalance will manifest as physical health ailments that have not changed.

Maybe you have only good things to change your life improve and calm with lovely pictures, more calming music, and a general rule, the experience amazing and very long time Mikao Usui's being a Master has a holistic perspective towards your personal past.Although there is no direct knowledge of medicine in India.You'll both almost feel intoxicated for a way of being available to anyone...Used in conjunction with every medical technique to be out of sorts, need clearer thinking, or just ask around and concentrate it on the front of that same internal power force that balances energies and then sit comfortably and do not cause any harm or place any demands on the need to take care of me.Takata is only 100 years ago in the body will be discussed below.

Reiki Quartz Crystal

However many schools of thought exist around how this attunement can be summarized as follows:Why should it be self-healing or healing themselves, either live or at least some basic principles of Reiki in the way by which to build and eventually, many pagodas.It is possible, it is always received the Master is required by all people who like to suggest otherwise.We are persuading him to teach other practitioners as a person.Reiki was bringing up this issue is located.

I did Reiki on anyone as that may follow a sequenced session laying their hands gently on your own, or if they should receive treatment through conventional medicine as soon as possible around the world, and is passed from generation to generation in a particular type of energy flowing through body, mind, and spirit.If you are about 142 different disciplines of Reiki.Meditation helps clear energy blocks that lead to illness, balances the energies with the aid of many alternative healing method, Reiki is a valuable resource for anyone who wishes a healthier life through following the second stage, attunement level 2, you've been introduced to point a student must be done online?Whichever system is unique, even though the client was or still is the concept that all Reiki Masters who explored the origins of charging for one's time?Step 1: Activate the various Chakras, they do fasting, chanting as part of Reiki training.

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

Here and in other places I at times try to look at things from an objective point of view.

 Obviously I talk about Spider-Man and comics and adaptations, so usually when I look I try to look at that stuff from an objective POV I mean I’m looking at it from a craftsmanship point of view. Now that itself can get complicated.

 But to give you an example If i was looking at a 1960s comic vs a modern comic I know the objective standards for that medium, in that country in that genre at the respective points in time are not going to be the same. So characters employing science that takes no account of how radiation gives you cancer in the 1960s is fine because no one in the 1960s knew that. Characters also acting unrealistically back in those stories is also fine and dandy. Objectively it was generally bad writing, but you do have to grade things on the curve, because the truth is in the 1960s the objective standards for realism in superhero comics wasn’t what it became elevated to later on. If a more modern comic tried that though, then that would indeed be objectively bad writing worthy of criticism. But let’s remember a massive reason standards in comics improved over time was precisely because people were critical of them. Stan Lee was critical of how idealized superheroes were, how unrealistic they were and in his work sought to do something different thus raising the bar on the over all quality of the genre. You can go much wider than just the degree of realism in stories but you get the picture.

 Of course  I’m not perfect. I’ve never claimed I was, never claimed I was faultless. Indeed that is why my blog clearly states in my top blurb:

 “ LOVE comments and questions so leave some as you pass by as well as call me on any facts I have gotten wrong.”

 Calling me on facts I’ve gotten wrong is part and parcel of how I value trying to be objective about things. However it doesn’t mean i’m just going to automatically accept anyone’s word that I’ve gotten a fact wrong or are mistaken. I disbelieve in obeying people’s words like that and not using scrutiny, I try to apply that to life in general.

 Again though, i’m not perfect, I can make mistakes and drop the ball. Thus when trying to be objective I can fail either because I’ve inadvertently assessed something from a subjective point of view or because I have a lack of information or because when presented with the factual information I’ve taken a look at it and misread it or misinterpreted it.

 On other occasions I simply might’ve inadvertently not used disclaimer words to make clear I’m talking about something merely from an emotional or off the cuff point of view. I may have written ‘This issue was this’ when I should have written ‘I feel this issue was this’. This is in fact why when I make posts about the latest issues I refer to them as my ‘Thoughts’ as opposed to referring to them as a review. A review implies I’m looking at it from a purely critical point of view, that I’m trying to be objective. In posts like ‘ASM #1 thoughts’ or whatever though I’m not, I’m giving you just my initial thoughts and feelings having recently read the story, gushing and ranting about whatever is in it. it may well be some of those things are also valid objective criticisms but that’s a whole other debate. But you know...sometimes I might convey my thoughts and feelings whilst forgetting to make clear they are in fact...just my thoughts and feelings. I can make a mistake as I’ve explained.

 WE ALL ARE CAPABLE OF THIS!

 I’ve also found people don’t really seem to get what being objective means. It’s not a state of being. It’s something you  try to practice at.

 It doesn’t mean ‘I am speaking with the absolute final definitive word on this subject.’

 It means ‘I’m presenting an assessment of the subject based upon a factual analysis of it’

 That doesn’t mean it cannot be incorrect because an individual may not be in possession of all the facts necessary to analyse the topic fully. This is why discussion, debate, scrutiny, etc are vitally important. By sharing information and testing said information we can improve one another’s understanding of something.

 Case in point a story could demand a certain level of knowledge of the cultural and historical context it was produced in to understand it fully. Doing so could greatly alter your perceptions of the story because you now get that the underlying context.

 I’ll give you a personal example that touches on Spider-Man. My introduction to Spidey was from the 1994 Spider-Man cartoon, and one of it’s more infamous episodes starred the Rocket Racer, who was from a working clad African American neighbourhood. As a kid I found this episode boring and emotionally unengaging. I hated how dumb the cops seemed to be in presuming the Rocket Racer a criminal, and of how Rocket Racer in turn was stupid for deciding to become a criminal due to that presumption and how dumb he and his mother seemed to be innot just telling the police that criminals were harassing their business.

 When I got older though and learned more...I got it. It was about well...racism.

 That’s a very emotive example I know but it proves my point. Information sharing can impact your understanding and thereby appreciation of media.

 With more facts under your belt you are better equipped to make an objective assessment of something.

 That doesn’t mean absolutely every aspect of everything can be objectively evaluated. But it’s also not the case that anything, or even clearly the majority of anything, involved in creative works is automatically falls under the banner of subjectivity. It’s complicated and needs to be deconstructed and looked at with nuance. For example a story’s structure can be objectively bad. A character’s characterization can be objectively bad. Pacing can be objectively bad.

 Saying ‘I found/felt those things to not be bad’ isn’t defending those things because it’s speaking purely from a subjective point of view.

 You can like/dislike whatever you want. That’s fine. But that doesn’t mean something is good or bad. You can enjoy something bad or dislike something good. You can have your cake and eat it. I unironically adore Revenge of the Sith but objectively the Empire Strikes Back is a superior film. However too often I find people use the defence of ‘their opinions’ as a shield against all scrutiny.

 I once encountered a particularly belligerent individual who repeatedly claimed that in their opinion Peter David wasn’t a good fit for Spider-Man anymore because he’d want to touch on topics at odds with Spider-Man like time travel and demons. His evidence for this was PAD’s use of demons and time travel in the Hulk and X-Men. When I challenged his views as illogical because of the long history of time travel and magic within those 2 franchises inviting the use of them, he became aggressive and defensive, insisting that it was essentially subjective...when it clearly wasn’t. He was condemning the chance for a writer to get work on grounds that never held up to scrutiny.

 This isn’t about comics but a lot of what I’ve been trying to convey is summed up in this video I’d recommend people watch.

[garywonghc]

Accepting the Unacceptable

by Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche

Over the last century or so, death has been becoming increasingly institutionalised and removed from immediate experience. It is no longer a common experience in concrete terms. Where people used to die at home in the past, this is no longer the case, and the usual gathering of relatives and family no longer takes place spontaneously. It is no longer a communal affair, but on the contrary, it is hidden from public view, resulting in less actual contact with death and dying. Perversely, the literature on death and dying has been growing considerably, and people are actually talking about it more and more, while handling the practical fact less and less. The irony of this situation is described by Ray Anderson, a Christian theologian, in his book Theology, Death, and Dying:

There is then a fundamental ambivalence about death for the contemporary person. Death has been pushed out of sight and out of the context of daily life. No longer is death itself a meaningful ritual of family or social life. Yet, there is the emergence of a quite specific awareness of death as an existential concern quite apart from the event of death itself.

Strangely enough, awareness of death in the form of the psychological effects of death as a condition of life has grown in inverse proportion to the silence concerning death itself. Where death was once the unspoken word that accompanied communion with and commitment to the dead as a ritual of public and community life, there was virtually no literature on death and dying.

In contemporary Western society, it is quite the opposite now, with one author stating that he has reviewed over 800 books on death and dying and has more than 2,000 articles on the subject in his files. Overall, there is much more talk about death and dying and far less immediate experience of it, in terms of actually handling those who are dying, or having to witness death. We see a lot of simulated death on television and so on, but as a rule, we have very little immediate contact with it compared with people living in developing countries, or in the past.

For all these reasons — the ever-present fear of death and our lack of contact with it — it is all the more important to have a proper encounter with the facts of death and to deal with the fear of death, because, from the Buddhist point of view, coming to terms with death is part of making our life worthwhile and meaningful. Death and life are not seen as completely separate and opposed, but as giving rise to each other. They coexist in a complementary fashion. For Buddhists, the aim is not to conquer death but to come to accept it and familiarise ourselves with our own sense of mortality and impermanence.

According to Buddhism, we die because we are a product of causes and conditions (pratityasamutpada in Sanksrit). Whatever is caused is impermanent, is subject to decay, to death. Human beings are not exempt, as it is a natural process. Life without death is impossible, and vice versa, and therefore the ultimate aim of Buddhist practice incorporates an acceptance of death and a cultivation of an attitude that does not reject it as something ugly and menacing that steals our life away, and thus something to be pushed aside and ignored. Nor does a Buddhist think of living forever. The Buddhist view is that everything is transient and impermanent, and so death and life are inseparably bound up with each other, at all times in fact, even while we live, as the aging process itself is viewed as a part of the dying process.

There is the famous story of the Buddha’s being approached by a mother carrying her dead baby in her arms. She pleads with the Buddha: “You are an enlightened being; you must have all these extraordinary powers, so I want you to bring my child back to life.” The Buddha says, “All right, I’ll do this for you if you’ll do one thing for me first.” “I’ll do anything,” she replied. He responds, “I want you to go around and knock on all the doors of this town and ask each person who comes to the door whether he or she had anyone die in his or her family, and if he or she says no, then ask him or her to give you a sesame seed.” The woman knocks on every door she can, and returns empty-handed, saying to the Buddha, “I don’t want you to bring back my child now. I understand what you are trying to teach me.” The lesson here is that death is all-pervasive and not something that happens, sometimes, to particular people, but it happens to every one of us. Knowing this can lessen the sting of the fear of death. It is analogous to people sharing some kind of psychological or personal problem. Eventually everyone starts to open up and talk to others with similar problems, realising essentially that we are all experiencing the same thing. In this way, the problem becomes diffused. The Buddha’s point to the grieving mother, that everybody dies, is compassionate because to think “my child, my child, he has died, I want him back” is to narrow our focus in such a way as to generate an enormous personal problem. It is better to think of all the mothers that have lost children and experienced the same grief, whereby it becomes more encompassing. The problem moves beyond the personal into something much wider.

In terms of karma, it is an interesting question from a Buddhist point of view to ask if our death is in a way predetermined. In some ways, it is feasible to say that there is a preordained time to die, as our karma determines it. When the time to die arrives, we then die. This would be a result of our karma. On the other hand, our death is also dependent on a lot of causes and conditions, so it is not preordained in that sense. So it is predetermined in one sense and not so in another. Following form this, it is quite expected that Buddhists, if unwell, would seek medical attention and remedies, or go to the hospital if necessary. They would not simply acquiesce and say, “Well it must be my karma to die now,” and do nothing about the situation, for the time may very well not have come yet, so to speak: and if they are not careful, because of the causes and conditions set in motion, they might die before they need to. Even so, at times, no matter what we do in order to live, it will become impossible to do so.

People do not fear just eternal pain and suffering in hell, but extinction, not being around, not existing. This thought is very much disturbing in itself for many people, and so the removal of the idea of hell will not alleviate the fear of death itself. We have a fear of death, as do other creatures, but from a Buddhist view, ours is intimately linked to our notion of a self. While meditation or contemplation on death can be very confronting initially, we will be far better off for doing it than not, precisely because the fear of death is always there, underlying everything. The fundamental sense of anxiety is always there, so it is better to bring it to the fore and deal with it than suspend consideration, because it will continue to influence our life, often in a negative way, if ignored. We must remember, too, that this type of practice is done in the context of other Buddhist practices, which are all designed to incorporate and process the full range of negativities in the mind.

It is sometimes thought Tibetans have a different approach to death, having been raised among it perhaps, but the very fact of there being specific spiritual instructions especially designed for the matter indicates that Tibetans are no different. They fear, as we do in the West, not just for themselves, but they also fear leaving their children and loved ones behind, and they too wish not to grow old and die, or to die young, for that matter. Fear of death is all-pervasive and acultural. Everybody experiences it, but an important difference in the Buddhist tradition is the emphasis on working with that fear. Therefore Tibetans, if they choose to, have access to traditions and practices of this nature. Monks for instance, would go to charnel grounds, or graveyards, to practice and contemplate impermanence, which might seem a bit excessive to us. In Tibet the charnel grounds use to be in the wilderness, so they were a very eerie place to practice, especially on one’s own, and it was guaranteed to throw up all kinds of fears. Thighbone trumpets and other implements used on these occasions have horrified some Westerners, who have described these rituals as shamanistic, incorporating elements of black magic and so on. However, for Tibetans, living in primitive physical conditions, these bones had no magical qualities, but were merely reminders of impermanence, of transience. It would help them deal with their fear of death, and the fear of the dead as well.

There are Buddhist traditions, of course, like Zen, that do not have such elaborate rituals as are found in Tibetan Buddhism that involve mantras, visualisations, and so forth, and focus more on being immediately present with what is happening now, avoiding all mental constructions of what might take place, as the best form of preparation for the future, including the eventuality of death. The end result is the same. Both methods lead to greater acceptance of the event, and the ultimate aim is the same, which is to increase awareness and develop insight. In addition, of course, the Buddhist view is that life and death are inextricably bound to each other, moment to moment. The death of the past is happening right now, and we can never really see what is going to happen in the future. When one moment passes, that is death, and when another arises, that is life, or rebirth, we might say. Therefore, living in the present with awareness, links in a fundamental way with appreciating impermanence.

It does not matter how elaborate certain teachings or meditation techniques are, the fundamental aim is still to deal with immediate experience, here and now. It has nothing much to do with what might or might not happen in the future, or attaining some wonderful mystical experience in the future, because, as the masters have continuously emphasised, as important as the attainment of enlightenment is, it has to be arrived at through being in the here and now, dealing with present circumstances, not through indulging in speculation about what enlightenment might be. None of this is to say that we have to be practicing Buddhists to die in a peaceful manner. Ultimately one cannot tell, judging by people’s personalities, who will die peacefully. Some Christians die very peacefully, whereas others struggle; some Buddhists die peacefully, and some kicking and screaming, as they say, and some atheists die peacefully, and so on. A very mild-mannered person can become quite aggressive and obnoxious at the time of death, refusing to accept it, and others, normally obnoxious characters, turn out to be very accepting and amiable. We can never really say with certainty how anyone will react to death, but we can say that certain meditations, including those on death, will definitely help a person come to accept it more readily, although we can never be absolutely sure, and the moment may produce panic even in a dedicated practitioner. But if we know what’s going on, it is likely to be far less confrontational.

This brings us to the critical factor of seeing meditation, reading, and contemplation as conjoined. We should not be satisfied to just think about impermanence and death; we have to have the real experience, which comes from meditation. To read about Buddhism’s approach to death is important, but it needs to become an existential concern and to be translated into something approximating a real intuition or a real encounter with death. Following such a path will prevent our knowledge from evaporating in the actual experience itself. From a Buddhist point of view, so much depends upon our habits, and so thinking about death in a certain way helps us to get used to it, to become habituated to it. Therefore a real transformation has to take place on an emotional and intellectual level. Most of us have a fair degree of intellectual understanding of the facts, but that is really not the main point. A sense of impermanence has to be felt and experienced. If we understand it truly, we will handle all our tribulations far better, such as when our relationships break up, when we get divorced, when we get separated from our loved ones, when relatives die. We will handle all of these situations far differently with a truer appreciation of impermanence than we would otherwise have.

Knowing in an abstract sense that everybody dies or that everything is impermanent is different from experiencing impermanence, coming face to face with in everyday life. If we have felt impermanence, then tragedies are easier to deal with because we fully grasp that all is impermanent and transient and nothing lasts forever. As the Buddha said, we come in contact with people and things that we wish not to come in contact with, and we get separated from people and things that we wish to stay among, and that is how things are, in reality. Similarly, when death occurs, it may still be a very fearful experience, but we may be able to maintain that sense of awareness. Fear may still be present, but maintaining a sense of equilibrium is very important. Buddhist meditators may get separated from their partner and experience great stress and grief, but they may not yield to that grief so completely that it overwhelms them, and this applies with respect to their own death as well.