#if someone's first response to being explained a cultural phenomena or term is 'you just want an excuse to be disgusting'

[phantompupz]

the fact that they didnt even put effort into calling diluc and kaeya ‘sworn brothers’ instead of just ‘brothers’ because we all know where that lead the fandom

though honestly a lot of  “””Crimes””” solely come from the fandom not using critical thinking and instead they just wanna start throwing ball pit balls at the other people in the chuck e cheese  over a poorly understood cultural term that doesnt have an actual term in english

but anything couldve been better than just Brothers

[atrayo]

Channeled Angelic Wisdom of the Jewels of Truth Series and Favorite Quotes of the Month of September

Hello All,

I always have the bad habit of waiting until the tail end of the month to make a channeled angelic entry here to Atrayo's Oracle. Since I'm also a PC gamer I'm also tied into enjoying the retail release of Amazon's Game Studio of New World come this Sept. 28th. I'll be gaming with my online gamer community of 17 years now that I've been a member of online. They're called "The Older Gamers" one has to be over the age of 25 yrs old to become a member. I'll be the guild leader for the US/EU branch on an East Coast North American server. (shameless gamer plug)

Tonight's trio of Jewels of Truth statements is channeled angelic wisdom, metaphysics, and mysticism. On the topics of a Multi-Dimensional Soul where I channel a historical figure named Josephus the old. Next, there is To Be the I Am which dispels one of the pet peeves I hear often in New Age circles. Where innocently someone remarks we're born into this reality just to learn and grow like this realm is an elementary school for souls. I roll my eyes when I hear this due to my cultivated relationship as an angelic channeler via claircognizance. (claircognizance is the psychic ability to channel knowledge and wisdom beyond one's lifetime.)

Lastly, the final topic is a zinger on two counts! It's titled the Younger Dominions of God. Where not unlike the metaphysical author of Neal Donald Walsch of "Conversations with God" a famous book series. I also channel this statement from God him/her/itself, which I've done on past occasions. This topic blew my mind when it flashed before my mind's eye as an inspiration. Basically, our Creation and the afterlife of heaven and hell are the godly early forms of the Supreme God of all gods Absolute. Meaning these are the terrible two's, tween years, and teenage raging hormone years on a human equalivent scale of God itself.

The Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer of Macro Supreme Realities dimensionally speaking. These realms of ours of the endless Infinite hells, Creation (ie our Meta-Universe), and the Majestic Heavens are the stratification of the evolutionary growth of God in a meta sense if compared to maturation. These realms astral or otherwise are the goldilocks years of God(dess) akin to a nursery for all souls, angelic kind, including elder angels.  As the lesser deities of countless faiths or dead religions as mythologies to us in our modernity.

Before I go too deep on the topic allow me to just write down the channeling from the Creator him/her/itself.

Also, a shout out to Tessa Luna Lluvia my original online mentor as an expert psychic-medium. She's kindly listed my books of the Jewels of Truth Series on her website. (bottom 8th row of the book listings)

As always no matter if these topics seem too fringe for your imaginations and spiritual belief systems. Allow them to just kindly expand your horizons of the immense grandeur of God Everlasting. Amen.

Multi-Dimensional Souls

3081) Here are the many fields of splendor possible within the grasp of the human condition by far. Nay beyond humanity itself can this spectrum of countless possibilities co-exist to exemplify all lifeforms in unison as Children of a Living God(dess). What I "Josephus the Old" will explain is that the godly soul of all spiritual beings when incarnated experiences a buffer of contrasts when alive on Earth.

For example, when a person commits wrongdoing as grotesque evils. That reincarnated soul as an individual entity has siphoned poorly from the evils metaphysically from the godless Hells, hereto unknown to humanity. Again another primitive example is a godly pious person of righteousness does good in the world without seeking high praises of whatnots. That individual spiritual entity of God has channeled the God Blessed Heavens robustly and directly upon this Earth. Whether this happens unwittingly or not.

The final example is whether a person is neutral and allows good or evil to flourish without personal involvement regardless of what occurs. Such a soul enters into a form of Limbo upon the world swayed easily without guile or reservation as a direct cause and effect. Akin to a sub-set of Karma upon the earth reality sphere of governing elements metaphysically.

The trio of the fates as conundrums of paradoxical fits and starts are prevailing winds of the afterlife set upon all mortal kind be it human or otherwise as creatures. With direct inputs and outputs upon the world and the meta-universes be they cosmic or of a metaphysical unholy/neutral/holy matrix of experiences as existential realities go.

To this end do not allow the oversimplification of these crude examples to paint only a black, gray, and white picture as a canvas of these meta-realities. There is a relativistic spectrum of contrasts akin to manifold kaleidoscopes of endless pigments of possibilities. As configurations of good, neutrality, and evil encompass universally as archetypes of behavior in all lesser Universes combined!

We have exhausted our range or scope of expressions without first mentioning as all souls are in the One Supreme Loving Image and Likeness of God. Denotes all Souls as a united continuum are multifaceted dimensionally as metaphysical entities before being people with physical bodies with an aura upon your current age or eon of your Earth.

As God(dess) is everything as Omni-Present denotes your souls in God are also everywhere God is forever. No matter you as the lesser children of God realize this in your global religions or not. It makes your magicks work as expressions of divinity constantly. Amen. ---Ivan Pozo-Illas / Atrayo. (Channeled Source Entity of Josephus the Old.)

To Be the I Am:

3083) Many in New Age spiritual circles inquire from fellow advanced participants and elders what is Life? Most respond with confidence that it is a school for young souls to evolve and grow further. This canned response is only partially true, however, it is incomplete in its scope of a response generically.

Life and Death as contrasting phenomena are far richer than such a one-dimensional interpretation of our spiritual unified reality with God(dess), and the Heavenly Host Infinitely meets at large always and forever. There are actually seven dimensions of spiritual being, if not more overall as archetypes of a universal basis of our united divinity with God(dess).

For Instance, the aforementioned scope of Life as a school is true but as one dimension so as to learn and grow as eternal souls having a human experience. Next in no particular order of grace of any of these roles is to Love like God(dess) and the Angels. Unconditionally in moderation so as to avoid fanaticism or zealotry as obsessive traits of passion and/or of true love.

Next comes to be of Service in moderation not necessarily as a selfless saint or angel that lives to extremes. However, to cultivate humanity or divinity on Earth with mutual compassion and empathy for those in need or of want. To serve in a volunteer capacity versus being employed in commercial industries denotes a deeper form of caring.

To be just as civilized and law-abiding or hospitable in the world. Followed closely with having a noble personality of character as benevolent in the human-divine holy nature like God and the Angels in the endless Heavens.

Next is to create or destroy like God in the universe. If destroy is too strong a negative connotation then let it be to uproot, erase, or recycle like God at the human micro-scale of being alive. As God(dess) is the Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer of macro realities en masse by Infinite scales and over the corridor of eternities.

The last two dimensional roles go hand in hand as fellowship or socialization with positive impacts of compassionate norms be it caring for one another as God has cared for each of us. Lastly to worship Inclusively like God(dess) as an unceasing with positive moderation with mutual respect and adoration to positive foreign beliefs and other cultural traditions of God in our shared world. Amen. ---Ivan Pozo-Illas / Atrayo.

Younger Dominions of God:

3080) To the one that reads these simple words come away with a wider understanding of what "I am that I am" is as the Constant Creator, God of all Totalities United! What "I am" is not simple but complex beyond human total comprehension. So in childish terms of "I am" is utilized all around for all levels of basic comprehension as my living beautiful souls.

What you call as Creation as a meta-construct of reality as the Universe(s), Galaxies, Solar Systems, etc... This is merely one of my countless younger expressions of my Ultimate Majestic godly nature, fully seeped upon material physicality and so much greater yet still.

What humanity denotes as the afterlife of Hell as the underworld. The neutral reality of metaphysical limbo or purgatory as either a realm of heightened enlightenment or for the uninitiated as numbing detachment as apathy. With the stupendous exalted Heavens are all grade school versions of my adolescent corpus of my total Supreme Creation as the Absolute Self.

The Infinite and timeless Hells, Limbos, Creations, and Heavens are each stratum of my youthful forms of expressions. As the Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer of cosmic and ethereal realms of pure totalities of "I am" essence and personified substances. For To Be the I am that I am as the God of all gods plural in a Supreme Fashion has other greater dominions of realism. Each by far beyond the rudimentary tenure of my youth as the Hells, Limbos, Creation(s), and the Heavens can contain forever as my meta corpus.

For example, every dominion where good, neutrality, and evil are located is a moot point having never existed prior. There is no such power struggle of contrasts of differences. A Uni-polar reality versus a multi-polar existence of Principles that tranquility reigns constantly. Only in the realms of my godly youth does contrast stand out in stark terms of the illusion of a good versus evil approach as an eternal useless struggle.

In my youth like environs of ethereal and otherwise physical existence goes. That my younger created lesser children such as humanity and other permutations of my infinity of expressions. Truly mirror my existential struggles of archaic yesterdays as eternities of long ago. I have matured far greater and this creates, sustains, and destroys for another set of challenges and opportunities elsewhere in my Meta-Verse of cosmic and ethereal Superiority as the Apex God of all gods. Amen. ---Ivan Pozo-Illas / Atrayo. (Channeled Source as God(dess)

You can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in. ---Junot Diaz.

Nature is not a place to visit, It is home. ---Gary Snyder.

Grace is the ability to redefine the boundaries of possibility. ---Manning Marable.

One of life's most fulfilling moments occurs in the split-second when the familiar is suddenly transformed into the dazzling aura of the profoundly new. ---Edward B. Lindaman.

What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are. ---C.S. Lewis.

Ivan "Atrayo" Pozo-Illas, has devoted 26 years of his life to the pursuit of clairaudient Inspired automatic writing channeling the Angelic host. Ivan is the author of the spiritual wisdom series of "Jewels of Truth" consisting of 3 volumes published to date. He also channels conceptual designs that are multi-faceted for the next society to come that are solutions based as a form of dharmic service. Numerous examples of his work are available at "Atrayo's Oracle" blog site of 16 years plus online. You're welcome to visit his website "Jewelsoftruth.us" for further information or to contact Atrayo directly.

[things2mustdo]

Last week I expounded the idea that we should take the time to ponder about emotions. These matter much in prompting us to take action or not to, to think about something or not to. Sustained emotional states can lead us to pedestalize girls, ignore our own needs, or refraining from caring about our own interests, whereas others push theirs every day. They can also allow said girls to go shamelessly after short-term pleasure, or be complacent to rapefugees while shrieking and finger-waving against men of their own kin.

Pondering passions and emotions does not mean getting led by them at the expense of critical thinking. Rather, it is the exact opposite, as it allows us to spot the shrewd ones who want to push our emotional buttons, as well as being freer to take more thoughtful and actually less emotion-determined actions. Once we have gained awareness of passions, we can decide which ones we want to stimulate and why.

Following this idea, I made some suggestions of how and in whom we could stir positive emotions such empathy, hope, and love. Today I will do the same with four other passions or emotions: admiration, shame, humility, and fear.

1. Admiration

Society, I think, should admit some victimhood to those who were raised as weaklings or acted cluelessly out of good intentions. Women in particular should be more empathetic and nurturing towards nice and beta males—as long as their empathy does not extent out of admitted boundaries—hence taking an opposite direction from the egotistical, uncaring orientation a lot of them currently harbor. Of course, this should not equate to validating too much the unhealthy, unmanly men: women should also be trained into validating more manlier men. And here admiration comes into play.

As Nassim Taleb put it, we are living more and more in an “extremistan” where those at the highest level take the lion’s share while the resources diminish quickly down the ladder. Girls today tend to admire only the most famous or high-status people, which leads them to despise the ninety-nine per cent. This exasperated hypergamy should be tamed so that the average man, as long as he achieves the minimum and/or is upstanding and dutiful, gets his fair share. A more “democratic” but still conditional distribution of girls’ admiration would reward actual good behaviour for men and decrease the intramasculine competition.

Girls should also admire—and not mock—proper feminine role models. Upstanding mothers, females taking proper care of themselves and so on ought to be at least esteemed by the average girl.

2. Shame

Shame arises from measuring our actions against moral standards and discovering that they fall short. If our actions fall short and we fail to notice, we can ‘be shamed’ or made to notice… Shame is normally accentuated if its object is exposed, but, unlike embarrassment, also attaches to a thought or action that remains undisclosed and undiscoverable to others. (Neel Burton, Heaven and Hell, chap.4, p.38)

A particularly strong emotion, shame usually comes as a blow, makes one lose face or composure, to eventually feel guilt or remorse. Just like other strong emotions, it has been used with consumed malignancy by the Left.

Leftists created a narrative where whites are held entirely responsible for dreadful historical phenomena such as slavery, the Holocaust, an oppression of “minority” groups, or “racism.” As these phenomena are constantly talked about and expanded, whites are also supposed to feel a correspondingly boundless guilt. The sheer power of guilt can explain why so many whites have been afraid to stand up: being shamed as a “racist” or “Nazi” can be enough to endure rejection from one’s family, lose reputation and employment.

Shame can be aroused through two levers: the standards one agrees with, and one’s purported responsibility. Both levers have been skillfully used to unshame the liberal-favored groups. As for the standards, feminists attacked what they called slut-shaming while also shaming relentlessly manly behavior, and as for the responsibility, pretty much all those who claim to identify with a “minority” tend to deny all by slipping it over the majority’s shoulders.

This is how you get persistent offenders or Jihadi families expressing neither shame nor remorse, whereas the productive, working, and normally sociable person gets nagged for being white. In the Current Year, better be a true rapist who can evade responsibility and shame by invading Europe than a young virgin of European descent.

What we should do here sounds pretty obvious in theory though it will be much harder to carry on in practice, as people evidently hate being shamed, especially when they have been accustomed of blaming everything on the others.

Shame the fatties, shame the arrogant snowflakes whose unwillingness to respect is all too obvious, recall the self-determination of anti-white liberals and criminals. They all made free choices. They should carry all associated responsibility.

As for us, we must keep our face straight, never make clueless concessions to skillful framers or hysterical SJWs. If they appeal to moral standards, put forth your own as legitimate. If they appeal to your purported actions or responsibility, emphasize theirs—and how it cannot be boiled down to external factors.

Even dogs and cats are considered responsible by their caretakers so they can be punished for bad behaviours and learn: likewise, granting certain people or groups a constant de-responsabilization amounts to give them a free pass for destroying everything. Criminals of said groups have agency, and the liberals who gave them a pass to plunder and kill whitey are responsible as well.

Shame can also arise from being associated with something or someone deemed as despicable. The liberal policy of distinguishing sharply between terrorists and documented aliens, in spite of how much the latter to house the former, allows for the latter going without shame even when they are closely associated with terrorists—whereas every white is threatened with shame if he has a “-ist” or “-phobic” acquaintance.

Turn the table. Shake off the burden from the disenfranchised majority, and put it back on those who have been acting with impunity for too long.

3. Humility

Current Year girls’ overinflated ego is enough, notwithstanding economic or racial factors, to explain a host of social problems. Blinded by it, girls ignore how much they are determined by their own cravings, short-term desires, or by the latest fashions around. They drink loads of booze, fuck with random strangers, reframe their story as a “rape” later so they can blame it all on the guy. They never learn to cook, clean, take care of something else than their Instagram account and corporate career. (Speaking of corporate: isn’t it striking that so many men are badly in need of employment, sex, and have almost nothing, whereas spoiled corporate drones believe they can have—take—it all?)

Ego makes one lose any sense of proportion or balance. It leads to complacency, merciless exploitation of others, refusal to take responsibility, and open despise.

Augustine of Hippo wrote that humility was at the foundation of all other virtues. This makes sense. If one’s ego is inflated, one does not feel the need to practice virtues and feels entitled to never be ashamed of her shortcomings—that are easily denied or blamed on someone else. Ego also leads to wasting resources on luxury, parce que je le vaux bien, as says a famous brand of cosmetics, instead of focusing on self-improvement or caretaking.

Though girls should be the first to have their ego smashed, as the survival of basic family units depends on it, bloated ego is a general disease in our age. Men too can be sold the idea that, say, being a smug urban elf is a proof that one sides with progress and civilization whereas they are actually weak, dependent and unable to fix anything by themselves. It’s not all about our individual selves.

4. Fear

Readers asked for it, so, here it is. Fear is a very powerful emotion, to the point of prompting one to freeze, flee, abandon a previously planned course of action, or never even think to consider an idea or an action. The Left has been using it in two different, albeit complementary, ways.

First, it has constantly accused conservatives to “play on fears,” implying irrational or unjustified fears, when they dared to ask serious questions or making realistic assessment. When the 1965 Immigration Act was voted, democrat senators pretended that opening up the borders would not change the ethnic mix of America and that any suspicion it might happen was “highly emotional.” In France, the socialists and mainstream righters alike have been carrying the same accusations. Here the Left accused any doubt to be a hint of unjustified and intolerable “fear.”

Well, what happened since? Doesn’t it look like every “fear” from the right was justified—especially since the post-WW2 Right has always been incredibly wary, not to say coward, when it came to criticize the Left’s moral high ground?

Second, the Left has also been keen on doing exactly what it accused the conservatives to do, namely, stirring fear about political bogeymen. Liberals invented “rape culture” or “patriarchal oppression” when men actually became weaker. They associated to “Nazism” any white person who assumes his race should basically survive. They shamelessly bludgeoned whom they could call “white supremacists” as if defending one’s right to live in peace against hordes of thugs and violent parasites was equal to being Hitler himself.

Whites were led to fear their own supposed “authoritarian” tendencies, as the shrewd Jews who intrigued through the Frankfurt school put it (see Kevin MacDonald, Culture of Critique, chap.5). Whites were led to fear some of their fears—better have one’s daughter killed by Muslims than expressing concerns about them to other whites, because racism is so evil, boo.

When I was younger, I noticed the local thugs had a huge advantage over us normal people: they were much more fearless. They had this devil-may-care, provocative attitude, which made them potentially dangerous to the bourgeois prude beta male and attractive to females. Not incidentally, the first movie of the French essayist Alain Soral Confessions d’un dragueur (“Confessions of a Womanizer”) shows a young Arab with decent pick-up experience taking a young middle-class white boy under his wing as to help him escape from virginity.

Feeling fear is a necessary step in life. Fear appears greatly useful when there is something to flee from or watch as a potential hazard, but being too fearful or afraid of the wrong things can be a serious liability. Never trust a liberal who either points finger at you for being “fearful” or tries to paint you as dangerous and justifying his own fear-mongering.

On the flip side, being feared by others is not always a negative. Some people need to be afraid to respect you: if you try to treat them correctly or let free rein to your innate generosity, they will harm and exploit you. Such people, just as everyone around who may be tempted to disrespect, should be kept in check by a minimal fear. Better be feared and respected than getting tread upon.

Conclusion

Frame and unframe whatever matters when you have to, as you have to. The left cursed us by locking us into an always negative framing: when we fail, whatever the reason, we are despised as weak or “losers,” and when we succeed they say we are “privileged” and “oppressive.” In both cases, the chosen framing leads to negative emotions associated to us—no matter what we actually do.

Fortunately, it is always possible to turn the tables, provided we keep a tight frame, and change these emotions as well. For example, when we are weak, we should elicit empathy, be noticed for our good intentions or noble infirmities, and when we are strong, we should elicit admiration and trust.

Think, frame, feel positive about us and about what we do. Get rid of those who won’t.

Read Next: 3 Emotions Men Should Master

https://www.returnofkings.com/99453/3-more-emotions-men-should-master

Passions and emotions are an almost bottomless pit. Start digging there and you will find new ones, or new relations between this and that tidbit of emotional content. So-called Enlightenment philosophers who tried to theorize the passions—something that had been done at greater length, actually, by Thomas Aquinas—could never agree on how many there were or even how much they exactly mattered in the course of life.

Whether or not you have been reading my last two pieces on the topic, remember this is about mastering passions in the most general sense. This is not only about emotional restraint or seduction. Our own emotional states are the first in line, but mastering the passions is also about spotting what other people are feeling, how they can be led to a specific course of action, and what tends to make them tick. Mastering the passions is far from evident, it rather takes times and experience: the concepts and directions I am providing here aim at giving some conscious clarity about things that are by nature a bit muddy.

Artists, though they often suffer from mental problems, are skilled at painting a particular vision in vivid colours, allowing their public to share a specific point of view and emotional state. This is something the elite know very well. Critics trashed Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged because they could see themselves painted there as passive-aggressive cultural parasites. Rand’s novel was more cogent, and attracted more heat, than her barely original “philosophical” pieces today sold at the cheapest price on the second-hand book market.

More recently, the movie The Fall (2004) got backlashed by some of the mainstream media on the grounds that it depicted Hitler as “too human.” While seeing actor Bruno Ganz pondering, eating, talking to his closest company or getting angry, the viewer could perhaps feel a bit of empathy to him. Which is, of course, unacceptable to a Left that clings to the idea of a crazy, careless, “inhuman” dictator to be forever cast as an embodiment of evil. Hollywood directors do not like witnessing others competing with their own emotional mastery.

We need artists, as well as qualified cultural critics, to take some distance from the mainstream propaganda disguised as entertainment and expand an alternative culture and artworks. Emotions explored in the present series can be used just that way.

1. Gratitude

Gratitude denotes a trained and refined disposition. Being graceful means “recognizing that the good in our life can come from something that is outside us and outside our control” (Neel Burton, Heaven and Hell, chap.8, p.61). It focuses on positive things we already have and that cannot be ascribed to our sole merit or efforts.

The traditional world, whatever the particular cultural or religious form it was embodied into, always emphasized the necessity of being grateful. You owed your existence to God, to your family and your community. None of these goods were actually deserved, which meant you had to be grateful for them and repay them by being a dutiful member of the community as well as a dutiful father for your own children. A lot of prayers and ancient rites imply a thanksgiving for what one already has.

Moving later in time, it is striking to see that modern progressivism breeds the exact opposite mindset. The ideology of rights make many goods granted, not a “thank you for” but an “I have a right to.” Neophilia (the relentless pursuit of novelty) always casts a bad shadow on what has been around for some time, as if what was coming later was always better.

Advertisement, gossip culture, economic growth pressure, quest for victimhood lead to envy and always being more or less frustrated with what one already has, regardless of what it is. By leading us to always want more, progressivism makes us oblivious to what we already have or how it does not stem from pure individual merit—and, when it flatters the ego, it makes us complacent and far from cultivating the art of being thankful.

Turning our backs from the modern, ungraceful mindset is easier said than done. To start with: loud-mouthed girls should be remembered they owe their nice, luxurious workplaces to the men who built them, LGBTBBQ should thank their heterosexual parents and ancestors for their very lives, anti-white black activists should remember they would not even exist had their ancestors not benefited from their white colonizers healthcare technology. Feel free to expand the list. Ultimately, I think, every person who is modern or westernized enough can be outed as ungraceful for something.

2. Trust

A famous study showed that multiculturalism was closely correlated with defiance and a lack of trust in each other. Provided that we enlarge a bit our definition of multiculturalism, this absolutely makes sense. Some ethnic groups are especially prone to violence, and some “minority” groups are rewarded for freely accusing the silent majority, but the hegemony of political correctness made it a taboo. Communities have been fragmented by individualism, i.e. each person looking to take as much as she can, and by an “antiracist” white guilt that soon became an intra-white generalized suspicion of “racism.” People do not identify anymore with the larger society and often cannot even identify with a smaller community—which makes everyone else a potential enemy.

Yet, without trust, life becomes unbearable. If you can’t go to the streets without the possibility of getting mugged by, say, BLM activists, or go to a family meal without the prospect of a lukewarm struggle with aging leftist parents, or have a relationship with a girl without the possibility of her making a false rape accusation, there aren’t a lot of things you can do on the long run. Without trust in other people, you have to trust the complex of big corporations, NGO, and State institutions we call the system—and be dependent from it for things as basic as food and shelter.

Only trust in each other can make life sustainable and long-term projects workable. To re-create trust, we have to make people accountable and bound to precise rules, reward good behaviours while punishing bad ones. Actions must bear consequences. But before neomasculinity gets into power, men should strive to establish a reputation through reliability, persistence, and a strong mindset. I could wager you have been more trusting of your Facebook friends last years than of the mainstream media, the former conveying more trustworthy information than the latter.

3. Desire

Modern capitalism and progressivism always ran on desire. Want cheaper prices? More goods? Better goods? More TV channels to watch? More monies? More ego and thinking you are the hot shit? Well, just buy in X or do some work for Y, and here it is… um, nah, you just have to do some more, and some more, and some more. In the end, you forgot why exactly you are doing what you’re doing, or why you started to watch TV. But it all started with you led to perform something, no matter how surreptitiously framed as spontaneous or normal it was.

The system plays on desires in three ways. It sets things to be desired, things to be feared or never desired at all, and things to be consummated without end. Things to be desired include everything the advertisement wants you to desire, like a revolving credit, a new sofa, an SUV or whatever, as well as the next step of “progress” as it has been elaborated on the top of the pyramid.

Things to be feared are where the system wants you to be resigned and fatalistic: did you ever feel sad to see all these girls losing themselves into a sea of fat, bitching, and SJW-propaganda spouting? Too bad, that’s globalization, resistance is futile, move on! At last, things to be consummated are mainly produced to keep you busy and programmed though you are not really practising anything beyond staring at a screen.

Lately, an important shift has been happening between the first and third ways to play on desires. Decades before, the average consumer had to desire owning more junk or being part of the “progress”: the system needed him to work and monitor his peers. Today, the junk is already everywhere, PC culture is already hegemonic, and the average American worker is no longer needed. Active desire is not needed anymore.

Thus, the system has shifted into making the average Joe more passive. Instead of actually desiring more, the consumer should be content with surrogates of everything—pseudo-group identity with team sports, pseudo-sports with football and basket on TV, pseudo-sex with porn, pseudo-life with video games, pseudo-family life with animals, pseudo-expertise when the average libtard obnoxiously parrots the media on everything. This is Brzezinski’s tittytainment in a nutshell.

Even if you don’t give up on having a real life instead of a surrogate, the system will still want you to desire things only for yourself, thus retreating into individualism, instead of trying to actually weight on the world. Either you surrender to “the progress” or you try to ignore it before it comes for you. As if nothing could change.

Don’t let the elite frame the world according to its own interests. Desire self-realization and weighting on the course of the world. Of course, our female counterparts should desire being loving, caretaking, and definitely on our side.

To conclude this series

Once again, it is hard to sketch in a few words what could be done with passions or emotions. What I have mostly dwelled into is how those already in power manipulate them and what we could do as to take them back. If you find the topic worthy of interest, you can expand it in two directions: first, documenting yourself on a particular passion or emotion, and second, using some by stirring it with a certain aim in mind.

In the former case, I would recommend Neel Burton’s Heaven and Hell (quoted several times in the course of this series) as a point of departure. In the latter, being creative or simply assertive is up to you. Whether this looks more like efforts or self-persuasion or artistry does not matter much.

Here, as well as in seduction, a tight framing is key. Whatever the topic, no vocabulary and no picture are really neutral, which is a problem as our perception and thinking orientation are often conditioned by these. The mastery of emotions is reinforced—and reinforces—the mastery of representations. If this sounds far-fetched, let me provide some examples of use, examples you are absolutely free to expand as it suits you.

In the comments space, several guys here have been giving a very negative portrayal of the nice guy: he would be a fake, a “sneaky bastard,” a “jerk.” So guys who want to get laid or have their own interests, just as everyone else, are jerks? This looks like internalized feminist thinking. In my opinion, nice guys should elicit empathy, which goes through a positive portrayal emphasizing their willingness to respect the girl or how they were likely raised by an unmanly culture.

A recent ROK piece about mainstream media has shown how these are making a conscious effort to hide and de-legimitate white victimhood: they paint vividly any crime where the victim is non-white and the perpetrator is, but mention no detail or do not mention at all any crime perpetrated by non-white(s) on white(s).

The same pattern appears in the movie Elysium (2013), when the (of course) white villain mentions children she wants to protect from a mass of brown invaders, yet these children are never shown and consequently stir no empathy from the average watcher, whereas the brown-skinned are vividly depicted as humane and not responsible for their own poverty.

Analyzing these phenomena is fine, but ultimately insufficient. Creative people on our side have to provide an alternative that includes mastered emotions. Picking up girls is part of, and gives some experience in, this wider game.

[darlingxdarkling]

I can’t believe my first Medium article is a pop culture piece criticizing Sindel’s depiction in MK11 Aftermath, but you know what? It’s totally worth it.

Full text under the cut in case the article is inaccessible because of Medium’s paywall. I want my pieces to be as accessible to the public as possible.

Warning: Heavy spoilers for Mortal Kombat 11 and its expansion, Aftermath.

Ever since its first release in 1992, the Mortal Kombat franchise is known for its extreme, action-packed violence and gore that led to the creation of the ESRB. It’s also know for its controversial depictions of scantily-clad women; however, did this not deter female gamers from becoming fans of the franchise, myself included. Admittedly I am one of the fans of Mortal Kombat who was late to the party, partly due to my age and inaccessibility of gaming platforms, only discovering Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 in 2010 while playing with my older cousins, who were mostly boys.

Eyes fixated on the pixelated, motion-captured sprites on the screen in wonder, I remember being a fan of characters such as Raiden, Nightwolf, and Sindel. Especially Sindel, whom I grew to adore because of her regal, gothic appearance. Due to the stereotype that gaming is a masculine interest prevalent during those times, I felt alienated at times, having no other female playmate aside from my younger sister. However, seeing female characters such as Sindel gave me characters to identify with in my formative years.

A decade later, I still am a fan of the franchise, and of those characters. With the years that passed, there had been significant changes in the video game industry, and the clamor for better depictions of women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and other minorities. Mortal Kombat is one of the franchises that changed with the times, even introducing their first confirmed gay character Kung Jin in Mortal Kombat X, and depicting classic character Mileena and 3D era character Tanya as lovers in the same game, confirming that Mileena is indeed canonically bisexual.

Mortal Kombat X’s female character designs were diverse and realistic too; there were some female characters whose designs didn’t show too much skin, like Sonya Blade’s main costume, befitting her role and demeanor as a tough-as-nails general, and there were female characters like Mileena who had more skin in her costumes, justified by her character’s desire to compensate for her monstrous Tarkatan genes. It’s not perfect, but overall, Mortal Kombat X is a breath of fresh air to the franchise. As a bisexual, an Asian, and a woman, I felt seen. I felt good, because minorities like me are respectfully represented.

As for its sequel, Mortal Kombat 11, there are some noteworthy depictions of real-life social issues in the game, such as colonization, which is explored with Nightwolf’s revamped lore. In the rewrite, Nightwolf is depicted as someone who used to be angry that his people, a fictional Native American tribe called the Matoka, resigned themselves to colonizers in his youth, but was blessed by his tribe’s deity, the Great Spirit, with power to help his tribe move forward after he defended the Matoka’s honor against Kano. The subject of race is also explored with Jax’s ending, where he uses the power he obtains from the hourglass to create a world where Black people were never enslaved, which garnered manufactured outrage despite the lack of any real controversy. Another example is Fujin’s ending, where he uses his power to experience the lives of mortals of different races, realms, genders, and faiths, putting emphasis on the value of integrating with the masses in order to understand and serve them better.

However, there are some aspects of the game that left a bad taste in my mouth. No, that would be an understatement. It left me furiously disappointed.

John Vogel is the lead writer for the franchise since John Tobias’ departure, writing the bulk of the story until he left around after Mortal Kombat X. Dominic Cianciolo becomes co-writer, alongside Shawn Kittelsen. Cianciolo is credited as the Story Director for Mortal Kombat 11, and thus responsible for the bulk of the plot.

After being unplayable in MKX, Sindel returns to the MK11 roster in a Kombat Pack, expansions featuring characters who aren’t present in the main story or are guest fighters from another franchise, such as Nightwolf and the Joker from the DC Universe. At the announcement of their return, I was ecstatic. The way Nightwolf’s character is handled and the added lore left me positive and hopeful for Sindel’s return.

But then, the retcon happened.

Originally, Sindel is the deceased mother of Kitana whose husband was killed by Shao Kahn. She then sacrificed herself through a suicide pact in order to protect the realms, and was brought back to life as an evil queen by Shao Kahn milennia later, but then escapes his hold. Here, she is made to be evil all along, responsible for her husband’s death and willingly coming with Shao Kahn to rule alongside him. Sindel becomes a character from her society’s ruling class who is obsessed with preserving her privileged position. Some fans claim that this new depiction is “empowering”, but is it really progressive?

Today, the terms “empowerment” and “women’s empowerment” are becoming buzzwords used by advertisers and big industry writers in an attempt to sell their product to a growing number of women who takes part in geek culture or play video games, and a society with values that are getting more and more progressive. Some people call this phenomena “woke capitalism”, where a corporation adopts progressive political causes. The gaming industry is not exempt from that; people pay for games, downloadable content, and microtransactions after all.

More often than not, when male writers write “strong” female characters, they tend to focus solely on enhancing traditionally masculine values, such as fighting ability, ignoring what other values female characters have that make them strong, or they tend to be horribly, horribly tone-deaf, which I will explain in detail later. These representations of “women’s empowerment” should force us to reexamine the media we consume, and discern whether these are genuine depictions of social issues or woke capitalism disguised as such.

In the first place, why are so many writers obsessed with “empowering” female characters, instead of writing them as characters capable of fighting for their emancipation?

Empowerment is passive; it’s something granted by those who hold power, not earned nor fought for. In the rewritten Sindel’s case, she is empowered by Shao Kahn when he took her as his wife and gave her the privileges he enjoys. Sindel’s empowerment is selfish; her rise to power did not empower, emancipate, nor liberate her daughter Kitana, nor Jade, nor Mileena, nor the women of Outworld. On the contrary, it made life worse and oppressive for all of Outworld’s denizens, including its women, who now have to serve not one, but two privilege-drunk monarchs who rule with an iron fist. If that’s the values the writers want to impart on their audience, I have serious doubts on the sincerity of their “wokeness”.

The release of Aftermath takes things up to eleven, where Sindel betrays her own daughter to be with Shao Kahn, who, originally, enslaves her and forces her into marriage, which holds so much unfortunate implications for those in abusive relationships. It doesn’t help that Cianciolo liked a tweet from a fan that said the original Sindel, an abuse survivor, was never an empowered female character and a was bad mother for killing herself and leaving her child behind, bringing even more unfortunate implications not just for women in abusive relationships, but also for people who struggle with suicide. Somehow, Cianciolo and the fans that agree with him ignore these implications altogether and believes that the new haughty, tyrannical Sindel is an example of a strong female character. This isn’t the first time male writers tried their hand at feminist writing and ended up with tone-deaf plot decisions.

Cianciolo took a nuanced and well-written character and turned her into Shao Kahn 2.0. What happened is essentially the creative butchering of Sindel’s character; she went from being a survivor to an oppressor. Shao Kahn already fills the role of a cruel tyrant who refuses to relinquish his privilege for the good of the masses, and rewriting Sindel to become his distaff counterpart is not necessary at all. This treatment of her character isn’t feminist or progressive at all; it’s poorly-disguised misogyny. It’s implying that a woman can only be powerful if she submits to her husband so that he may grant her a taste of privilege reserved for powerful men, an antiquated sentiment best left to the feudal ages. Granted, the fictional realm of Outworld is ruled by a monarchy, but Sindel’s previous characterization is proof that writers can refuse or avoid using that trope.

Emancipation, on the other hand, is an active role; according to Ruane and Todd, it is “a process by which the participants in a system which determines, distorts and limits their potentialities come together actively to transform it, and in the process transform themselves.” This concept can be applied more appropriately to pre-retcon Sindel.

Going back to my days as a highly impressionable teenager, though I grew interested in her for her benevolent demeanor despite her intimidating appearance, Sindel’s roles as a survivor and a leader are what cemented my love for the character. Shao Kahn murdered her husband, usurped the throne, conquered her kingdom, and coerced her to be his wife. Later, she sacrificed herself for the greater good of a realm, and after being resurrected as an evil brainwashed puppet, she finally broke free from her abuser. With her newfound agency, she became a queen of Outworld who recognized her privilege and used it to stand with its masses against tyrants, and she also becomes a doting mother to Kitana, demonstrating great love for her family. When finally removed from her abuser’s influence, Sindel chose to be free, she chose to lead her people benevolently, and she chose to be with her true family. This Sindel broke free from the traditional Outworld power structure that Shao Kahn perpetrated for thousands of years, no longer a bride to be forcefully taken, nor a pawn to be manipulated by its emperor.

If you can look past the scanty costume design standard for video games of that era, the original Sindel could be a female character ahead of her time. Original Sindel not only can kick ass, she also has agency, willpower, and a heart; a strong female character with good writing. For those reasons, Cianciolo’s Sindel is #NotMySindel.

[wisdomrays]

TAFAKKUR: Part 114

Maintaining the Brain: Neurons that Fire Together Wire Together

Our brains consist of many different types of cells, including astrocytes, microglia, and neurons. These are the cells that people are indirectly referring to when you hear someone say that hitting your head can cause permanent damage even though the initial impact was a minor one. They are the primary cells that are responsible for signaling functions, and one can see this in their shape because they resemble an electric cord. The dendrites receive signals, process them in cell bodies, and send an output signal via the axons and synaptic terminals. These cells cannot multiply, and our heads never get larger, so it begs the following question: how do we continue to learn and store information? The answer is long-term potentiation (LTP).

LTP is when synaptic connections between neurons become stronger with frequent activation. Neuronal activation is an electrical signal called an action potential that emerges due to a change in ion locations resulting in electrical potential that generates a nerve impulse. When the same neurons keep getting activated, again and again, a shortcut is created. We have two crucial receptors that play a role in this mechanism: AMPA and NMDA. AMPA is activated first because a Mg2+ ion blocks NMDA. As AMPA gets activated, the neuron becomes depolarized (due to the previously mentioned electrical changes). Now, the neuron is more positive overall, which will push the Mg2+ ion out of the channel, which is called the Law of Attraction in physics (i.e., opposites attract). With the Mg2+ ion removed, calcium ions can move freely through the NMDA receptor, and this influx of calcium initiates cellular mechanisms that cause more AMPA channels to be produced and placed on the synapse of the neuron, making the pathway activated quicker and quicker. These pathways become a default, and this is called long-term potentiation. The opposite of long-term potentiation is long-term depression, a decrease in synaptic strength, so if “you don't use it, you lose it.”

Long-term potentiation is thought to be a way in which the brain changes in response to experience, and thus may be an underlying mechanism for learning, retaining memory, and even overall physical health. With long-term potentiation our default pathways are formed; so if we train ourselves to be anxious and stressed individuals, then we will be at an increased risk for developing hypertension, heart disease, cancer, and almost any other physical illness. We often forget that stress itself is a risk factor along with other lifestyle choices such as diet and regular physical activity. An interesting article, "The Science of Happiness: Why Complaining is Literally Killing You," delves into this point of view:

“When your brain is firing off these synapses of anger, you're weakening your immune system; you're raising your blood pressure, increasing your risk of heart disease, obesity and diabetes, and a plethora of other negative ailments... This is why it is so important to spend time with people who lift you up. Want to be happy? Surround yourself with happy people who rewire your brain towards love.”

Long-term potentiation is also the basis of cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is a form of psychotherapy treatment that is goal-oriented and takes a practical approach to problem-solving. Cognitive-behavioral therapy recognizes the underlying mechanism of long-term potentiation: neurons that fire together wire together and puts it to good use by trying to change default patterns of thinking and behavior. By changing these default patterns, the result changes how we feel. For example, a common practice in cognitive-behavioral therapy is to keep a daily gratitude journal. The therapist may ask their client to write three things they are grateful for each morning and each night, whether it be something as simple as having water to drink or a significant life event. Forcing yourself to make these connections continuously, and being in a default repetitive state of gratitude, has been scientifically proven to decrease rates of depression and other mental illnesses.

Another perspective we can approach LTP from is from the lens of faith and prayer since prayer has an element of repetition in it. In his book, Jon Pahl states that "Peacebuilders pray, and prayer is a nonviolent practice. Even more: prayer has power. The power of prayer is neither political nor miraculous. Personally, prayer builds confidence. The repetition of prayer comforts a troubled mind with the solace of the familiar. Culturally, prayer builds trust. Communing with God and others can make any challenge seem surmountable. Socially, prayer builds movements.”

Yes, if we could rewire our brains towards love and peace with each prayer, we could find comfort and peace, and build bridges with those around us. In 2019 alone, an Islamic scholar mentioned the word "neurons" in his weekly sermons nine times, a fascinating statistic for a scholar who is neither a neuroscientist nor psychiatrist. Some excerpts from these sermons include:

“[when recited and listened to a couple times during the day and in the Tarawih Prayer] the Qur'an will establish itself better in our minds; our neurons will open their doors like the doors of a castle to the Qur'an and say 'enter.' Therefore, who knows how many times a day, a reunion will be established with the Qur'an.”

“Another scholar says: 'Even if we had four hands instead of two, they would not be sufficient to do things we need to do.' … In this case, we must send orders to the millions of neurons in our brain at the same to dedicate them all to the same task. … God opens you a window to exit.

“[‘The entire universe is a great book of God; the meaning of each letter is nothing but God.’] Just as you … use all of your neurons to see the endless possibility of bounties, lined along like a gallery as if He is to say, 'see and think as you walk this gallery.'

To return to the biological aspect of neurons, one key component that is also valuable to synthesize all the information we have just covered, and that is the concept of "mirror neurons." When we observe another person these mirror neurons start to fire and a kind of virtual reality simulation is formed in our minds, contributing to the construction of a theory of our intentions. For example, when someone smiles, you want to smile back; when someone gets a paper cut, you feel their pain; or when someone cries, you cannot help but cry as well. These are all phenomena explained by mirror neurons. Mirror neurons explain empathy on a biological level and are present even in animals.

From a multi-disciplined approach, including biological, psychosocial, and spiritual perspectives, one lesson becomes clear: we have the free will and responsibility to carve our default pathways. To make sure these default pathways are filled with love, peace, serenity, alongside discipline, patience, and resilience is paramount to our personal and collective health. By defining our own neural pathways, we will also be building our community's networks since neurons mirror each other.

[awildpoliticalnerd]

Book Review: The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. By Robert Wright. (1994).

Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal is a look through the field of evolutionary psychology--at least as it stood at the book's writing in 1994. It's a promising work with a lot of insight. However, it can best be analogized to the peacock: If it survives, it does so despite the massive disadvantage of some obvious maladaptions. In the case of the peacock, the adaption is its oversized tail (or "train" as it's often referred to). In the case of The Moral Animal, it's Wright’s own unexamined moral and ideological biases presented as fact that lowered its potential. 

The big sell of the book is actually a rather interesting premise: Take the most famous proponent of the theory of evolution (Charles “the Chuck” Darwin) and use his life to demonstrate the principles of evolutionary psychology. Want to illustrate the theory that men are less biologically inclined towards lifelong monogamy thanks to our disproportionately small part in the baby-making process? Highlight the fact that Darwin literally sketched out a cost/benefit analysis of getting married in his notebook. Want to argue that young siblings should be both predisposed towards rivalry and cooperation thanks to kin selection? Give some (admittedly adorable) examples of Darwin’s many, many children. Because of this, the book was part popular-science exploration of a then-burgeoning topic and accessible biography on one of the most important scientific minds to ever emerge from the primordial ooze. When done well, this was the book at its best. It was discursive, informative, and enjoyable. It kept me engaged over much of the book’s nearly 400-pages.

(Lest someone use the opening example as evidence that I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about later in the review, let it be known that I know that the mystery of the peacock’s train was solved with the insights of sexual selection--that peahens select males with large trains because possessing one shows that the males have got to be pretty dang "fit" to survive with such a glaringly obvious disadvantage. Writing thematically consistent introductions is hard; I claim some artistic liberties here).

There are two core ways that this plays out throughout the book. The first is the odd insistence that every possible point that Wright could conceive of making in this vast subject was exemplified by good ol’ Chuck. And there were times that this was very clearly a stretch. The way he pursued his eventual wife, Emma, is described through a very genetic lens instead of primarily cultural terms (part of a supposed genetic predisposition towards the “Madonna-Whore” dichotomy for those of us with that infernal y chromosome). His differential patterns of grief for the loss of two of his children (he reportedly mourned the death of his ten year old daughter far longer, and far more intensely, then that of his infant son) are couched as being primarily due to their proximity to prime fertility age. His intense anxiety about publishing what would be his scientific legacy (you know, apart from being the 19th century’s foremost barnacle expert)? It’s the genes! It’s genes, genes, genes all the way down. 

I’d like to say that the book was always like this. Or, apparently, my desire to want to say this, my inability to do so, and the considerable amount of sarcasm required to pen these last two sentences are because of my genes. At least that’s the culprit if we were to take Wright literally. At times, he is positively (and ironically) evangelical about the power of our genetics in dictating our behavior. And it is to the rest of the work’s detriment. 

I’m not some biological denialist. I believe whole-heartedly in evolutionary theory. And, of course, the potential for any and all physical actions have to ultimately originate in the code that facilitates every biological process we undertake. But, first off, since natural selection works probabilistically, what do you think the odds are that, of the billions of humans to walk the Earth, the theory’s first popular progenitor is an acceptable exemplar of all of these processes? It’s laughably small. Literally smaller than the first common ancestor of all life on this planet compared to the sun. I don’t think that this means that Wright had to abandon the mission of using Darwin as an illustration--again, that’s part of what made this book so interesting--but it would be far better served if, instead, Wright said something to the effect of “we can see an imperfect analogy to these processes in Darwin’s life.” A small change but, as Wright knows, small changes can have a large impact.

I suspect that Wright’s self-admitted zealousy on the subject was partially spurred on by the fact that this book was written before epigenetics (the process through which different parts of the genome are activated/deactivated in response to environmental changes, changing the genes’ expression) was more rigorously demonstrated. I recall him adamantly insisting, once or twice, that genes “can’t be changed” once we’ve been conceived. At the time, that was the belief commensurate with the best available evidence. Although epigenetics do not disprove this, the truth is that our genes are far more flexible than originally thought. If genetic fixedness is what you’re arguing, it’s pretty tough to say anything other than “everything Darwin did ever is totally explainable through evolutionary psychology.” Even if it's not true. So I’ve decided to chalk this up to scientific progress and its inevitable, unenviable ability to reveal certain pronouncements as utterly wrong. It’ll undoubtedly happen to me; it happens to any practicing scientist. 

The second theme, though, is less able to be chalked up to the inexorable march of progress. That is the distinct, but related, assertion interwoven throughout the text that literally everything can be explained by evolutionary psychology. Moral codes? Evolutionary psychology. Selective memory of our own moral failings? Evolutionary psychology. Western social structures and the necessity of political and economic inequality? Survey says: Evolutionary psychology. 

These assertions are often manifest through what I call “cover your ass” language. We all know it; we all, regrettably, deploy it. It comes when the authors use absolute terms for the vast preponderance of the work and then say “now, do I really think that this explains everything? Of course not! But…” and then proceeds to make the exact same points, just with a couple of words interjected to signal intellectual humility. A few careful words do not erase the other 98% and the frames they collectively construct. Wright is arguing that evolutionary psychology alone can explain just about every social phenomenon, from the simple to profound. But the fact of the matter is that evolutionary psychology would be hard-pressed to understand why people on vacation with their families would bother to leave tips at restaurants despite the fact that they do, more often than not. (Seriously. Reciprocal altruism’s out since you’ll never see that server again. Odds are they weren’t related, so kin selection’s out too. Peacocking wealth contrasts with women’s supposed preference for mates who don’t needlessly divert resources away from her children. Tipping is a tough nut to crack for rational-choice-esque theoried like evolutionary psych). If it can’t explain something so banal as this, I have strong doubts of the deterministic account Wright explicates here. He will, almost begrudgingly, admit that social and environmental forces play a part in genetic expression. But he does not seem prepared to admit that it plays as big of a role as even the available evidence at the time did.

The more I read it, the more I felt that this book was symbolic of a lot of evolutionary science at the time: It contains real, interesting insight on genetic processes and their role (however expansive or limited) in complex interpersonal phenomena. These shouldn’t be undersold or ignored; I learned a great deal reading this book. The problem is that these insights come paired with uninterrogated moralizing, steeped in contemporaneous social events, passed off as timeless, objective Truth. The most obvious example (because of how often Wright returns to it) comes in the aforementioned asymmetry in male parental investment. Or, rather, the seemingly inevitable end-result: Divorce. This was often curiously paired with hand-wavey discussions of the Madonna-Whore dichotomy. Apparently, men who manage to have sex with women earlier in the relationship feel less inclined to see her as a viable marriage partner. Should a quickly-pairing couple (referring to the speed in which they decide to do the act and not, hopefully, the duration of the act itself) wind-up married, men are more likely to ditch the women--and ditch them for similar "kinds" of women. This discussion would often lead to Wright lamenting how women are engaging in sex earlier and earlier in romantic relationships. Things were better decades before this promiscuity was socially acceptable. Like back in Victorian England when Charles wed his beloved Emma. And the evidentiary linchpin, at times explicitly mentioned while only obliquely inferred at others, is the sky-high divorce rates that, Wright argues, came as a consequence of social structures being poorly designed considering our inherent genetic predispositions. 

Of course, we now know that the high divorce rates of the 90s were a temporary thing. First-marriages are lasting far longer than they did (on average) in the 80’s, 90’s, and early 00’s but divorces are just as easy (if not easier) than ever before. If it was entirely because of early sex and our baser nature, the pattern should continue. The fact that it doesn’t is both evidence that evolutionary psychology is more limited than Wright suggests and that the urgency imbued in his analysis was shaped by his own moral sensibilities rather than those seen in society as a whole, inculcated by natural selection.

This wasn’t all of the social critique Wright was inclined to wade in. All fields and theories have their critics. Good authors often anticipate common objections and address them in the text. He saw his most likely critics as less scientifically driven as ideologically so. Lofty prose to the contrary, he was on the attack far more than on the defense; Darwin found himself a new bull dog. His target: Those dastardly post-modernists. He often panned “post-modernism” for their critiques of evolutionary psychology, often claiming (without much evidence) that it stemmed from the post-modernists’ universal and fundamental ignorance about biology. Honestly, the way Wright so derisively talked about them, I was surprised that he didn’t bust out a couple of verbose “yo mamma” jokes. 

What makes his vituperative swipes so ironic 25 years later is that the post-structuralists were right. Many evolutionary scientists were predisposed towards advancing biologically deterministic theories of human behavior. Any practicing geneticist worth their salt today would tell you that human behavior is so dependent on genes' interactions with the social and physical environment that even things we take for granted as “hard-wired” (such as one’s sexual preference) has been persuasively shown to not be the consequence of singular genes--or even wholly the consequence of complex genetic interactions. This is a far, far cry from Wright’s portrayal in the book; I honestly think he would be aghast at this suggestion, as if it surrenders precious ground to heretical forces in the battle for all of science’s soul. And the post-modernists are consequently vindicated in questioning what kind of power is made manifest, and towards whom is it ultimately directed, when these assertions are given the pop-science stamp of total veracity. (Actually, despite it being basically their entire deal, I can’t recall a moment when Wright discussed power when issuing his disses of post-modernism. Instead, he discussed them in the same kind of shifting, ephemeral manner that paints them as boogeymen with accusations that were often equally grounded in reality. I think he would find his own intellectual horizons broadened if he allotted the same serious attention to their intellectual contributions as he demands for his subject). 

To shoehorn in a personal complaint that I had, the book was heavy in evolutionary theory but very, very sparse in social-psychological insight. Spare a chapter where Wright tried to rehabilitate Freud’s reputation (as successful attempt as one’s going to have considering how uphill that battle is), most of the psychology was relegated to sexual pairing preferences and over-general suggestions on morality and social bonding. The former was interesting and insightful; the rest woefully underdeveloped. I may be spoiled by books like Behave and How Emotions Are Made (part of these phenomenal works both touched on how evolution may bring around specific cognitive processes), but I think Wright could have comfortably fit interesting, more specific insights if he shed the weird moralism and extensive post-modernist vendetta.

I hate closing reviews with negatives, no matter how well deserved. Presumably that’s in my genes as well. So I’d actually like to conclude by saying that I well and truly learned a lot from this book. Some of it was less novel so much as it was a refresher (I have read a number of prominent books on evolutionary theory, including the oft-referenced Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins), but some insights were well and truly new to me and illuminating. The one that stands out the most at the moment is the game theoretic accounts claiming that monogamy ultimately serves men (while institutional polygyny would be better for women) and the argument that people are more rude in spaces with fewer permanent interpersonal ties. I also thought the point that adherence to cultural values are an expedient for environmentally contingent reproductive success was well argued. I don’t buy these arguments entirely, but I think they and other points are worth mulling over to extract the useful bits. But in order to get to these bits, you have to be attentive and willing to parse through a lot of things that, in the rat-race of ideas, deserve to be thoroughly out-competed. 

[pope-francis-quotes]

9th May >> (@ZenitEnglish By Andrea Tornielli) #Pope Francis #PopeFrancis ANALYSIS: Takeaways from #PopeFrancis’ Motu Proprio ‘Vos Estis Lux Mundi’

Vatican’s Editorial Director, Andrea Tornielli, Explains Pope’s New Law to Combat Sexual Abuse @Tornielli @oss_romano

ANALYSIS: Takeaways from Pope Francis’ Motu Proprio ‘Vos Estis Lux Mundi’

Vatican’s Editorial Director, Andrea Tornielli, Explains Pope’s New Law to Combat Sexual Abuse

By Andrea Tornielli, Editorial Director of Vatican’s Dicastery for Communications, published in L’Osservatore Romano

***

New norms for the whole Church against those who abuse or cover up

Pope Francis’ Motu proprio, “Vos estis lux mundi”, establishes new procedures for reporting abuse and violence, and ensures that Bishops and Religious Superiors are held accountable for their actions. It includes the obligation for clerics and religious to report abuse. Every Diocese must have a system that allows the public to submit reports easily.

“Vos estis lux mundi”. “You are the light of the world… Our Lord Jesus Christ calls every believer to be a shining example of virtue, integrity and holiness”. The Gospel of Matthew provides the title and first words of Pope Francis’ new Motu proprio dedicated to the fight against sexual abuse committed by clerics and religious, as well as the actions or omissions of Bishops and Religious Superiors that in any way interfere with or fail to investigate abuse. The Pope recalls that “the crimes of sexual abuse offend Our Lord, cause physical, psychological and spiritual damage to the victims and harm the community of the faithful”, and mentions the special responsibility of the Successors of the Apostles to prevent these crimes. The document represents another result of the Meeting on the Protection of Minors held in the Vatican in February 2019. It establishes new procedural rules to combat sexual abuse and to ensure that Bishops and Religious Superiors are held accountable for their actions. It establishes universal norms, which apply to the whole Catholic Church.

An “office” for reporting in every diocese

Among the new indications given is the obligation for every Diocese in the world to set up, by June 2020, “one or more public, stable and easily accessible systems for submission of reports” concerning sexual abuse committed by clerics and religious, the use of child pornography, and cover-ups of the same abuse. The legislation does not specify what these “systems” consist of, because it leaves operational choices to the Diocese; and these may differ according to various cultures and local conditions. The idea is that anyone who has suffered abuse can have recourse to the local Church, while being assured they will be well received, protected from retaliation, and that their reports will be treated with the utmost seriousness.

The obligation to report

Another new indication concerns the obligation for all clerics, and all men and women religious, to “report promptly” all accusations of abuse of which they become aware, as well as any omissions and cover-ups in the management of cases of abuse, to ecclesiastical authorities. Though this obligation was formerly left up to individual consciences, it now becomes a universally established legal precept. The obligation as such is sanctioned for clerics and religious, but any layperson can, and is encouraged to, use the system to report violence and abuse to the competent ecclesiastical authority.

Not only child abuse

The document covers not only violence and abuse against children and vulnerable adults, but also sexual abuse and violence resulting from an abuse of authority as well. This includes cases of violence against religious by clerics, as well as abuse committed against adult seminarians or novices.

Dealing with cover-ups

One of the most important elements is the identification, as a specific category, of so-called cover-ups, defined as “actions or omissions intended to interfere with or avoid civil investigations or canonical investigations, whether administrative or penal, against a cleric or a religious regarding the delicts” of sexual abuse. This section refers to those who hold positions of particular responsibility in the Church, and who, instead of pursuing abuses committed by others, have hidden them, and have protected alleged offenders instead of protecting the victims.

The protection of vulnerable people

Vos estis lux mundi stresses the importance of protecting minors (anyone under 18) and vulnerable people. The definition of a “vulnerable person” is broadened to include “any person in a state of infirmity, physical or mental deficiency, or deprivation of personal liberty which, in fact, even occasionally, limits their ability to understand or to want to otherwise resist the offense”. In this respect, the new Motu proprio echoes recent Vatican legislation (CCXCVII of 26 March 2019).

Respecting the laws of states

The obligation to report to the local Ordinary or Religious Superior does not interfere with, or change, any other reporting obligation that may exist in respective countries’ legislation. In fact, the norms “apply without prejudice to the rights and obligations established in each place by state laws, particularly those concerning any reporting obligations to the competent civil authorities”.

The protection of victims and those reporting abuse

The sections dedicated to protecting those who come forward to report abuse are also significant. According to the provisions of the Motu proprio, someone reporting abuse cannot be subjected to “prejudice, retaliation or discrimination” because of what they report. The problem of victims who in the past have been told to keep silent is also addressed: these universal norms provide that “an obligation to keep silent may not be imposed on any person with regard to the contents of his or her report”. Obviously, the seal of confession remains absolute and inviolable and is in no way affected by this legislation. Vos estis lux mundi also states that victims and their families must be treated with dignity and respect and must receive appropriate spiritual, medical and psychological assistance.

The investigation of bishops

The Motu proprio regulates the investigation of Bishops, Cardinals, Religious Superiors and all those who lead a Diocese, or another particular Church, in various capacities and even temporarily. The rules apply not only in the case of these persons being investigated for having committed sexual abuse themselves, but also if they are accused of having “covered up”, or of failing to pursue abuses of which they were aware, and which it was their duty to address.

The role of the Metropolitan

There are new indications regarding the role of the Metropolitan Archbishop in preliminary investigations: if the accused individual is a Bishop, the Metropolitan receives a mandate from the Holy See to investigate. This strengthens his traditional role in the Church and indicates a desire to make the most of local resources with regard to investigations into Bishops. Every thirty days, the person in charge of the investigation sends the Holy See “a status report on the state of the investigation”, which “is to be completed within the term of ninety days” (extensions for “just reasons” are possible). This establishes specific timeframes and requires the Vatican Dicasteries concerned to act promptly.

Involvement of the laity

Citing the Canon Law article that stresses the important contribution of the laity, the norms of the Motu proprio provide that the Metropolitan, in conducting the investigations, can avail himself of the help of “qualified persons”, according to “the needs of the individual case and, in particular, taking into account the cooperation that can be offered by the lay faithful”. The Pope has repeatedly stated that the specializations and professional skills of the laity represent an important resource for the Church. The norms now provide that Episcopal Conferences and Dioceses may prepare lists of qualified persons willing to collaborate, but the ultimate responsibility for investigations remains with the Metropolitan.

Presumption of innocence

The principle of presumption of innocence of the person under investigation is reaffirmed. The accused will be informed of the investigation when requested to do so by the competent Dicastery. The accusation must be notified only if formal proceedings are opened. If deemed appropriate, in order to ensure the integrity of the investigation or of the evidence, this notification may be omitted during the preliminary stage.

Conclusion of the investigation

The Motu proprio does not modify the penalties for crimes committed, but it does establish the procedures for reporting and carrying out the preliminary investigation. At the conclusion of the investigation, the Metropolitan (or, in certain cases, the Bishop of the suffragan Diocese with the greatest seniority of appointment) forwards the results to the competent Vatican Dicastery. This completes his contribution. The competent Dicastery then proceeds “in accordance with the law provided for the specific case”, acting on the basis of already existing canonical norms. Based on the results of the preliminary investigation, the Holy See can immediately impose preventive and restrictive measures on the person under investigation.

Concrete commitment

With this new juridical instrument, called for by Pope Francis, the Catholic Church takes a further and incisive step in the prevention and fight against abuse, putting the emphasis on concrete actions. As the Pope writes at the beginning of the document: “In order that these phenomena, in all their forms, never happen again, a continuous and profound conversion of hearts is needed, attested by concrete and effective actions that involve everyone in the Church.”

9th MAY 2019 18:08ANALYSIS

[forsetti]

On Defending Misogyny: Ross Douthat Edition

Ross Douthat’s latest nonsense in the New York Times is quite the pile of crap, even when compared to other piles of crap written by Douthat.  Here is my take on the article (Douthat’s article in bold.) One lesson to be drawn from recent Western history might be this: Sometimes the extremists and radicals and weirdos see the world more clearly than the respectable and moderate and sane. All kinds of phenomena, starting as far back as the Iraq War and the crisis of the euro but accelerating in the age of populism, have made more sense in the light of analysis by reactionaries and radicals than as portrayed in the organs of establishment opinion. Not one single person with an ounce of credibility thinks that extremists and radicals and weirdos see the world clearly because SEEING THE WORLD CLEARLY IS ANTITHETICAL TO BEING AN EXTREMISTS, RADICAL, OR WEIRDO.  The ONLY way Douthat's statement makes any sense is if he thinks people with enough common sense to know invading Iraq on bogus reasons with zero plan on what to do after the initial invasion was a fucking horrible idea, were extremist, radical, weirdo.

This is part of why there’s been so much recent agitation over universities and op-ed pages and other forums for debate. There’s a general understanding that the ideological mainstream isn’t adequate to the moment, but nobody can decide whether that means we need purges or pluralism, a spirit of curiosity and conversation or a furious war against whichever side you think is evil.

For those more curious than martial, one useful path through this thicket is to look at areas where extremists and eccentrics from very different worlds are talking about the same subject. Such overlap is no guarantee of wisdom, but it’s often a sign that there’s something interesting going on.

A classic Douthat move-lay out a completely bogus claim right out of the block and then construct a whole argument on top of it.

Which brings me to the sex robots. People having opinions about the Iraq war and the European Union logically leads us to sex robots because of course it fucking does.

Well, actually, first it brings me to the case of Robin Hanson, a George Mason economist, libertarian and noted brilliant weirdo. Commenting on the recent terrorist violence in Toronto, in which a self-identified “incel” — that is, involuntary celibate — man sought retribution against women and society for denying him the fornication he felt that he deserved, Hanson offered this provocation: If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?

If you use “libertarian,” you don't get to follow it up with “brilliant.” Never....fucking ever.  As crazy as that juxtaposition of terms is the casual acceptance by Douthat of what “incel” means is even more disturbing.  The idea that women in society have to have sex with men is repulsive on every level.  That someone gives voice to this notion and give it its own term is fucked up beyond reason. Sorry men, women are not here for you to have sex with.  Here's a thought, if men want to have sex with women, then maybe, just maybe, they should behave in ways that women deem appropriate enough to where they will give up their bodies willingly to them.  Anything short of this is misogyny at the least and rape a the most. After all, he wrote, “one might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met.” Let me de-fuckify this statement because it is a Ceasar's Word Salad of nonsense.  “Men who don't get as much sex as they want, think they deserve, need to band together to find ways, even through violence, to get women to fuck them against their wills.”

This argument was not well received by people closer to the mainstream than Professor Hanson, to put it mildly. A representative response from Slate’s Jordan Weissmann, “Is Robin Hanson the Creepiest Economist in America?”, cited the post along with some previous creepy forays to dismiss Hanson as a misogynist weirdo not that far removed from the franker misogyny of toxic online males.

I can't understand why the “mainstream” would find the unionization of violent, horny men hell-bent on making women their sexual subjects offensive.  But, see what Douthat has done.  He has already constructed his argument where the mainstream is the ones who don't “see the world clearly.”  Since the mainstream has been pigeon-holed as not seeing reality for what it really is, then it logically follows for Douthat that their view cannot be correct.

But Hanson’s post made me immediately think of a recent essay in The London Review of Books by Amia Srinivasan, “Does Anyone Have the Right To Sex?” Srinivasan, an Oxford philosophy professor, covered similar ground (starting with an earlier “incel” killer) but expanded the argument well beyond the realm of male chauvinists to consider groups with whom The London Review’s left-leaning and feminist readers would have more natural sympathy — the overweight and disabled, minority groups treated as unattractive by the majority, trans women unable to find partners and other victims, in her narrative, of a society that still makes us prisoners of patriarchal and also racist-sexist-homophobic rules of sexual desire.

There is a lot to unpack here.  First, Douthat uses a philosopher, in order to bolster the credibility of his argument.  As someone with two degrees in philosophy, I can tell you that there are a lot of batshit crazy people with philosophy degrees who throw out outlandish arguments for no other reason than to be controversial and get their shit published in order to placate the Publish or Perish Gods. Second, having sympathy for how a culture views and treats groups outside the accepted norms like “overweight,” “trans,” “disabled,”... who have a difficult time having sex for a host of reasons is, to quote Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, “...ain't the same fucking ballpark. It ain't the same league. It ain't even the same fucking sport.” Third, Douthat, a devout Catholic who has carried water for the patriarchy, for misogynists, for homophobes...for years now doesn't get to pretend he is worried about the very structure he helped build.

Srinivasan ultimately answered her title question in the negative: “There is no entitlement to sex, and everyone is entitled to want what they want.” But her negative answer was a qualified one. While “no one has a right to be desired,” at the same time “who is desired and who isn’t is a political question,” which left-wing and feminist politics might help society answer differently someday. This wouldn’t instantiate a formal right to sex, exactly, but if the new order worked as its revolutionary architects intended, sex would be more justly distributed than it is today.

Not only did Douthat use a philosopher to bolster his argument, he completely misused their words in order to do so.  Notice how he uses Srinivasan's comment, “who is desired and who isn't is a political question,” and dovetails his own comment “which left-wing and feminist politics might help society answer differently someday,” as if they were one and the same statement.  Every culture has their own ideas of what is/isn't sexually desirable.  It has nothing to do with “left-wing” or “feminist” politics.  Some cultures sexually value heavier companions, those with smaller feet, those with longer necks, those with fairer skin...  We can argue the rationality of all of these but none of them are based on leftist or feminist beliefs.  In fact, left-leaning and feminists would argue the fuck against these arbitrary sexual values.

A number of the critics I saw engaging with Srinivasan’s essay tended to respond the way a normal center-left writer like Weissmann engaged with Hanson’s thought experiment — by commenting on its weirdness or ideological extremity rather than engaging fully with its substance. But to me, reading Hanson and Srinivasan together offers a good case study in how intellectual eccentrics — like socialists and populists in politics — can surface issues and problems that lurk beneath the surface of more mainstream debates.

By this I mean that as offensive or utopian the redistribution of sex might sound, the idea is entirely responsive to the logic of late-modern sexual life, and its pursuit would be entirely characteristic of a recurring pattern in liberal societies.

Shorter Douthat: “Smart people reacting honestly to the arguments of a libertarian nut job don't know what the fuck they are doing but I, a dyed-in-the-wool social conservative does because of some magical reason that is never explained.”  If you think placating angry, resentful, horny men is the way to utopia, I'm pretty sure you are either stupid as fuck and/or just about the most intellectually dishonest person I've ever read.

First, because like other forms of neoliberal deregulation the sexual revolution created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration. Douthat's use of “neoliberal” was done on purpose and as meaningless as the term itself.  What Douthat really means by this statement is, “In the past, men could do whatever the fuck they wanted to women, whenever they wanted and women had to take it because that is the fucking way it was.  Now men can't do this and they are having a sad about it so we need to blame the women and those who support them instead of the fuck wad misogynists who were morally wrong 50, 100, 200... years ago for their behaviors.”

Second, because in this new landscape, and amid other economic and technological transformations, the sexes seem to be struggling generally to relate to one another, with social and political chasms opening between them and not only marriage and family but also sexual activity itself in recent decline.

“The sexes seem to be struggling generally to relate to one another, with social and political chasms opening up between them.”  Holy Both-Fucking-Siderism!  NO!!!  The “sexes” are not having a problem.  MEN caught up in an archaic belief system are having a problem-a big fucking problem.  Douthat doesn't get to lay the responsibility and consequences of men not adapting to women's rights on the doorstep of women.

Third, because the culture’s dominant message about sex is still essentially Hefnerian, despite certain revisions attempted by feminists since the heyday of the Playboy philosophy — a message that frequency and variety in sexual experience is as close to a summum bonum as the human condition has to offer, that the greatest possible diversity in sexual desires and tastes and identities should be not only accepted but cultivated, and that virginity and celibacy are at best strange and at worst pitiable states. And this master narrative, inevitably, makes both the new inequalities and the decline of actual relationships that much more difficult to bear …which in turn encourages people, as ever under modernity, to place their hope for escape from the costs of one revolution in a further one yet to come, be it political, social or technological, which will supply if not the promised utopia at least some form of redress for the many people that progress has obviously left behind.

There is an alternative, conservative response, of course — namely, that our widespread isolation and unhappiness and sterility might be dealt with by reviving or adapting older ideas about the virtues of monogamy and chastity and permanence and the special respect owed to the celibate.

So let me get this straight, the problem with sex in America is because of feminists and leftists but, “ the culture’s dominant message about sex is still essentially Hefnerian.”?  I've never known a single feminist or leftist who was not only okay with the views and attitudes about sex espoused by Hugh Hefner but who used them as the basis of their sexual ethics.   In fact, it has been the direct opposite.   Douthat's view of feminism and left-leaning is comical and beyond conservative stereotyping.  

But this is not the natural response for a society like ours. Instead we tend to look for fixes that seem to build on previous revolutions, rather than reverse them.

In the case of sexual liberation and its discontents, that’s unlikely to mean the kind of thoroughgoingly utopian reimagining of sexual desire that writers like Srinivasan think we should aspire toward, or anything quite so formal as the pro-redistribution political lobby of Hanson’s thought experiment.

By defacto argument, the sexual revolution was bad so men trying to come to terms with how to really treat women as equals would be a misguided approach to the problem.  We need to go back in time to when women had limited rights and almost none with regard to their bodies, their sexuality, and start from there in order to build a more perfect union where men get to get laid when they want by whomever they want.

But I expect the logic of commerce and technology will be consciously harnessed, as already in pornography, to address the unhappiness of incels, be they angry and dangerous or simply depressed and despairing. The left’s increasing zeal to transform prostitution into legalized and regulated “sex work” will have this end implicitly in mind, the libertarian (and general male) fascination with virtual-reality porn and sex robotswill increase as those technologies improve — and at a certain point, without anyone formally debating the idea of a right to sex, right-thinking people will simply come to agree that some such right exists, and that it makes sense to look to some combination of changed laws, new technologies and evolved mores to fulfill it.

Whether sex workers and sex robots can actually deliver real fulfillment is another matter. But that they will eventually be asked to do it, in service to a redistributive goal that for now still seems creepy or misogynist or radical, feels pretty much inevitable.

So, for Douthat, the need to address and placate incels is important but we shouldn't do it with legalizing prostitution or other means.  What Douthat is really saying is, “If men cannot dominate and be in control of women, then any sexual solution won't be acceptable.  Not legalized prostitution. Not sex robots.  Nothing short of actual, real women being subservient to men will do.”

At no point in this entire article by Douthat are men held responsible for their beliefs, for their actions.  NOT ONE SINGLE FUCKING TIME! “Feminists” and “left-leaning” people are the real reason behind backward thinking, immoral. egotistical men for behaving the way they do towards women. GTFOH!

[marnathas]

You're into erotic what!?

So I'm into erotic hypnosis. What on earth does that even mean? What's involved? Pretty much everyone in this kink has as some point asked those questions. I answer them quite frequently on Discord and such, as even people who know they're interested often come in without knowing much, because information is so hard to come across, and there's so many misconceptions about hypnosis.

Where to start? Well, I may as well explain the idea of erotic hypnosis to begin with. Most people are familiar with therapeutic hypnosis, which is a very formal, controlled environment aimed at self-help and fixing issues. We're also familiar with stage hypnosis, which is silly, fun (maybe), and flashy, creating a spectacle of embarrassing suggestions using carefully picked members of the audience. Erotic, and what I like to call recreational (which is the same idea, but without the NSFW 18+ elements), is somewhere in-between, depending on the people involved. It's usually much more controlled, and one-on-one or in small groups. It's usually aimed at having fun and some silliness, but without the embarrassment, and creating experiences. And as a result tends to focus on building strong working relationships of trust and rapport to create better and more enjoyable experiences. Like most forms of kink, it can be in the context of devoted relationships, play partners, D/S, platonic, and all the in-betweens.

To go through the even more basics (or at least how I think about them), hypnosis is basically a state of hyper-focus, where the hypnotic subject is much more open to ideas and able to create connections within their own mind. This leads to the hypnotist being able to give them "suggestions", i.e. when you leave trance you will do X, and it then happens because the subject's mind has agreed to that idea and has deemed it safe and acceptable to do. A slightly more complex, and long-term form of this is "triggers", creating a pre-planned response to certain stimuli. The easiest example is a reinduction trigger, whenever X happens you will go back into a hypnotic trance. The possibilities are quite endless, providing they're physically possible, and both parties are fine with it. You could, as a hypnotist, stop someone from being able to move, repeat the same 5 seconds over and over, or experience intense arousal, among other things.

That leads pretty easily to the biggest set of misconceptions about hypnosis. This isn't mind control. The subject actually has quite a bit of control over the situation, to reject suggestions or bring themselves out of trance if needed (it's actually impossible to get "stuck" in a trance, you'd come out at some point even if left alone). There's always a part of your brain that's looking out for your own well-being, and it stops you from accepting ideas that you know are bad, even when hypnotised. Additionally, almost anyone can be hypnotised. If you're able to sit down and keep focused on one thing, you're able to go into trance via some method. Going into trance, and being able to experience phenomena within it, are simultaneously skills that can be worked on and improved at, and highly individualistic. Some people are absolute naturals at various aspects of hypnosis, others aren't. It's completely normal if you don't find it easy at first, or if you drop like an anchor first time. Even exactly how trance feels can differ wildly between people, and experience levels, so don't take anyone else's account as this is how it must be and I've failed if I don't feel the exact same things.

Now, I should mention the ugly side of this kink, it'd be wrong of me not to acknowledge it. What I said about your brain looking out for you isn't completely fool-proof. Most people in the erotic hypnosis community know at least some horror stories, either of people being hypnotised by someone they shouldn't of trusted, or a relationship going sour in a way that precluded removing all the built-up hypnotic responses in the subject. It's why the first thing anyone responsible will tell a new person is to only do stuff with someone they trust to be responsible and to keep your best interest in mind too. Like many other parts of life, there are some awful people out there who will use hypnosis to do awful things, and the may not reveal themselves as such instantly. Luckily the community for this is pretty damn awesome at catching those people and making sure they don't get further opportunities to do so, and there's a heap of fantastic people in it who can be trusted.

Please don't take the previous paragraph as a reason to run screaming, as for the potential bad there's always some amazing in return. I've hinted at this, but the community for erotic hypnosis is genuinely fantastic, and most people involved are responsible enough to try and structure things to prevent problems before they can occur. For instance, when creating a trigger, like the example above, tying it to very specific circumstances (often directly to the hypnotist), so they can't happen by accident. And because it's such a small community, everyone tends to try to look after each other, to spot red flags as quickly as possible, and prevent the above situations from happening as pre-emptively as possible, and has built up an incredible culture of emphasising trust and negotiation before any kind of play occurs, because it's necessary when you're dealing with something that puts one person in an altered state of mind where they can't then properly consent to more things, so you have to do so at the very start. And you see some fantastic relationships of all kinds form between people, as hypnosis tends to be a very intense and emotionally charged experience (and fun too!).

For anyone reading this who's interested in seeing what (erotic) hypnosis is all about, my suggestion would be to, if possible, find a local event that's running and meet people, or find some of the online communities, and ask questions, get to know people, and steadily see what it's all about. Despite this feeling quite long I've honestly barely scratched the surface, it's an incredibly fascinating topic that combines a lot of different fields and can be seriously in-depth if you start diving into the underlying concepts. And if you do start exploring the communities, and you find someone you end up feeling comfortable with trusting, give it a try yourself and see what it's like for you. Or on the other hand, if you want to try your hand at being a hypnotist, again ask around and you'll always get pointed towards some great learning resources that are out there, although it's usually good to experience the subject end of hypnosis even if you want to be the hypnotist, as knowing that helps you learn too. Either way, there's never any need to feel pressured to rush into it all, just take it at whatever pace feels best.

I fully expect at some point in the future I'll decide I've explained this like crap and will write it again from scratch, but for now I hope it's a decent introduction to the idea.

[kristablogs]

Where does fear actually come from?

Convention thinking says that the root of all fear lies in our brains. But what comes before then? (The National Museum in Oslo/)

Excerpt from Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear by Eva Holland. Reprinted with permission of The Experiment.

Fear, it seems at first, should be easy to identify and define. To borrow from that old judicial decision about the definition of obscenity: we know it when we feel it.

Putting that feeling into words can be harder. G. Stanley Hall, the nineteenth-century founder of the American Journal of Psychology and the first president of the American Psychological Association, described fear as “the anticipation of pain,” and that seems like a pretty good general definition to me. Fear of violence? Anticipatory pain. Fear of a breakup, the loss of someone you love? Anticipatory pain. Fear of sharks, of plane crashes, of falling off a cliff? Check, check, and check.

But what we need, really, isn’t just a solid catch-all definition. What we need, to understand the role of fear in our lives, is to examine the layers and varieties of fears that can afflict us.

There’s the sharp jab of alarm when you sense a clear, imminent threat: That car is going to hit me. There’s the duller, more dispersed foreboding, the feeling of malaise whose source you can’t quite pinpoint: Something is wrong here. I don’t feel safe. There are spiraling, sprawling existential fears: I am going to flunk this exam, tank this interview, fail at life. And there are precise, even banal, ones: Pulling this Band-Aid off is going to hurt. How do they all fit together? Or, put differently, to what extent does each stand apart?

According to Greek mythology, Ares, the god of war, had two sons, who accompanied him into battle: Phobos, the god of fear, and Deimos, the god of dread. That seems like a useful distinction to start with—fear versus dread—and it’s one that’s echoed today by our distinction between fear and anxiety. Fear, generally speaking, is regarded as being prompted by a clear and present threat: you sense danger and you feel afraid. Anxiety, on the other hand, is born from less tangible concerns: it can feel like fear but without a clear cause. Simple enough, at least in theory.

In Fear: A Cultural History, author Joanna Bourke gamely attempts to parse the distinctions between fear and anxiety. “In one case a frightening person or dangerous object can be identified: the flames searing patterns on the ceiling, the hydrogen bomb, the terrorist,” she writes. Whereas “more often, anxiety overwhelms us from some source ‘within’: there is an irrational panic about venturing outside, a dread of failure, a premonition of doom ... Anxiety is described as a more generalized state, while fear is more specific and immediate. The ‘danger object’ seems to be in front of us in fear states, while in anxiety states the individual is not consciously aware of what endangers him or her.”

But as Bourke points out, that distinction has serious limitations. It’s entirely dependent on the ability of the fearful person to identify the threat. Is it legitimately, immediately dangerous? Or is the fear abstract, “irrational”? She offers the hydrogen bomb and the terrorist as examples of potentially clear and present threats, but both can also serve as anxiety-inducing spectres, ominous even when absent.

Nerve by Eva Holland. (Courtesy of The Experiment/)

The distinction between fear and anxiety, then, can be murky, even as it can also be a useful and even necessary line to draw. But setting the issue of a threat’s clear presence aside, there’s the matter of our “fear” response.

The scientists who study our emotional lives make distinctions between different categories of feelings. There are the primary emotions, our most basic and near-universal responses, found across cultures and even appearing, or at least seeming to us to appear, in other species: fear, anger, disgust, surprise, sadness, and happiness.

Think of them like primary colors, the foundational elements of a whole rainbow of emotion. Just as red and blue in combination can be used to create all the shades of purple, you can imagine some more precise feelings as being built by the primary emotions. Horror, for instance, is fear mixed with disgust—and, maybe, some shadings of anger and surprise. Delight could be happiness with a bit of surprise stirred in. And so on.

There are also the social emotions, the feelings that don’t stand alone like the primary emotions but are generated by our relationships to others: sympathy, embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, jealousy, envy, gratitude, admiration, contempt, and more.

Of all these, fear is perhaps the most studied. But what does it really mean to study fear? What do we even mean, exactly, when we say “fear” in the context of scientific research? That’s a more complicated question than you might expect.

Traditionally, scientists have studied “fear” in animals by measuring their reactions to threatening or unpleasant stimuli—a rat’s freezing response when it is subjected to a small electric shock, for instance. In studying humans, scientists have more options and a broader array of tools. Most importantly, humans can self-report, verbally or in writing: Yes, I felt afraid.

The complicating factor is that those two responses—the freezing and the feeling—are separate and distinct. As the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, an expert on the brain circuitry of fear, emphasizes in his book Anxious, we know that the physical fear response and the emotional feeling of fear are produced by two different mechanisms in the body.

For a long time, the working theory held that the feeling came first, in response to the fear stimulus, and then the physical response followed from the feeling. This is what’s known as the commonsense, or Darwinian, school of thought. But that was more an assumption than a proven mechanism, and these days it has fallen out of favor.

Instead, as science has turned its attention to working out that elusive mechanism more concretely, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has come up with an answer that, while provocative, ultimately feels right to me. The feeling, he argues in a pair of funny and wise books, Descartes’ Error and Looking for Spinoza, is actually derived from that same menu of physical reactions that we would typically view as accessories of, or adjacent to, our emotions.

For the purposes of his argument, Damasio makes an unusual distinction between “emotions”—by which, in this context, he specifically means the physical, measurable reactions of the body in response to an emotional stimulus, the physical fear response—and “feelings,” the intangible expressions of emotion in our minds. That may seem odd, or even nonsensical, but it’s a key to his case, so keep it in mind.

“We tend to believe that the hidden is the source of the expressed,” he writes in Looking for Spinoza. But he argues, instead, for a counter-intuitive reversal of that order: “Emotions”—again, meaning the physical reactions here—“and related phenomena are the foundation for feelings, the mental events that form the bedrock of our minds.”

All organisms have varying abilities to react to stimuli, from a simple startle reflex or withdrawal movement all the way up to more complex multi-part responses, like the description of our physical fear processes above, which are Damasio’s “emotions.” Some of the more basic responses might sometimes look, to our eyes, like expressions of the feeling of fear, and in fact the machinery that governs them is also implicated in the more complex processes. (My startle reflex, one of our oldest and simplest reactions, has certainly come into play at times when I’ve also felt afraid. Hello, raptors in the kitchen in Jurassic Park!) But the “emotions” are at the top of the heap in terms of complexity, and as such not all organisms are capable of generating them.

Unlike some of the simpler “fear” reactions in simpler organisms (poke a “sensitive plant,” watch its leaves curl up), our emotions can be generated by stimuli both real, in the moment, and remembered—or even imagined. That’s the gift and the burden of the human mind.

But for now, let’s stick with an in-the-moment example, like a strange noise heard in the night. The fact of the noise is captured by the sensory nerves in the ear and is relayed to the brain structures involved in triggering and then executing a response. Now your body is reacting in all the ways described above.

So far, so good? The next step, in Damasio’s formulation, is the creation of the feeling itself. We know that our bodies are laced with neurons, and that they not only send out information from the brain, they also receive it.

So after the outgoing messages have gotten our hearts pumping, our sweat beading, and so on, a series of incoming messages returns to the brain, bearing all of that information about our physical state. Our brains, Damasio explains, maintain incredibly complex maps of the state of the body, from our guts to our fingertips, at all times.

And here’s the core of his argument: when the incoming messages bearing news of the body’s physical fear-state alter these maps, that’s when the feeling itself arises. Your brain learns from your body that your heart is pounding, your pupils are dilated, your goosebumps are standing at attention. Your brain does the math and says, Aha! I am afraid!

In his 1884 essay, “What is an emotion?” the philosopher and psychologist William James wrote,

If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind-stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. . . . What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of gooseflesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible for me to think.

Damasio picks up where James left off. But he doesn’t just draw on Victorian-era philosophizing to make his argument. He also works from case studies and his own research; for instance, the case of a Parkinson’s patient in Paris. The woman, who was sixty-five years old and had no history of depression or other mental illness, was undergoing an experimental treatment for her Parkinson’s symptoms. It involved the use of an electrical current to stimulate motor-control areas of the brain stem via tiny electrodes.

Nineteen other patients had undergone the treatment successfully. But when the current entered the woman’s brain, she stopped chatting with the doctors, lowered her eyes, and her face slumped.

Seconds later, she began to cry, and then to sob. “I’m fed up with life,” she said, through her tears. “I’ve had enough ... I don’t want to live anymore ... I feel worthless.” The team, alarmed, stopped the current, and within ninety seconds the woman had stopped crying. Her face perked up again, the sadness melting away. What had just happened? she asked.

It turned out, according to Damasio, that instead of stimulating the nuclei that controlled her tremors, the electrode, infinitesimally misplaced, had activated the parts of the brain stem that control a suite of actions by the facial muscles, mouth, larynx, and diaphragm—the actions that allow us to frown, pout, and cry. Her body, stimulated not by a sad movie or bad news, had acted out the motions of sadness, and her mind, in turn, had gone to a dark, dark place. The feeling arose from the physical; her mind followed her body.

This whole thing seemed counterintuitive to me at first, reversing as it does the “commonsense” view. But then I sat back and really thought about my experience of fear. How do I recall it in my memory? How do I try to explain it to other people? The fact is that I think of it mostly in physical terms: that sick feeling in my gut, the tightness in my chest, maybe some dizziness or shortness of breath.

Think about how you actually experience the feeling of happiness, of contentment, or ease. For me, it manifests in the loosening of the eternally tense muscles in my forehead and jaw, in my neck and shoulders. My eyes open wider, losing the worried squint. I breathe more deeply.

Or think about the sheer physicality of deep grief, how it wrecks your body as well as your mind. When I look back on the worst of my grief after my mom’s death, I remember it as headaches, exhaustion, a tight chest, a sense of heaviness, and lethargy. I felt sad, yes—sadder than I’ve ever been—and it was my body that told me how sad I was.

[scootoaster]

Where does fear actually come from?

Convention thinking says that the root of all fear lies in our brains. But what comes before then? (The National Museum in Oslo/)

Excerpt from Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear by Eva Holland. Reprinted with permission of The Experiment.

Fear, it seems at first, should be easy to identify and define. To borrow from that old judicial decision about the definition of obscenity: we know it when we feel it.

Putting that feeling into words can be harder. G. Stanley Hall, the nineteenth-century founder of the American Journal of Psychology and the first president of the American Psychological Association, described fear as “the anticipation of pain,” and that seems like a pretty good general definition to me. Fear of violence? Anticipatory pain. Fear of a breakup, the loss of someone you love? Anticipatory pain. Fear of sharks, of plane crashes, of falling off a cliff? Check, check, and check.

But what we need, really, isn’t just a solid catch-all definition. What we need, to understand the role of fear in our lives, is to examine the layers and varieties of fears that can afflict us.

There’s the sharp jab of alarm when you sense a clear, imminent threat: That car is going to hit me. There’s the duller, more dispersed foreboding, the feeling of malaise whose source you can’t quite pinpoint: Something is wrong here. I don’t feel safe. There are spiraling, sprawling existential fears: I am going to flunk this exam, tank this interview, fail at life. And there are precise, even banal, ones: Pulling this Band-Aid off is going to hurt. How do they all fit together? Or, put differently, to what extent does each stand apart?

According to Greek mythology, Ares, the god of war, had two sons, who accompanied him into battle: Phobos, the god of fear, and Deimos, the god of dread. That seems like a useful distinction to start with—fear versus dread—and it’s one that’s echoed today by our distinction between fear and anxiety. Fear, generally speaking, is regarded as being prompted by a clear and present threat: you sense danger and you feel afraid. Anxiety, on the other hand, is born from less tangible concerns: it can feel like fear but without a clear cause. Simple enough, at least in theory.

In Fear: A Cultural History, author Joanna Bourke gamely attempts to parse the distinctions between fear and anxiety. “In one case a frightening person or dangerous object can be identified: the flames searing patterns on the ceiling, the hydrogen bomb, the terrorist,” she writes. Whereas “more often, anxiety overwhelms us from some source ‘within’: there is an irrational panic about venturing outside, a dread of failure, a premonition of doom ... Anxiety is described as a more generalized state, while fear is more specific and immediate. The ‘danger object’ seems to be in front of us in fear states, while in anxiety states the individual is not consciously aware of what endangers him or her.”

But as Bourke points out, that distinction has serious limitations. It’s entirely dependent on the ability of the fearful person to identify the threat. Is it legitimately, immediately dangerous? Or is the fear abstract, “irrational”? She offers the hydrogen bomb and the terrorist as examples of potentially clear and present threats, but both can also serve as anxiety-inducing spectres, ominous even when absent.

Nerve by Eva Holland. (Courtesy of The Experiment/)

The distinction between fear and anxiety, then, can be murky, even as it can also be a useful and even necessary line to draw. But setting the issue of a threat’s clear presence aside, there’s the matter of our “fear” response.

The scientists who study our emotional lives make distinctions between different categories of feelings. There are the primary emotions, our most basic and near-universal responses, found across cultures and even appearing, or at least seeming to us to appear, in other species: fear, anger, disgust, surprise, sadness, and happiness.

Think of them like primary colors, the foundational elements of a whole rainbow of emotion. Just as red and blue in combination can be used to create all the shades of purple, you can imagine some more precise feelings as being built by the primary emotions. Horror, for instance, is fear mixed with disgust—and, maybe, some shadings of anger and surprise. Delight could be happiness with a bit of surprise stirred in. And so on.

There are also the social emotions, the feelings that don’t stand alone like the primary emotions but are generated by our relationships to others: sympathy, embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, jealousy, envy, gratitude, admiration, contempt, and more.

Of all these, fear is perhaps the most studied. But what does it really mean to study fear? What do we even mean, exactly, when we say “fear” in the context of scientific research? That’s a more complicated question than you might expect.

Traditionally, scientists have studied “fear” in animals by measuring their reactions to threatening or unpleasant stimuli—a rat’s freezing response when it is subjected to a small electric shock, for instance. In studying humans, scientists have more options and a broader array of tools. Most importantly, humans can self-report, verbally or in writing: Yes, I felt afraid.

The complicating factor is that those two responses—the freezing and the feeling—are separate and distinct. As the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, an expert on the brain circuitry of fear, emphasizes in his book Anxious, we know that the physical fear response and the emotional feeling of fear are produced by two different mechanisms in the body.

For a long time, the working theory held that the feeling came first, in response to the fear stimulus, and then the physical response followed from the feeling. This is what’s known as the commonsense, or Darwinian, school of thought. But that was more an assumption than a proven mechanism, and these days it has fallen out of favor.

Instead, as science has turned its attention to working out that elusive mechanism more concretely, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has come up with an answer that, while provocative, ultimately feels right to me. The feeling, he argues in a pair of funny and wise books, Descartes’ Error and Looking for Spinoza, is actually derived from that same menu of physical reactions that we would typically view as accessories of, or adjacent to, our emotions.

For the purposes of his argument, Damasio makes an unusual distinction between “emotions”—by which, in this context, he specifically means the physical, measurable reactions of the body in response to an emotional stimulus, the physical fear response—and “feelings,” the intangible expressions of emotion in our minds. That may seem odd, or even nonsensical, but it’s a key to his case, so keep it in mind.

“We tend to believe that the hidden is the source of the expressed,” he writes in Looking for Spinoza. But he argues, instead, for a counter-intuitive reversal of that order: “Emotions”—again, meaning the physical reactions here—“and related phenomena are the foundation for feelings, the mental events that form the bedrock of our minds.”

All organisms have varying abilities to react to stimuli, from a simple startle reflex or withdrawal movement all the way up to more complex multi-part responses, like the description of our physical fear processes above, which are Damasio’s “emotions.” Some of the more basic responses might sometimes look, to our eyes, like expressions of the feeling of fear, and in fact the machinery that governs them is also implicated in the more complex processes. (My startle reflex, one of our oldest and simplest reactions, has certainly come into play at times when I’ve also felt afraid. Hello, raptors in the kitchen in Jurassic Park!) But the “emotions” are at the top of the heap in terms of complexity, and as such not all organisms are capable of generating them.

Unlike some of the simpler “fear” reactions in simpler organisms (poke a “sensitive plant,” watch its leaves curl up), our emotions can be generated by stimuli both real, in the moment, and remembered—or even imagined. That’s the gift and the burden of the human mind.

But for now, let’s stick with an in-the-moment example, like a strange noise heard in the night. The fact of the noise is captured by the sensory nerves in the ear and is relayed to the brain structures involved in triggering and then executing a response. Now your body is reacting in all the ways described above.

So far, so good? The next step, in Damasio’s formulation, is the creation of the feeling itself. We know that our bodies are laced with neurons, and that they not only send out information from the brain, they also receive it.

So after the outgoing messages have gotten our hearts pumping, our sweat beading, and so on, a series of incoming messages returns to the brain, bearing all of that information about our physical state. Our brains, Damasio explains, maintain incredibly complex maps of the state of the body, from our guts to our fingertips, at all times.

And here’s the core of his argument: when the incoming messages bearing news of the body’s physical fear-state alter these maps, that’s when the feeling itself arises. Your brain learns from your body that your heart is pounding, your pupils are dilated, your goosebumps are standing at attention. Your brain does the math and says, Aha! I am afraid!

In his 1884 essay, “What is an emotion?” the philosopher and psychologist William James wrote,

If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind-stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. . . . What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of gooseflesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible for me to think.

Damasio picks up where James left off. But he doesn’t just draw on Victorian-era philosophizing to make his argument. He also works from case studies and his own research; for instance, the case of a Parkinson’s patient in Paris. The woman, who was sixty-five years old and had no history of depression or other mental illness, was undergoing an experimental treatment for her Parkinson’s symptoms. It involved the use of an electrical current to stimulate motor-control areas of the brain stem via tiny electrodes.

Nineteen other patients had undergone the treatment successfully. But when the current entered the woman’s brain, she stopped chatting with the doctors, lowered her eyes, and her face slumped.

Seconds later, she began to cry, and then to sob. “I’m fed up with life,” she said, through her tears. “I’ve had enough ... I don’t want to live anymore ... I feel worthless.” The team, alarmed, stopped the current, and within ninety seconds the woman had stopped crying. Her face perked up again, the sadness melting away. What had just happened? she asked.

It turned out, according to Damasio, that instead of stimulating the nuclei that controlled her tremors, the electrode, infinitesimally misplaced, had activated the parts of the brain stem that control a suite of actions by the facial muscles, mouth, larynx, and diaphragm—the actions that allow us to frown, pout, and cry. Her body, stimulated not by a sad movie or bad news, had acted out the motions of sadness, and her mind, in turn, had gone to a dark, dark place. The feeling arose from the physical; her mind followed her body.

This whole thing seemed counterintuitive to me at first, reversing as it does the “commonsense” view. But then I sat back and really thought about my experience of fear. How do I recall it in my memory? How do I try to explain it to other people? The fact is that I think of it mostly in physical terms: that sick feeling in my gut, the tightness in my chest, maybe some dizziness or shortness of breath.

Think about how you actually experience the feeling of happiness, of contentment, or ease. For me, it manifests in the loosening of the eternally tense muscles in my forehead and jaw, in my neck and shoulders. My eyes open wider, losing the worried squint. I breathe more deeply.

Or think about the sheer physicality of deep grief, how it wrecks your body as well as your mind. When I look back on the worst of my grief after my mom’s death, I remember it as headaches, exhaustion, a tight chest, a sense of heaviness, and lethargy. I felt sad, yes—sadder than I’ve ever been—and it was my body that told me how sad I was.

[vyldan]

Culturebox

Where I’m From

How a trip to Kenya changed the way I think about the terms African-American and black American.

By Aisha Harris

July 29, 20145:12 PM

One of the first times I recall being asked the question “Where are you from?” was also one of the first times I realized that being black wasn’t a sufficient answer. For a sixth-grade project, I had to create my own version of a family crest to be presented to the class. The idea was for each student to celebrate her ethnic heritage. I knew my ethnicity, but where were my ancestors from? While almost all of my classmates in my predominantly white Connecticut elementary school could proudly claim that their grandparents—or great-grandparents—had come to America at some point from Ireland, or Italy, or Greece, I was forced to acknowledge that I had no idea where my forebears had lived, as they were brought here against their will and any records of their origins had long since been lost. My grandparents and great-grandparents on both sides of my family were born in the South and the mid-Atlantic—hardly an interesting story, or so I thought at the time.

I was recently asked where I’m from again—multiple times—in an entirely different context: while in Kenya for a wedding. On one occasion, I struck up a friendly conversation with a young armed guard (and aspiring engineer) who stood watch within the gate of the compound where my boyfriend and I, along with several of the other foreign wedding guests, were staying.

“Where are your parents from?” he clarified, after I told him I was a visiting American. “They’re also from America,” I explained, slightly confused about what he was getting at.

Eventually, it dawned on me: He was asking the same question my school project had asked: He was curious what non-American country my family was from. Kenya, Nigeria, both? I tried to explain that as far as I know, I have no immediate or extended relatives outside of the States, but he didn’t seem to fully grasp what I meant.

Later, another Kenyan I met—the cousin of the bride—posed the same question to me during the wedding afterparty. His complimentary response: “Ah, you look like you could be African!”

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I am at least partially African, genetically speaking. A few years ago, my father took an ancestry DNA test, which revealed that some of his roots can be traced to Nigeria. But I don’t consider myself Nigerian-American, or even African-American. Where I’m from is America—who I am is a black American.

I was about 7 or 8 when my dad sat me down to watch Roots—all 500 hours of it—recorded on VHS tapes from an ’80s cable rebroadcast. Alex Haley’s tale of genealogical discovery resonated with my father as a powerful attempt to re-establish the lineal connection between Africans and African-Americans that had been erased by slavery. Roots was just one of the African-themed cultural artifacts that my father introduced to my sister and me: There was also the gorgeous soundtrack to Sarafina!, a Broadway musical about the Soweto Uprising in South Africa; the African-themed art in our home; Anansi tales; Kwanzaa celebrations. He attempted to instill in us not just a sense of pride as black Americans, but as Americans of African descent, and throughout my adolescence, I identified as black and African-American interchangeably. All of this without knowing, at the time, from what country our ancestors had come, due to the loss and erasure of their birth records prior to the turn of the 20th century.

Despite my father’s efforts, however, my first in-depth encounters with first- and second-generation Americans who had immediate family from African countries made me question my adherence to the label of African-American. To me, people with such explicit connections to their relatives’ home countries accurately embody the term; they truly have access to both cultures. As someone who grew up with a much stronger sense of my black American roots, and an understanding of African culture distilled primarily through an American sensibility, I feel as though the term African-American doesn’t quite suit my identity.

That didn’t stop my father from (sort of) jokingly asking, upon my return from Kenya last month, “Did you feel different when you landed in the motherland?” What he meant, of course, was whether I felt as if I’d returned “home” to a place I’d never before been. People have spent their whole lives hoping to find the equivalent of their own personal Zion. Had I?

My answer to him, without hesitation, was no—at least not in the way he meant it. I definitely felt different in Kenya, but it was the kind of difference I imagine everyone experiences when exploring an entirely new place for the first time—that of a tourist. (I suspect that visiting my supposed ancestral homeland of Nigeria would produce the same effect.) In addition to the obvious differences in transportation and living conditions (livestock roam the streets even in urban areas of Kenya), there were smaller but significant cultural gaps. While the wedding featured familiar traditions like the tossing of the bouquet (accompanied, naturally, by a sound bite from that universal anthem “Single Ladies”), many parts of the ceremony were in Swahili, the country’s official working language alongside English. Even some of the jokes the emcee made in English delighted the Kenyan guests but flew over my head—I later had one of the guests, a cousin of the bride who also lives in the U.S., explain the playful digs to me.

But it’s not just the lost-in-translation humor that made me frequently aware of my outsider status. Having to explain what I am—an American with American parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents—emphasized the gulf between the Kenyan understanding of race and my own. For the Kenyans I interacted with, having black skin also means being African. For me, being black means, well, being black.

During that sixth-grade project, I envied my classmates’ apparent abilities to trace their lineages as far back as the turn of the 20th century. My teacher surely intended to instill pride in family heritage, and to celebrate the varied paths each student’s family had taken to this country. The assignment, made in the mid-’90s, was likely a product of America’s obsession with hyphenated identities (“Kiss Me—I’m Irish!”), formed in the decades following the civil rights movement. As Matthew Frye Jacobson notes in his book Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America, the rise of black nationalism in the ’60s and ‘70s coincided with a growing emphasis, among white Americans, on the idea of America as a “nation of immigrants.” He argues the two phenomena are not unrelated:

This blunted the charges of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and eased the conscience of a nation that had just barely begun to reckon with the harshest contours of its history forged in white supremacism.

Americans who traced their ancestries to the Great Wave of immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century couldn’t be blamed for the horrors of slavery or Reconstruction, or so the thinking went.

In hindsight, I had nothing to be ashamed about; the family crest I created was just as valid as any of the other kids’, even if I couldn’t claim to know for certain the foreign lands in my family history. But it wasn’t the last time I felt a tinge of inferiority. Later, when I was in college and met African immigrants or first-generation African-Americans, I felt it again.

I’ve since changed my point of view on that as well, however, and am comfortable now with defining myself by my upbringing rather than by where my ancestors may have come from. The distinction between black and African-American has been expounded upon in recent years, on both a semantic level (Slate just this year changed its standard from African-American to black American) and, by extension, a cultural one. I know I’m not alone in wishing to identify as a black American. And I believe that every individual, and especially people of color, who so often have their existences defined by the standards of a white majority (recall, for example, the one-drop rule), should be able to identify as they see fit.

I don’t see my preference for being called a black American as a way of denying or distancing myself from my genetic African heritage. Rather, I believe it acknowledges the similarities that do extend to all black people—in spite of our differences—as black people: the prejudices we can face from nonblacks (from police brutality to skewed standards of beauty) to the cultural influences we share with one another, like the aesthetic notion of “black cool,” traced to West Africa and translated more recently into black American art.

Having never lived in the land of my ancestors, I will never truly understand what it means to be Kenyan, Nigerian, or, more generally, African. But my recent travels, which included a cross-country road trip from Nairobi to Diani Beach and Mombasa on the coast, gave me my first immersive understanding of an African country, and I did feel a kinship with the people I met: It was fascinating to spend time in a country where the majority of the population was not white, and to interact with such a wide range of social classes and cultures, from the traditional Maasai tribes to the rural farmers and city dwellers. Finally, after years of learning from afar, I got to understand a small slice of African culture for myself. I’m eager to experience even more in the future, even if it’s only as a tourist and not as a long-lost family member returning “home.”

[theconservativebrief]

August 28 is not a day that is particularly known for feeling especially crisp or autumnal in most parts of North America. And yet it’s the day in 2018 — the earliest release date so far — that Starbucks chose to ready its blazing orange jugs of “pumpkin sauce” and unleash its annual run of pumpkin spice lattes upon its customers.

You’d be forgiven for mistaking this tone for one of disdain. Since its inception in 2003, the pumpkin spice latte has become something of a strawman for discussions about capitalism, seasonal creep, and the meaning of “basic,” resulting in widespread hatred for an otherwise innocuous beverage.

For example, back in 2014, at the height of pumpkin spice mania, this very website described the PSL as “an unctuous, pungent, saccharine brown liquid, equal parts dairy and diabetes, served in paper cups and guzzled down by the liters” — even though clearly the pumpkin spice latte is a highly delicious treat that pairs well with wearing vests and making dorky comments about how crisp the air feels today. Yes, it contains 380 calories; yes, it will make your coffee a rather unappetizing orange color; no, you should not “guzzle it down by the liters.”

But contempt for the PSL and other items of the seasonal pumpkin spice variety is often not really about the flavor itself. After all, there are plenty of other flavors we should all be way more furious about. (There is a shop in Scotland that serves mayonnaise ice cream, people!) Too frequently, it’s about sexism, class anxiety, and our collective skepticism of savvy marketing.

The pumpkin spice latte almost didn’t exist. As former Starbucks veteran Tim Kern told Quartz, “A number of us thought it was a beverage so dominated by a flavor other than coffee that it didn’t put Starbucks’ coffee in the best light.”

Fortunately for Starbucks, the Tim Kernses of the company were ultimately overruled, because within a decade of its launch in 2003, the PSL became its top-selling drink, with more than 200 million of them sold. In 2015, Forbes estimated the PSL brought in around $100 million in revenue over a single season.

2015 was also the year that Starbucks changed its decade-old formula to include actual pumpkin for the first time, rather than simply caramel coloring and pumpkin pie spices (like cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, and cloves). By all accounts, it tasted pretty much the same, just, according to its inventor, “cleaner.”

At that point, the PSL wasn’t just a cash cow: It was a cultural phenomenon. In part, that’s thanks to its marketing — there is nothing inherently seasonal about the spices that go in pumpkin pie, but Starbucks is able to convince us that the drink should only be drank during the fall months, thereby increasing demand.

But there’s another reason why the PSL exploded so much over the past decade. Culinary food trend analyst Suzy Badaracco told Vox back in 2014, “Pumpkin became recognized as part of the comfort food trend during the recession in 2008,” due to its association with Thanksgiving and the holidays. In tough times, we’re more likely to crave foods that bring back happy memories.

Surely, though, the reason we all began talking about PSLs to begin with was their prevalence on social media. It’s not that they’re inherently photogenic — a Starbucks cup is a Starbucks cup regardless of what’s inside it, and the PSL doesn’t get its own special design like the holiday drinks do.

It’s because when you add a PSL to a photo of, say, your new fall boots standing atop crunchy-looking leaves or a selfie featuring a festive dark lip color, it adds to the autumnal aesthetic. It’s not a coincidence that Instagram — the epicenter of cutesy fall tableaus — happened to blow up in the early 2010s, which is the same time that it became cool to claim you despised pumpkin spice.

But maybe that’s not the whole story.

The fact that the pumpkin spice latte — which, to many, conjures the scents and imagery of Thanksgiving — is released in increasingly hot weather year after year is often touted as an ominous harbinger of the evil forces of seasonal creep. “It’s agricultural revisionism!,” argue some, citing the fact that pumpkins aren’t actually in season until autumn proper.

A viral John Oliver clip from 2014 declares as much, noting that “that bottle of pumpkin-flavored science goo sits behind the counter of Starbucks, never aging, like Ryan Seacrest:”

[embedded content]

The success of the PSL is also largely responsible for the barrage of pumpkin spice-flavored everything else, from cream cheese to dog treats, Kahlua, to an especially wacky seasonal crossover, Peeps. There have also been air fresheners, deodorant, even Four Loko (okay, that one ended up being a joke), resulting in the expected amount of hand-wringing about a food trend “gone too far.” (Indeed, back in 2010, spice brand McCormick forecasted that pumpkin spice would be a popular flavor for the holiday season, which in turn likely exacerbated the rush.)

When a food trend is as in-your-face as pumpkin spice is — ever been to a Trader Joe’s in October? — it forces us to think about how the free market is essentially designed to create this kind of phenomena. If a product like the pumpkin spice latte sells, it’s natural under capitalism for other companies to attempt to replicate that success. But it’s uncomfortable when we see it happening on such an exaggerated scale.

Well, maybe, but maybe what pumpkin spice backlash is really about is our dismissal of trends that are coded as feminine. As Jaya Saxena wrote in Taste last fall, in a piece titled “Women Aren’t Ruining Food,” “When men enjoy something, they elevate it. But when women enjoy something, they ruin it.”

She continues, on the topic of “girly” food crazes like açai bowls, rosé, and pumpkin spice versus “manly” ones like barbecue, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and IPAs:

When those foods blow up, we judge women for falling for the marketing or trying to jump on the bandwagon, and we assume that because they like something other women like, they don’t have minds of their own. And on top of that, women are asked to reckon with, consciously or unconsciously, the perceived psycho-sexual symbolism attached to seemingly innocuous foods.

Plus, “masculine” foods are almost never chastised for being “basic,” the ever-nebulous term used to describe someone with average, predictable taste that’s usually reserved for women.

In the most stereotypical (and by now, probably outdated) terms, a “basic bitch” wears North Face, leggings, and Uggs, and absolutely adores hashtag-PSLs, marking her as a woman with “a girlish interest in seasonal changes and an unsophisticated penchant for sweet,” as the Cut noted back in 2014.

There are often classist implications, too. In a BuzzFeed piece about “basic” and class anxiety, Anne Helen Peterson wrote:

Unique taste — and the capacity to avoid the basic — is a privilege. A privilege of location (usually urban), of education (exposure to other cultures and locales), and of parentage (who would introduce and exalt other tastes). To summarize the groundbreaking work of theorist Pierre Bourdieu: We don’t choose our tastes so much as the micro-specifics of our class determine them. To consume and perform online in a basic way is thus to reflect a highly American, capitalist upbringing. Basic girls love the things they do because nearly every part of American commercial media has told them that they should.

Essentially, hating pumpkin spice lattes is our way of othering those who drink them, and in the process, marking ourselves as decidedly un-basic.

Of course, this notion of what “basic” means is not the same way black people have been using it for decades, which, as Kara Brown explained in Jezebel, pretty much just translates to “I think that the stuff you like is lame and I don’t really like you.”

“Rihanna could become the official spokesperson for Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes and nobody would think of her as basic,” she wrote. “You know why? Because Rihanna does what she wants and what she thinks is cool and doesn’t give a damn about anybody else.”

Even if Rihanna suddenly became the official spokesperson of PSLs, however, there is also the possibility that, quite frankly, nobody really cares that much anymore. We seemed to have hit peak “pumpkin spice hot take” in the year 2014, with searches for “pumpkin spice latte” peaking in 2015.

Plus, the pumpkin spice bubble may have already popped. Analytics company 1010data revealed that, despite the fact that pumpkin spice products for sale had risen by nearly 50 percent between 2015 and 2016, sales went up just 21 percent — we just aren’t craving it like we used to.

Maybe that’s because we’ve all been stricken with a case of seasonal beverage fatigue in general. Starbucks is constantly coming out with random gimmicky drinks, from the Unicorn Frappuccino to the so-called “secret menu.”

If that’s true, it tracks that we aren’t seeing the same kind of anger directed at what is arguably replacing pumpkin spice as autumn’s de facto flavor. In 2017 both Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts released maple pecan lattes. And according to restaurant menu data from that year, “mentions of maple as a flavor in nonalcoholic beverages on menus are up 86 percent this year over last … Pumpkin mentions, on the other hand, are down 20 percent.” Yet nobody’s complaining about how dumb maple syrup is.

And these days, tweets about PSLs are way more in the vein of “Screw you and let me enjoy my shitty drink in peace, because everything is terrible.”

Pumpkin Spice Latte comes back tomorrow and I am 100% getting one in 91 degree weather because this world is a shitshow and I take joy where I can get it, like in delicious flavored coffee drinks.

— drunk wynhaught (@drunkhaught) August 27, 2018

People have also expressed exhaustion about the “actually-ing” over what pumpkin spice even is, as if anyone really wants to talk about it.

“pumpkin spice refers to the spices used in pumpkin pie and doesn’t actually taste like pumpkins” is the “Frankenstein was the name of the doctor” of this decade

— Kyle (@KylePlantEmoji) August 27, 2018

There are even ironic tweets poking fun at the automation of feminist responses to the anti-pumpkin spice brigade:

Women’s unabashed enjoyment of a thing has always led to wholesale dismissal of said thing as frivolous and/or bad. From early examples like needlework to more current cases like pumpkin spice and romance novels, we can track this trend throughout history. In this paper I will –

— The Ripped Bodice (@TheRippedBodice) August 27, 2018

Anyway, this is all to say that maybe now, in the year 2018, pumpkin spice has finally returned to signifying the autumnal blend of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves, and nothing more: not basic, not everything wrong with capitalism, and not gross. Because it’s not! It’s delicious.

Original Source -> Pumpkin spice lattes — and the backlash, and the backlash to the backlash — explained

via The Conservative Brief

[pixelatedflood]

What’s wrong with the startup world, and the book that lays it down

I have had the chance to read, over the last couple of months (mostly in the last 21 days, since CMU homework consumed the rest of that period) Dan Lyon’s book “Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble”.

I purchased this book around when I first arrived to the US (August 2016, almost 4 months after its release), and I was excited by the promise of a behind-the scenes look at this start-up hype, which felt like being over-glorified and polished from the outside. I will however, preface my comments on questions the book tackled (don’t expect an objective well-studied analysis of the book, it’s rather a subset of my personal thoughts on it and comments on things I found interesting) with a rather long story of how I felt about this issue before I read the book. This might explain my comments on the book itself, and might be of interest for someone who is curious about how a young developing world native software engineer feels about this whole thing. Yeah nobody probably cares but I’m doing this anyway.

Background

Why I was excited to get a closer look into the startup world’s internal mechanics and true face is a story that goes back to when I first engaged with “social entrepreneurship” volunteer work in Tunisia as an engineering student. That system was to me, a posteriori, like an incubation environment of what people orbiting around it liked to call “leaders”. These guys are supposedly the ones destined to create and run future startups. They are meant to “disrupt” things and “make change happen”. You can therefore see why this all looked analogous to me.

I came in expecting a lot of good honest work, and discovered a couple of years later that the system was built on hype and overselling half-baked projects rather than on real (or realistic) achievements, which do actually “change the world” “glocally”. I was introduced in the most brutal way to the world of saying more than you are doing, glorifying and sublimating basic grunt work, selling more than you’re planning on creating, and blowing small stupid “cool” ideas and promises out of proportions to make them gather “momentum” (= unjustified public trust, unjustified money and unjustified support) then cashing in on the “prizes” and “recognition” which, amazingly, seem to have become an easier-than-expected outcome for this kind of thing. PR had taken the place of producing real value. Slick self-righteous talk had taken the place of real productive work. Very serious people have, to my absolute shock, switched from encouraging and requiring real feats to “believing” in big-mouthed idiots.

I had already become distrustful of big allegedly “technology-backed” claims (especially when the projected outcomes outsize any real possible outcome: oh, so you’re going to “change the world” with your calendar app?). But I guess my realization of the real scale of this, and the fact that it affected “grown-up” investment circles, started when I first felt that the redundancy of ukulele music in startup promos was annoying. Usually nobody needs to exercise so much serenading power if they're not trying to screw you. It felt suffocating like a chloroform cloth pressed to my face. And to everybody's face, since people seemed to be falling for this crap. Along with that came the raised eyebrows about claims of "changing the way you X", X being anything from eating to performing blood tests, often ending in disappointments and massive waste of money. Instead of being limited to companies making development tools, frameworks and libraries, .io domain names were now being purchased by “tech” startups who make (or rather promise) physical products. We’ve all felt it creeping in slowly: words like “awesome”, “cutting-edge”, “empower”, “change the way we X”, “disrupt X”, “X as-a-service” (where X is in the set of human activities), etc. were now being thrown left and right. I realized it became a hype when that jargon went over the boundary of the “entrepreneurs” circle of divine inspiration and started being a silver bullet for all types of organizations and people to sound cool or make nasty changes appear cool. Bottom line? It's now scarily easy to make preposterously huge yet unjustified claims and get away with it. Hell, you'll even get money for it, A LOT. Hell, it'll even make you rich.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not indiscriminately bashing the start-up culture and all of its outcomes. I used to think and do still think that when it is “real” (as in: not a massive brainlessness-promoting “positivity” dance), start-up culture can actually be cool. Young people given the opportunity to pursue their ambitions like never before? I’m in. Financing and support for individual initiative? Checkity check. Moonshots given the opportunity to be explored? Give me a piece of that! Informal and individuality-friendly workplace organization? Where do I sign! But when you look at the amount of “fakeness” in tech startups it’s easy to realize that most of this “culture” or phenomenon turned into a money-generating hype machine, which does not yield a fraction of what it promises, but that’s ok because hey: it’s a start-up, what did you expect?

I knew something was wrong, and was amazed why people were still falling for anything that sounded start-up-ish without question. I was actually labeled as a “negative person” a couple of times when I expressed skepticism towards big claims in casual discussions with fellow engineering students. As I came to learn, everyone was now “drinking the cool-aid” of this new twisted construct of values, hype, lifestyle and bullshit. Anyone questioning that, or the fact that it’s a “world-changing phenomenon”, or “the way of the future” is undoubtedly an old grumpy soul opposed to change. “The Cheerleading and delusions of grandeur” as Dan Lyons puts it in Disrupted (p55) seem to be the main norms of social interaction in the startup world.

It would have been fine if it was just dumb ideas getting funded. But oooooh no, it’s a lot more than that. It’s the new lifestyle, it’s drinking protein shakes, doing Yoga and making lists, thinking (and saying) it makes you a superior being. It’s blurting wisdom and philosophy pulled out of your ass without any experience or knowledge to back it. You see creating/working at a startup is no longer just a professional project, it’s the new “thing”, it’s stylish, it’s heroic, it’s “à la mode”, even people who do not do any actual entrepreneurship are now leaders and lifestyle coaches. It’s a whole new world of bullshit becoming the undisputed norm every day. I could rant on and on but I'll refer you to this excellent article which explores this in depth, "Fuck your startup world". It actually got a massive response too, showing that more people feel this way than you would expect.

But deep down I had my own selfish reasons for the resentment I felt towards this culture and its promoters. I wanted to be an engineer ever since I first started reading The Hamlyn Junior Science Encyclopedia as a 6-year-old kid, and realized how fascinating and empowering science and engineering can be. Behind my disappointment, there is a little ambitious boy who wanted to be a Henry Ford, a Thomas Edison, a Howard Hughes or one of the Wright Brothers. I aspired to be an Engineer with a capital E, to make beautifully world-changing technology and machines, not to make a shit mobile app, come up with a name “YourNameHere”, remove a couple of vowels from it and call it “YrNmHr.io”. I was angry to see minor shit take the center of the stage under a waterfall of praise symptomatic of the twisted “everybody is a winner/overpraised kid syndrome”. I also felt sad that the future where advances in robotics and life sciences change the face of the earth, the human condition and phenomena such as modern slavery and oppression, is getting delayed to give space and time for kids (remember, I’m still a “kid” too to some extent) to come up with an “app that makes shopping easier”, or an “app that makes scratching your back more fun”. Of course, people are free to do what they want. But as a species, I think we are slowing down in terms of technological progress. To put it in terms that would reflect my subjective bitterness more accurately: as a species, we’re stretched on a plastic chaise lounge in our backyard drinking a cold lemonade and reflecting on how cool it would be to have a robotic arm dispense lemonade so that we don’t have to move our arm so much and how awesome it would be if we could have AC outdoors and how awesomesauce it would be if that robotic arm dispensing lemonade could also take selfies and write random wise quotes about the importance of relaxation on all the social networks there is, ALL of them. Oh and we then tell ourselves how beautiful and world-changing that stupid shit would be. Then we pull a check, write down all our money and hand it to a conveniently standing by college graduate who runs off to build all that stuff, or not. All of this while our car is rusting, our house is on fire, and our kids are getting suffocated by the smog from the nearby chemical factory. You see the picture.

The book

I finally opened the book early December 2016. I can’t hide that I was mainly looking for a confirmation of these thoughts I’ve been having, and maybe even a little push to hold me back from drinking the cool-aid, which was starting to look like a very tempting choice that comes with a lot of perks.

And I got even more than I asked for.

The book as a whole tells the very interesting story of how Dan Lyons, a journalist in his fifties finds himself out of a job one day and ventures into the startup world by joining Hubspot. It tells this story while describing the environment and dynamics of Hubspot and startup culture as a whole, with the uniquely cynical style of a sane person landing in the middle of a collective craze and trying to find a way through it. I won’t go into the detail, buy the book (Amazon) and read it. I promise: it’s a good read.

Several aspects of startup culture were covered in the book. I believe that there are two aspects to it: one specific to the Hubspot experience and how it worked for the author, and the other is more of a general reflection on the startup world and culture. These are not completely separate since the author often uses the first aspect to derive generalized reflections covering the second aspect, illustrating with other examples from the industry. As I have no particular interest in Hubspot, I was more focused on the second aspect. Dan Lyons covered things I mentioned in the first part of this article and went way beyond that thanks to his constant reflection upon his experiences as they happened. I have chosen to comment on three aspects which I found particularly interesting: ageism in the tech industry, the startup “bubble” economic model, and the “drinking the cool-aid” hypnosis system some startups (and big companies) use to push their employees to perform without real rewards for extra effort.

Ageism in the tech industry

Ageism or age discrimination is a fairly perceptible phenomenon across the professional world. But in the specific case of startups and the startup culture, “youth-driven” seems to be the positive label that sometimes hides discrimination against older candidates or colleagues. It is actually “weird” for someone who is above 40 (or, you know, with a family) to be in that ecosystem. The common belief is that startup work is so intense that only young hyperactive people who are not bound by family or health obligations can do it. If you’re going to work for a startup, you kinda know you’re getting into a 60+ work hours a week type deal. But it’s more than that: it’s that “these old people” and “their old system” are the antithesis of startup culture, therefore they should be left out. They don’t say “awesome” enough. They speak proper English, write memos and document things, ew. They couldn’t possibly take part in our “awesome” rituals such as daily plank meetings or submit to our “awesome” values. They still think this is a job, ew. This IS OUR LIFE, and if they won’t make it their life too, they’re not in.

That kind of shit.

I have already spoken against ageism against young employees (which is more of a large corporation practice) here, but Dan’s account of how he lived through being the second oldest person in a tech startup showed me a fate I wouldn’t like for myself (or anyone) in 20 years’ time. Ageism is stupid, no question about it: it’s just the sneakiness with which it is exerted against one age group or the other that is dangerous. It’s those seemingly neutral excuses for firing employees who are “no longer meet the business goals” or “don’t embody the company’s values” to artificially skew the average age of a company’ employees in the “right” direction. It’s that systematic refusal of every single job application you send because it’s not “selling” to be as old as you are. And it happens, way more than we imagine.

The startup bubble

I was mostly aware and appalled by the amount of fakeness weighing on startup world/culture, but Disrupted also shed light on a very important aspect I was not really aware of before: the financial crookery in the startup economics. By highlighting how in the MVP-grow-IPO-sell cycle, when growth and stock value jump in the IPO become the goals of VC-backed entrepreneurship instead of making and selling the product (i.e. creating money from nothing, from "how much people believe this will work" rather than "the real/realistic value of a company and its products"), the book helped me understand that "the fakeness" I was perceiving is not just "white lies", it's actually harmful stuff that often shatters investments and shifts spending from "the most promising product/service" to "the most promising hype machine". Sure, that'll make a handful of people wealthy, but in the grand scheme of things, A LOT of money will be destroyed. Micro-bubbles will burst, and who knows? Maybe one day it'll be 2001 or 2008 all over again if we're not careful enough.

Choking on the cool-aid

Yeah. Sure. Startups are not made to be a 9 to 5 job that you do for a hopefully big paycheck and perks package. They’re by definition entities that depend on how much commitment, ownership and initiative their employees show.

It makes sense for them to provide remuneration in the form of equity: the more the employees own of the company, the more its success becomes a personal success for them.

It makes sense for startups which are racing against time and limited money to achieve big goals to push their employees to be far more productive than the average employee.

But does it make sense to formalize this in a set of cult-ish practices, lingo and propaganda and shove it down the throats of employees? Does it make sense to strive to transform a startup’s workforce into an army of minions with identical clothes, speak, habits and thinking? Does it make sense to choke people on cool-aid and kick out whoever doesn’t drink it for “lack of adherence with the company’s values”? What are company values anyway? Are companies suddenly entities which must dictate the observance of a set of sometimes ridiculous pseudo-wisdoms by which every employee must live, just to satisfy some higher-up’s need to “inspire” people? Isn’t the respect of freedom and individuality the ground stone of startup culture itself? Then why is following the horde and creating a uniform unicolor work environment now an imperative? Why the hell would something as frustratingly wrong as “1+1=3” become an element of the jargon that people need to use? Oh and, do Teddy bears really need to attend meetings? Don’t they have some children to amuse?

It actually goes beyond that: in terms of work environment, some startups are not doing well, up to a point where unethical practices have become a huge problem in silicon valley. Dan Lyons actually described one example of his boss pushing him around with repetitive unjustified negative feedback which turned out to be intentional, and probably more of a source of personal satisfaction.

What now?

Well, nothing much. We know something is wrong, we know many pain points, it’s time for change, but I don’t have the brains or the time to offer solutions. Stopping the stupid mass hallucination would be a great start, just stepping back to think and see how stupid and risky this collective dance has become would be an achievement in itself. In that regard, Disrupted is an excellent wake-up call to start reflecting on what’s wrong with the startup world and the startup culture.

About the book, the reception was massive and it ranged from praise to bashing. One interesting fact is that a Hubspot employee allegedly attempted to get his hands on the draft of Disrupted. An investigation ensued, without Dan Lyons being able to get specifics as he explains in an epilogue within the book.

Since this article was mostly in a pro-Disrupted tone, I will provide a couple of links as an attempt to balance things out and give you the opportunity to explore different viewpoints about the book.

First there’s Hubspot’s response to the book, shared on Linkedin.

Second there’s this unsavorily-titled article in Fortune, which does however tackle specific points in the book.

Needless to say, I personally loved the book. It lead me to a better understanding of that vague bad feeling I had towards this collective startup craze.

And what better way to express my gratitude Dan Lyons for this totally inspirational book than to give him the hubspotty praise email he never got? Here you go Dan, I know you've been waiting for this for so long:

Subject: Dan is totally crushing it!!!!!!!!

Sup!!!

I just wanted to say how much Dan the man is awesome! Dan, I really appreciate you and everyone here at not Hubspot does too!!! Cool book brah! Keep kicking ass, much respect xoxoxxoooo

Woooo-hooooooo Dannyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!

[kristablogs]

Where does fear actually come from?

Convention thinking says that the root of all fear lies in our brains. But what comes before then? (The National Museum in Oslo/)

Excerpt from Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear by Eva Holland. Reprinted with permission of The Experiment.

Fear, it seems at first, should be easy to identify and define. To borrow from that old judicial decision about the definition of obscenity: we know it when we feel it.

Putting that feeling into words can be harder. G. Stanley Hall, the nineteenth-century founder of the American Journal of Psychology and the first president of the American Psychological Association, described fear as “the anticipation of pain,” and that seems like a pretty good general definition to me. Fear of violence? Anticipatory pain. Fear of a breakup, the loss of someone you love? Anticipatory pain. Fear of sharks, of plane crashes, of falling off a cliff? Check, check, and check.

But what we need, really, isn’t just a solid catch-all definition. What we need, to understand the role of fear in our lives, is to examine the layers and varieties of fears that can afflict us.

There’s the sharp jab of alarm when you sense a clear, imminent threat: That car is going to hit me. There’s the duller, more dispersed foreboding, the feeling of malaise whose source you can’t quite pinpoint: Something is wrong here. I don’t feel safe. There are spiraling, sprawling existential fears: I am going to flunk this exam, tank this interview, fail at life. And there are precise, even banal, ones: Pulling this Band-Aid off is going to hurt. How do they all fit together? Or, put differently, to what extent does each stand apart?

According to Greek mythology, Ares, the god of war, had two sons, who accompanied him into battle: Phobos, the god of fear, and Deimos, the god of dread. That seems like a useful distinction to start with—fear versus dread—and it’s one that’s echoed today by our distinction between fear and anxiety. Fear, generally speaking, is regarded as being prompted by a clear and present threat: you sense danger and you feel afraid. Anxiety, on the other hand, is born from less tangible concerns: it can feel like fear but without a clear cause. Simple enough, at least in theory.

In Fear: A Cultural History, author Joanna Bourke gamely attempts to parse the distinctions between fear and anxiety. “In one case a frightening person or dangerous object can be identified: the flames searing patterns on the ceiling, the hydrogen bomb, the terrorist,” she writes. Whereas “more often, anxiety overwhelms us from some source ‘within’: there is an irrational panic about venturing outside, a dread of failure, a premonition of doom ... Anxiety is described as a more generalized state, while fear is more specific and immediate. The ‘danger object’ seems to be in front of us in fear states, while in anxiety states the individual is not consciously aware of what endangers him or her.”

But as Bourke points out, that distinction has serious limitations. It’s entirely dependent on the ability of the fearful person to identify the threat. Is it legitimately, immediately dangerous? Or is the fear abstract, “irrational”? She offers the hydrogen bomb and the terrorist as examples of potentially clear and present threats, but both can also serve as anxiety-inducing spectres, ominous even when absent.

Nerve by Eva Holland. (Courtesy of The Experiment/)

The distinction between fear and anxiety, then, can be murky, even as it can also be a useful and even necessary line to draw. But setting the issue of a threat’s clear presence aside, there’s the matter of our “fear” response.

The scientists who study our emotional lives make distinctions between different categories of feelings. There are the primary emotions, our most basic and near-universal responses, found across cultures and even appearing, or at least seeming to us to appear, in other species: fear, anger, disgust, surprise, sadness, and happiness.

Think of them like primary colors, the foundational elements of a whole rainbow of emotion. Just as red and blue in combination can be used to create all the shades of purple, you can imagine some more precise feelings as being built by the primary emotions. Horror, for instance, is fear mixed with disgust—and, maybe, some shadings of anger and surprise. Delight could be happiness with a bit of surprise stirred in. And so on.

There are also the social emotions, the feelings that don’t stand alone like the primary emotions but are generated by our relationships to others: sympathy, embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, jealousy, envy, gratitude, admiration, contempt, and more.

Of all these, fear is perhaps the most studied. But what does it really mean to study fear? What do we even mean, exactly, when we say “fear” in the context of scientific research? That’s a more complicated question than you might expect.

Traditionally, scientists have studied “fear” in animals by measuring their reactions to threatening or unpleasant stimuli—a rat’s freezing response when it is subjected to a small electric shock, for instance. In studying humans, scientists have more options and a broader array of tools. Most importantly, humans can self-report, verbally or in writing: Yes, I felt afraid.

The complicating factor is that those two responses—the freezing and the feeling—are separate and distinct. As the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, an expert on the brain circuitry of fear, emphasizes in his book Anxious, we know that the physical fear response and the emotional feeling of fear are produced by two different mechanisms in the body.

For a long time, the working theory held that the feeling came first, in response to the fear stimulus, and then the physical response followed from the feeling. This is what’s known as the commonsense, or Darwinian, school of thought. But that was more an assumption than a proven mechanism, and these days it has fallen out of favor.

Instead, as science has turned its attention to working out that elusive mechanism more concretely, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has come up with an answer that, while provocative, ultimately feels right to me. The feeling, he argues in a pair of funny and wise books, Descartes’ Error and Looking for Spinoza, is actually derived from that same menu of physical reactions that we would typically view as accessories of, or adjacent to, our emotions.

For the purposes of his argument, Damasio makes an unusual distinction between “emotions”—by which, in this context, he specifically means the physical, measurable reactions of the body in response to an emotional stimulus, the physical fear response—and “feelings,” the intangible expressions of emotion in our minds. That may seem odd, or even nonsensical, but it’s a key to his case, so keep it in mind.

“We tend to believe that the hidden is the source of the expressed,” he writes in Looking for Spinoza. But he argues, instead, for a counter-intuitive reversal of that order: “Emotions”—again, meaning the physical reactions here—“and related phenomena are the foundation for feelings, the mental events that form the bedrock of our minds.”

All organisms have varying abilities to react to stimuli, from a simple startle reflex or withdrawal movement all the way up to more complex multi-part responses, like the description of our physical fear processes above, which are Damasio’s “emotions.” Some of the more basic responses might sometimes look, to our eyes, like expressions of the feeling of fear, and in fact the machinery that governs them is also implicated in the more complex processes. (My startle reflex, one of our oldest and simplest reactions, has certainly come into play at times when I’ve also felt afraid. Hello, raptors in the kitchen in Jurassic Park!) But the “emotions” are at the top of the heap in terms of complexity, and as such not all organisms are capable of generating them.

Unlike some of the simpler “fear” reactions in simpler organisms (poke a “sensitive plant,” watch its leaves curl up), our emotions can be generated by stimuli both real, in the moment, and remembered—or even imagined. That’s the gift and the burden of the human mind.

But for now, let’s stick with an in-the-moment example, like a strange noise heard in the night. The fact of the noise is captured by the sensory nerves in the ear and is relayed to the brain structures involved in triggering and then executing a response. Now your body is reacting in all the ways described above.

So far, so good? The next step, in Damasio’s formulation, is the creation of the feeling itself. We know that our bodies are laced with neurons, and that they not only send out information from the brain, they also receive it.

So after the outgoing messages have gotten our hearts pumping, our sweat beading, and so on, a series of incoming messages returns to the brain, bearing all of that information about our physical state. Our brains, Damasio explains, maintain incredibly complex maps of the state of the body, from our guts to our fingertips, at all times.

And here’s the core of his argument: when the incoming messages bearing news of the body’s physical fear-state alter these maps, that’s when the feeling itself arises. Your brain learns from your body that your heart is pounding, your pupils are dilated, your goosebumps are standing at attention. Your brain does the math and says, Aha! I am afraid!

In his 1884 essay, “What is an emotion?” the philosopher and psychologist William James wrote,

If we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind-stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. . . . What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of gooseflesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible for me to think.

Damasio picks up where James left off. But he doesn’t just draw on Victorian-era philosophizing to make his argument. He also works from case studies and his own research; for instance, the case of a Parkinson’s patient in Paris. The woman, who was sixty-five years old and had no history of depression or other mental illness, was undergoing an experimental treatment for her Parkinson’s symptoms. It involved the use of an electrical current to stimulate motor-control areas of the brain stem via tiny electrodes.

Nineteen other patients had undergone the treatment successfully. But when the current entered the woman’s brain, she stopped chatting with the doctors, lowered her eyes, and her face slumped.

Seconds later, she began to cry, and then to sob. “I’m fed up with life,” she said, through her tears. “I’ve had enough ... I don’t want to live anymore ... I feel worthless.” The team, alarmed, stopped the current, and within ninety seconds the woman had stopped crying. Her face perked up again, the sadness melting away. What had just happened? she asked.

It turned out, according to Damasio, that instead of stimulating the nuclei that controlled her tremors, the electrode, infinitesimally misplaced, had activated the parts of the brain stem that control a suite of actions by the facial muscles, mouth, larynx, and diaphragm—the actions that allow us to frown, pout, and cry. Her body, stimulated not by a sad movie or bad news, had acted out the motions of sadness, and her mind, in turn, had gone to a dark, dark place. The feeling arose from the physical; her mind followed her body.

This whole thing seemed counterintuitive to me at first, reversing as it does the “commonsense” view. But then I sat back and really thought about my experience of fear. How do I recall it in my memory? How do I try to explain it to other people? The fact is that I think of it mostly in physical terms: that sick feeling in my gut, the tightness in my chest, maybe some dizziness or shortness of breath.

Think about how you actually experience the feeling of happiness, of contentment, or ease. For me, it manifests in the loosening of the eternally tense muscles in my forehead and jaw, in my neck and shoulders. My eyes open wider, losing the worried squint. I breathe more deeply.

Or think about the sheer physicality of deep grief, how it wrecks your body as well as your mind. When I look back on the worst of my grief after my mom’s death, I remember it as headaches, exhaustion, a tight chest, a sense of heaviness, and lethargy. I felt sad, yes—sadder than I’ve ever been—and it was my body that told me how sad I was.