#the point about the erosion of empathy is REALLY important

[sleep-safe]

[text description: #is there a way we could spare the teenager and let the rest of them suffer? /end description]

I hope they find the idiot rich ppl I hope a teenager doesn't have to die a horrible nightmare death and then I also hope they immediately get slapped with a $500,000 bill to repay the taxpayer cost of rescuing them from their idiocracy and then also another $1billion dollars inconvenience fee of making us all hear about this for 3 days straight.

[kipakyousee]

7 Gaslighting Phrases Malignant Narcissists, Sociopaths and Psychopaths Use To Silence You, Translated

By Shahida Arabi, Bestselling Author

Last updated: 18 Nov 2019

~ 10 MIN READ

Gaslighting is an insidious erosion of your sense of reality; it creates a mental fog of epic proportions in the twisted “funhouse” of smoke, mirrors, and distortions that is an abusive relationship. When a malignant narcissist gaslights you, they engage in crazymaking discussions and character assassinations where they challenge and invalidate your thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and sanity. Gaslighting enables narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths to exhaust you to the point where you are unable to fight back. Rather than finding ways to healthily detach from this toxic person, you are sabotaged in your efforts to find a sense of certainty and validation in what you’ve experienced.

The term “gaslighting” originated in Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, Gas Light, where a manipulative husband drove his wife to insanity by causing her to question what she experienced. It was further popularized in the 1944 film adaptation, Gaslight, a psychological thriller about a man named Gregory Anton who murders a famous opera singer. He later marries her niece, Paula to convince her she is going crazy to the point of being institutionalized, with the agenda of stealing the rest of her family jewels. According to Dr. George Simon, victims of chronic gaslighting can suffer from a wide array of side effects, including flashbacks, heightened anxiety, intrusive thoughts, a low sense of self-worth, and mental confusion. In cases of severe manipulation and abuse, gaslighting can even lead to suicidal ideation, self-harm, and self-sabotage.

Gaslighting can take many forms – from questioning the status of your mental health to outright challenging your lived experiences. The most dangerous culprits of gaslighting? Malignant narcissists, who, by default, use gaslighting as a strategy to undermine the perception of their victims in order to evade accountability for their abuse. These perpetrators can use gaslighting callously and sadistically because they lack the remorse, empathy, or conscience to have any limits when they terrorize you or covertly provoke you. Gaslighting by a malignant narcissist is covert murder with clean hands, allowing the perpetrator to get away with their mistreatment while depicting the victims as the abusers.

I’ve spoken to thousands of survivors of malignant narcissists who have shared their stories of gaslighting, and below I include the most commonly used phrases malignant narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths employ to terrorize and deplete you, translated into what they really mean.

These phrases, when chronically used in the context of an abusive relationship, serve to demean, belittle and distort the reality of abuse victims.

1. You’re crazy/you have mental health issues/you need help.

Translation: You’re not the pathological one here. You’re just catching onto who I really am behind the mask and attempting to hold me accountable for my questionable behavior. I’d rather you question your own sanity so you believe that the problem is really you, rather than my own deceptiveness and manipulation. So long as you believe you’re the one who needs help, I’ll never have to take responsibility for changing my own disordered ways of thinking and behaving.

Malignant narcissists play the smirking doctors to their victims, treating them like unruly patients. Diagnosing their victims with mental health issues for having emotions is a way to pathologize their victims and undermine their credibility; this is even more effective when abusers are able to provoke reactions in their victims to convince society that they are the ones with mental health problems. According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, some abusers will even actively drive their victims to the edge to concoct proof of their instability. The Hotline estimates that around 89% of their callers have experienced some form of mental health coercion and that 43% had experienced a substance abuse coercion from an abuser.

“Most survivors who reported their abusive partners had actively contributed to mental health difficulties or their use of substances also said their partners threatened to use the difficulties or substance use against them with important authorities, such as legal or child custody professionals, to prevent them from obtaining custody or other things that they wanted or needed.” – The National Center on Domestic Violence and the Domestic Violence Hotline

2. You’re just insecure and jealous.

Translation: I enjoy planting seeds of insecurity and doubt in your mind about your attractiveness, competence, and personality.  If you dare to question my numerous flirtations, affairs, and inappropriate interactions, I’ll be sure to put you back in your place in fear of losing me. The problem, as I’ll convince you, isn’t my deceptive behavior. It’s your inability to remain confident while I perpetually put you down, compare you in demeaning ways to others, and eventually cast you aside for the next best thing.

Manufacturing love triangles and harems are a narcissist’s forte. Robert Greene, author of The Art of Seduction, speaks about creating  “an aura of desirability” which stirs a frenzied sense of competition among potential suitors. In abuse survivor communities, this tactic is also known as triangulation. It grants malignant narcissists a depraved sense of power over their victims. They actively provoke jealousy in their intimate partners in order to control them and paint them as unhinged when they finally react. When a victim calls out a narcissist’s infidelity in any way, it is common for them to label the victims insecure, controlling, and jealous to avoid suspicion and to continue to reap the benefits of multiple sources of attention, praise, and ego strokes.

Remember: to someone who has something to hide, everything feels like an interrogation. Narcissists will often lash out in narcissistic rage, stonewalling, and excessive defensiveness when confronted with evidence of their betrayals.

3. You’re too sensitive/you’re overreacting.

Translation: It’s not that you’re too sensitive, but rather that I am insensitive, callous, and unempathic. I do not care about your emotions unless they serve me in some way. Your negative reactions provide me stimulation and pleasure, so please, do keep going. I enjoy putting you down for having legitimate reactions to my abuse.

According to Dr. Robin Stern, one of the effects of gaslighting include asking yourself “Am I too sensitive?” a dozen times a day. Claiming that victims are overreacting or oversensitive to emotional abuse is a popular way for malignant narcissists to override your certainty about the severity of the abuse you experienced.

Whether or not someone is a sensitive person is irrelevant when it comes to cases of psychological or physical violence. Abuse affects anyone and everyone of varying sensitivity levels, and its impact should not be taken lightly. A mark of a healthy partner is that they give you the space to feel your emotions and provide emotional validation, even if they do not agree with you. A malignant narcissist will excessively focus on your so-called sensitivity and consistently claim that you are overreacting rather than own their horrific actions when called out, regardless of how “sensitive” you may be.

4. It was just a joke. You have no sense of humor.

Translation: I love disguising my abusive behavior as just jokes. I like calling you names, putting you down, and then claiming you’re the one who lacks the sense of humor to appreciate my depraved “wit.” Making you feel defective allows me to say and do whatever I wish, all with a smile and a derisive laugh.

Disguising cruel remarks, off-color comments, and put-downs as “just jokes” is a popular verbal abuse tactic, according to Patricia Evans, author of The Verbally Abusive Relationship. This malicious tactic is very different from playful teasing which takes a certain amount of rapport, trust, and mutual enjoyment. When malignant narcissists dole out these unsettling “jokes,” they can engage in acts of name-calling, taunting, belittling and contempt while evading the responsibility of issuing an apology or owning their vicious verbal assaults. You are then gaslighted into believing that it is your inability to appreciate the “humor” behind their cruelty, rather than the reality of its abusive intentions.

“Just jokes” are also used to test boundaries early on in an abusive relationship; what you may have rationalized as a tone-deaf or off-color comment in the beginning can escalate into psychological violence quite quickly in the hands of a narcissist. If you find that you have a partner who laughs at you more than they laugh with you, run. It will not get better.

5. You need to let it go. Why are you bringing this up?

Translation: I haven’t given you enough time to even process the last heinous incident of abuse, but you need to let it go already so I can move forward with exploiting you without facing any consequences for my behavior. Let me love-bomb you into thinking that things will be different this time around. Don’t bring up my past patterns of abusive behavior, because you’ll then recognize that this is a cycle that will just continue.

In any abuse cycle, it’s common for an abuser to engage in a hot-and-cold cycle where they periodically throw in crumbs of affection to keep you hooked and to renew hope for a return to the honeymoon phase. This is a manipulation tactic known as intermittent reinforcement, and it’s common for an abuser to terrorize you, only to return the next day and act like nothing has happened. When you do recall any abusive incidents, an abuser will tell you to “let it go” so they can sustain the cycle.

This form of abuse amnesia adds onto your addictive bond to the abuser, also known as “trauma bonding.” According to Dr. Logan (2018), “Trauma bonding is evidenced in any relationship which the connection defies logic and is very hard to break. The components necessary for a trauma bond to form are a power differential, intermittent good/bad treatment, and high arousal and bonding periods.”

6. You’re the problem here, not me.

Translation: I am the problem here, but I’ll be damned if I let you know it! I’d rather subject you to personal attacks as you bend over backwards trying to hit constantly moving goalposts and arbitrary expectations of the way I think you should feel and behave. As you spend most of your time trying to fix your fabricated flaws while always coming up short of what I deem “worthy,” I can just sit back, relax, and continue to mistreat you the way I feel entitled to. You won’t have any energy left to call me out.

It’s common for abusive partners to engage in malignant projection – to even go as far as to call their victims the narcissists and abusers, and to dump their own malignant qualities and behaviors onto their victims. This is a way for them to gaslight their victims into believing that they are the ones at fault and that their reactions to the abuse, rather than the abuse itself, is the problem. According to Narcissistic Personality clinical expert Dr. Martinez-Lewi, these projections tend to be psychologically abusive. As she writes, “The narcissist is never wrong. He {or she} automatically blames others when anything goes awry. It is very stressful to be the recipient of narcissistic projections. The sheer force of the narcissist’s accusations and recriminations is stunning and disorienting.”

7. I never said or did that. You’re imagining things.

Translation: Making you question what I did or said allows me to cast doubt on your perceptions and memories of the abuse you’ve experienced. If I make you think that you’re imagining things, you’ll start to wonder if you’re going crazy, rather than pinpointing the evidence which proves I am an abuser.

In the movie Gaslight, Gregory causes his new wife to believe that her aunt’s house is haunted so she can be institutionalized. He does everything from rearranging items in the house, flickering gas lights on to making noises in the attic so she is no longer able to discern whether or not what she’s seeing is real.  He isolates her so that she is unable to gain validation.  After manufacturing these crazymaking scenarios, he then convinces her that these events are all a figment of her imagination.

Many victims of chronic gaslighting struggle with the cognitive dissonance which occurs when their abuser tells them that they never did or said something. Much like reasonable doubt can sway a jury, even the hint that something may not have happened after all can be powerful enough to override someone’s perceptions. Researchers Hasher, Goldstein and Toppino (1997) call this the “illusory truth effect” – they discovered that when falsehoods are repeated, they are more likely to be internalized as true simply due to the effects of repetition.  That is why continual denial and minimization can be so effective in convincing victims of gaslighting that they are indeed imagining things or suffering from memory loss, rather than standing firm in their beliefs and experiences.

The Big Picture

In order to resist the effects of gaslighting, you must get in touch with your own reality and prevent yourself from getting entrapped into an endless loop of self-doubt. Learn to identify the red flags of malignant narcissists and their manipulation tactics so you can get out of disorienting, crazymaking conversations with malignant narcissists before they escalate into wild accusations, projections, blameshifting and put-downs which will only exacerbate your sense of confusion. Develop a sense of self-validation and self-trust so you can get in touch with how you really feel about the way someone is treating you, rather than getting stuck attempting to explain yourself to a manipulator with an agenda.

Getting space from your abuser is essential. Be sure to document events as they happened, rather than how your abuser tells you they happened. Save text messages, voicemails, e-mails, audio or video recordings (if permitted in your state laws) which can help you to remember the facts in times of mental fog, rather than subscribing to the distortions and delusions of the abuser.

Engage in extreme self-care by participating in mind-body healing modalities which target the physical as well as psychological symptoms of the abuse. Recovery is important to achieve mental clarity. Enlist the help of a third party, such as a trauma-informed therapist, and go through the incidents of abuse together to anchor yourself back to what you’ve experienced. Malignant narcissists might attempt to rewrite your reality, but you don’t have to accept their twisted narratives as truth.

References

Evans, P. (2010). The verbally abusive relationship: How to recognize it and how to respond. Avon, MA: Adams Media.

Greene, R. (2004). The art of seduction. Gardners Books.

Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., & Toppino, T. (1977). Frequency and the conference of referential validity. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16(1), 107-112. doi:10.1016/s0022-5371(77)80012-1

Martinez-Lewi, L. (2012, November 10). Narcissist’s Projections are Psychologically Abusive. Retrieved March 19, 2019, from http://thenarcissistinyourlife.com/narcissists-projections-are-psychologically-abusive/

Logan, M. H. (2018). Stockholm Syndrome: Held Hostage by the One You Love. Violence and Gender,5(2), 67-69. doi:10.1089/vio.2017.0076

Simon, G. (2018, May 11). Overcoming Gaslighting Effects. Retrieved March 19, 2019, from https://www.drgeorgesimon.com/overcoming-gaslighting-effects/

Stern, R., & Wolf, N. (2018). The gaslight effect: How to spot and survive the hidden manipulation others use to control your life. New York: Harmony Books.

Warshaw, C., Lyon, E., Bland, P. J., Phillips, H., & Hooper, M. (2014). Mental Health and Substance Use Coercion Surveys. Report from the National Center on Domestic Violence, Trauma & Mental Health and the National Domestic Violence Hotline. National Center on Domestic Violence, Trauma and Mental Health. Retrieved here. November 5, 2017

[sowingseedsandshootinghoops]

Helping those in the Helping Profession

A note on the text: I used The Helper’s Journey: Working with People Facing Grief, Loss, and Life Threatening Illness by Dale Larson as published by Research Press in 1993.

It’s very hard to be in the helping industry. Whether you are a social worker, a nurse, a therapist, or any other person working in this field, keeping up your morale is very important. People enter into the industry with the best of intentions and within a relatively short period of time can find themselves being burned out because of compassion fatigue. Dr. Dale Larson, in this seminal book, draws upon his wealth of experience to offer “helpers” advice on how to avoid getting burned out.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap. . . . Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it to future generations (2).

Most people in the helping profession can strongly identify with the above statement made by George Bernard Shaw. It is why they entered into the field in the first place. They are driven by a need to serve others; to do more than simply “work for themselves”. They want to make a career out the adage that “the world should should be a better place because you were in it”. They want to make that kind of a positive impact on the lives of those around them. People in the helping profession tend to be more altruistic and therefore, “seeing other human beings grow and knowing that they are assisting in this growth is rewarding to them” (9). It’s natural for human beings to want to reach out and help each other- even animals are pre-disposed to help other members of the same species. In fact, “the weight of scientific evidence decidedly leans towards the conclusion that altruism and cooperation are innate and that the tendency to help others in distress is part of our biological inheritance” (12). 

As an example of this Dr. Larson talks about an experiment done with reheus monkeys. The fifteen monkeys were all rewarded with food when they pulled one chain when the red light flashed and the other chain when the blue light flashed. All fifteen monkeys were able to do this with ease, so the researchers changed the parameters to the experiment. Now on top of giving the monkeys some food,the pulling of the chain resulted in a small electric shock being given to the monkey in the next cage. The results were electrifying: “Ten of the 15 monkeys shifted [exclusively] to the non shock chain, and two refused to pull either chain. When the shock victim was a cage mate this altruistic behavior was much [even] more likely to occur [and] monkeys who had themselves been shocked in the past were [still] more likely to engage in [this] selfless behavior” (13). You see the same attitude with human beings: just look at how many people lined up to do things like donate blood after the shootings in Orlando and Las Vegas. Ask most people about why they do what they do and most of them will talk about how they survived something horrific and how this spurred them to dedicating themselves to helping others, and it is through helping others that they find meaning for their lives. This is what George Bach and Laura Torbet call the Caring Paradox: 

The Caring Paradox is that self-realization is only possible through caring for others. Caring for and about others is caring for ourselves. Caring for other accrues great benefits [for ourselves]: it increases our self esteem, attracts the care and concern of others, improves the environment, and enhances the quality of life. All caring is double edged, We have impact on others by acknowledging their impact on us, we grow by supporting others’ growth” (24).

However, the altruistic fire that fuels these workers is a double edged sword. At some point, the fire that fuels them will also cause them to burn out. This is what is commonly referred to as compassion fatigue. The challenge to any helper is to be emotionally involved in their work without burning out: 

The most idealistic, altruistic, and committed helpers are [often] the first to burn out. . . . One common theme in discussions of burnout is some sort of motivational erosion: dedication becomes apathy, altruism becomes contempt; insomnia replaces the impossible dream; and crusaders become kvetches. The implicit assumption is that [the] burnout must be preceded by commitment. . . . The process of burnout cannot begin unless the level of motivation is high. Metaphorically,one must be ‘fired up’  before one can burn out (29-30).

A good question that many people ask is, what does it mean to burn out? Well people who are burnt out share these three characteristics: emotional exhaustion, diminished caring, and demoralization. People who are emotionally exhausted are chronically tired, and feel emotionally drained and “used up”. Diminished caring is probably the most painful part of the burnout process, especially for the helper in question. It is where the helper feels so drained that he feels himself start to pull back emotionally- they “stop” caring, and this can happen in a way that is all encompassing. They stop caring “for the people [they] help, [their] co workers, and sometimes [their] friends and family” (33). If you’ve ever been pushed to say to someone: “you use up all of your sympathy at work”, this is the result of diminished caring. Demoralization happens when “the sense of efficacy and the intrinsic rewards that often accompany helping [are replaced with] feelings of hopelessness” (34). Most people don’t realize that helpers that are going through the burnout process are really struggling with their self esteem which can really complicate the situation: “I got into this work because [I thought I was] a caring person and [that] I wanted to make a difference. Now I don’t even want to see another hurting person, and I don’t think I’m doing much good” (35). If you, or someone you love, is in the helping profession and you see these qualities in yourself, realize that you are burning out and that you have fallen into what Dr. Larson calls the “Helper’s Pit”.

You fall into the Helper’s Pit by becoming so emotionally entangled with your client that you are unable to maintain the proper emotional distance. In order to protect yourself from burnout, and help your client most effectively, you have to have some emotional distance. You cannot identify with the person in the pit so strongly that you fall into it with them; you have to help them, but from the outside: 

identifying with the other person [too closely] and falling into the Helper’s Pit can also severely limit your [ability to help]. You [can’t] accurately perceive the other and you are unable to think objectively about what course of action [must]be taken for him or her. . . . You must find a way to reach into the Pit and helping the suffering person out- without falling in yourself (38-39).  

You have to work with your client in an emotionally balanced way. Otherwise you not only risk seriously harming yourself, but also you cannot be effective in helping the client. 

Now if you are in the process of burning out there are two things that you should know. The first is that 

finding a way to be empathetic and emotionally involved without falling into the Helper’s Pit is perhaps the central challenge for the caring helper. . . . [and] that [you] can have extremely strong emotional responses without falling into the Helper’s Pit. Strong emotions are a part of helping people cope with grief, loss, and life threatening illness [among other things]. You can be balanced even as tears roll down your cheeks as long as you are still focused on the other person and your own feelings don’t shift from caring to [personal] distress (46).

A quick aside: there is a difference between sympathy/empathy and personal distress. With sympathy/empathy, you are more inclined to help the other person because you “feel for them” in some way. With personal distress you are more inclined to help yourself because you are the one feeling distressed. When you fall into the Helper’s Pit your instinct quickly becomes to help yourself because you see yourself as being under attack and thus are not able to help others effectively which makes personal distress “a central feature of the burnout syndrome” (39). That’s why you want to stay out of Helper’s Pit and keeping yourself away from caring mode into personal distress mode. 

So the question remains: how do you achieve the emotional balance that is necessary to avoid burnout? The first step is to have an honest dialogue with yourself about what it is that stresses you out. This can be difficult to do because helpers often times have an unrealistic expectation of themselves. They think that they should always be able to help people, and when they hit a wall they tend to blame themselves. It results in the “if I were only” phrase that Dr. Larson calls “a burnout mantra” because if you say it to yourself enough then you will burn out (46). The problem is that “at its extreme this way of thinking goes beyond what we can reasonably expect from ourselves. It leads to [the] illusion of omnipotence [that is] reflected in such statements as ‘Maybe I could have prevented Mr. Smith’s death’ or [even] ‘I’m responsible for how he died’” (64). You are not a god. Let me say that again: YOU ARE NOT A GOD! You cannot  save everyone, and you shouldn’t expect yourself to. 

Once you’ve identified what your limits, aka stressors, are, don’t try to avoid them: 

the moment we choose avoidance we openly admit to ourselves (and any others who care to observe) that we have detected impulses that are so unacceptable that they cannot be faced realistically. . . . Obviously the prospects for personal growth are virtually non existent when the individual’s response to a perceived threat is to deny that which [he] has already glimpsed to be true” (70-71). 

The alternative is to openly acknowledge your limitations and find ways to cope with them: that is what growth is. You cannot grow if you cannot acknowledge what your weaknesses are. There are however some pretty important differences between those who cope successfully and those who don’t: 

Unsuccessful copers tend to blame themselves for their problems and engage in denial and avoidance- they feel helpless and out of control. They tend not to enlist the support of others and react without much planning and flexibility. Successful copers tend to take responsibility- without blaming themselves- for finding a solution to the problem they are facing. They tend to be flexible in their use of different coping strategies, enlist the help of others, and feel optimistic regarding the outcome of their efforts. They also usually view their difficulties as opportunities for personal growth, even though they would have preferred that life be otherwise (77).

The key to staying out of the Helper’s Pit is to maintain a balance “between the external and internal demands you confront and the resources [emotional and otherwise] that you have to meet them” (78). In short: do what you need to do to take care of yourself.

The first step in coping, is being proactive. Realize that your stress started somewhere upstream from where it is now, and go deal with it at the source. There is a story a man who is walking by a river and sees a man drowning. He quickly jumps into the river, saves the man, and resumes his journey. A few feet ahead he sees another man drowning, jumps in, saves him and as he’s getting out he hears a third man scream for help. At this point the man turns and starts to walk up stream, and a bystander asks him why he’s not trying to save the third man. He turns to the bystander and says: “because I’m going upstream to figure out who is throwing all of these guys into the river!”. The problem is that we usually only deal with problems when they’ve come “downstream”, when they’ve already become problems. If you actually want to change something about your life in a systemic way though, you have to go “upstream” to see where the problem started and see what you can change up there. Never fall into the trap of believing that your problems are simply unsolvable. It’s just a matter of going upstream enough that you’re able to see the problems before they develop into the problems that they are. Being able to anticipate a problem, and properly prepare yourself to face it, is half the battle. 

Once you’ve decided to be proactive in combating your burnout, there are many things you can do including learn how to set limits and compartmentalize. 

You have to set, and accept, limits on yourself, specifically limits concerning the amount of time and attention you give to every client: “you cannot be the number one psychosocial caregiver for everyone you work with. . . . If you don’t set limits, you will find that [the] emotional and physical overload will eventually” completely overwhelm you (82). 

Compartmentalizing is also important so that you can attend to all the different areas of your life without becoming overwhelmed. Don’t bring work problems home with you, and don’t bring home problems to work with you. When you’re at work, be at work. When you’re at home, be at home. It often helps to have a “small symbolic act or cue- [such as] listening to your favorite song or reading a note that [you’ve left yourself on your door]- [that] can remind you that you are leaving one world and entering another” (83). For me, I like listening to sports commentary when I’m leaving work. Something about hearing a conversation about something I like that isn’t that serious really calms me and puts my mind into “home” mode. 

People do other things as well to emotionally replenish themselves: some, like myself practice some form of prayer or meditation, while others do some form of exercise. 

It is also important that you create and maintain a strong social support system, especially with people that are also helpers and can understand what you’re going through: “sharing painful experiences and self doubts with others [who are] doing the same work can help in two ways: it helps [you] redefine these experiences as normal and human, and it leads to the identification of other coping mechanisms” (89). That isn’t to say that having other friends and family who are outside of your line of work can’t help, because they can, but having the support of people who do what you do is uniquely beneficial. I myself can attest to this; talking to people who are in the same field and know what I’m going through is vastly from talking to people on the outside. That’s why many people who are counselors and therapists have their own counselors and therapists!

Whatever you decide to do the most important thing is to know yourself: know what your limits are what you have to do to not fall into the Helper’s Pit and get burned out. 

At the end of the day I think it’s important to just know this: compassion fatigue is real, burning out is real, it’s all real. These are real problems that can be very hard to deal with. But everyone in the helper field deals with them, and they can be dealt with. The important thing is to get to know yourself: to know when you are burning out, what your limits are, and what you need to in order replenish yourself physically, spiritually, and emotionally. Only then can you set things up in such a way that you can achieve the kind of emotional balance that will allow you to be emotionally involved with your client without falling into the Helper’s Pit and burning out. But it is doable. So just take a deep breath, be patient with yourself, and know that you can figure it out. 

[boobtubedude]

My Top 10 Shows Of 2017

Hi. Here’s a top ten list. People like these, right? 

Close But Not Quite: GLOW, Speechless, Insecure, One Day At A Time, Brooklyn Nine-Nine 

So what’s 2017 been about? Not about TV, really. Not for me. Hasn’t been the focus. It’s been there, like it always has, but not in the same what. What was an omnipresent obsession turned into something else. It didn’t go away, but it transformed, mutated, evolved, got pushed to the back. But what stuck really stuck, not really programs but lifelines, ways to make sense of senselessness, to realize there was a point to all of this. I didn’t watch nearly as much TV as I had in recent years, but taking a step back meant everything had to count. It had to mean something. It couldn’t be a way to pass the time but a way to define how I should spend it.

10) Wynonna Earp

It was a year in which listening meant more than speaking, when shutting the fuck up was more valuable than trying to articulate anything. Mansplaining my way through this calendar year, whether consciously or inadvertently, would have been the bad way to go. So it was more about looking for blind spots, having them displayed in ways that made me rethink what it meant to be not just a critic but a citizen. Being the former without the latter just means you’re an outsider observer rather than an active participant. Supporting voices that had been screaming to be heard was more important than sharing my own. Even a list like this is probably bullshit, but that’s why I’m not really talking about the shows at all.

9) Jane The Virgin

The shows are important, obviously. They are more than just TV shows but reflections of what’s possible. You can judge shows by how closely they reflect reality and how close they envision how life SHOULD IN FACT BE. I’m not sure there’s a right or wrong way to approach the medium. I do know that shows that simply state how futile it is to do anything other than what’s in one’s own self-interest are lazy and terrible and fairly close to immoral in this stage in history. We all know that life sucks. We won’t need a show to only remind us of that. We need shows that remind us that there’s light in the darkness, that there are options, that happiness is a possibility even when we can’t see it for ourselves.

8) Chris Gethard: Career Suicide

We need to know that other people feel as terribly as we do, and that doesn’t make it freaks but rather makes us human. The idea that we have to hide those kinds of thoughts and vulnerabilities for fear of shame or ridicule cripples us more than we know, and I know this because I’m only this year realizing how long I’ve been this miserable. I chalked it up to “normal” Irish-Catholic upbringing, something that was not worthy of even discussing because relative to so many it’s so fine that it’s not worth even mentioning. And while there are obviously a lot of degrees to this, I chose to just suck it all in for the first 40+ years of my life rather than even contemplate the fact that my left foot taps incessantly for almost every moment of every day I’m awake. I’m constantly aware of how anxiety-ridden and unhappy I am. The very idea of having to go out to meet people at an event I agreed to go to stresses me out, even while being at home all the time makes me wonder why I have so few friends. I can intellectually rationalize the insanity of that contradiction, but I live it all the same. The best stuff on TV doesn’t offer a solution to any of that, but lets me know I’m not alone.

7) American Vandal 

We get stuck in routines. We get defined by what others think of us, which in turn reinforces actions that fit that description. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to convince strangers online that I’m a certain type of person, and that has calcified around someone I’d both like to be and mostly hate. All writing is performative to some extent, and it doesn’t matter if I do it in 140 characters or 5,000 words, it’s all a performance to some extent. You don’t see the crusty-eyed, hairy, smelly weirdo that’s typing any of this on his phone or his laptop. You don’t know me, because I don’t want you to, even though some part of me absolutely positively wishes you did. If you ever wondered if it’s exhausting being a narcissist with crippling low-self esteem, let me tell you: It is. 

6) Twin Peaks: The Return

Nothing about this year makes any sense, which means that absurdity often reveals more than “real” life ever could. I’m a lapsed Catholic, so the idea of a God watching over everything seems peculiar, but I’ve never lost faith in the idea that there’s more than just the stuff that happens before we shuffle off our mortal coil. We’re connected to something, whatever it is, because without that connection we’re truly in an abyss. People that do the right thing should be judged differently than those that don’t, and I like the idea that the cosmos has some way of addressing that. Whether that’s through mathematics or morality, I can’t say. But we all sense there’s senselessness just around the corner, and even while that’s mighty tempting at times, there’s a fundamental need for order at the heart of existence that transcends mortgages, commuting to work, and the busyness of everyday life. That meaning is reflected on the inside of our eyelids, played across a screen that becomes impossibly vast once we go to sleep. It’s hard to literally interpret, but it’s there all the same.

5) The Good Place 

Actions have consequences. As they should. The rising fear in 2017 centered around the idea that causality had been flung into space, a vestigial element of a life that no longer existed. Actions that once had consequences no longer seemed to have any, and the entire agreement between earthly citizen had seemingly been eradicated by those for who shame had been surgically removed. We all knew things were bad, but there seemed to be no mechanism by which to compel those that didn’t feel like abiding by the normal rules of nature to do so. Once that reality set in, nothing felt real, and action after action buried the actions before those. What was strange was how…familiar everything felt, even while nothing was the same. The post-apocalyptic fantasies gave way to benign realities: We still did more or less the same things while also feeling like it mattered less than ever before, or that by doing the same thing we were perpetuating the problem. Hashtags only get you so far. Many of us marched in January but were exhausted by June. We might as well have been arguing with the tides.

4) Review 

What’s fascinating about making a bad decision, or indulging in a dark thought, can perpetuate itself and create its own logic loop from which it’s nearly impossible to escape. So people double down on a bad decision rather than admit it was one, and before long you’re so far down the wrong path that finding your way back to the main road is impossible. Mounting evidence of error yields entrenchment, resistance, and a further erosion of trust in anyone else that doesn’t march in lockstep with your worldview. At some point, objectivity turns into a quaint idea, and you can go insane so slowly that you don’t realize that you’ve been scrolling through tweets for the last ninety minutes because the onslaught of bullshit isn’t stopping but in fact picking up speed. There’s a self-perpetuating cycle with enough power to light up the entire United States but instead might just engulf it in flames. Driving off the cliff becomes preferable to looking in the rearview mirror at all you’ve lost on the way to the precipice. We’re ultimately and irrevocably alone in the bubble we’ve built for ourselves.

3) Better Things

That’s not true, but that’s how it felt for a lot of the year for many of us. I have the lottery ticket of life as a straight white American male, and if I felt this bad this year, I can’t begin to imagine a tenth of a tenth of what it was like for anyone else. That doesn’t mean I don’t have sympathy, but I can’t pretend to have empathy in a way that’s meaningful for anyone but myself to hear. The world is profoundly different than in was in 2016, but much of that change doesn’t come from something suddenly introduced so much as suddenly pushed into discussion. These aspects of life have always been here, and while it shouldn’t be a surprise to so many to hear them uttered, it is all the same. In that dissonance is opportunity: opportunity for those able to articulate what’s been under an unfortunate cloud for so long to speak out loud in voices both defiant but also hopeful. These are voices that show both an ugly truth but also a better way. These are voices that, now introduced, cannot and should never be silenced again. 

2) BoJack Horseman

Instagram is a fairly new app, but the idea of papering over one’s less-than-ideal qualities has been around for, well, forever. We collectively decide we’re not going to talk about it, and we bottle it up, and then we slowly go bald and fat. Or so I hear. I wouldn’t know anything about that, with my luscious locks and 30’’ waistline. 2017 was, for me, a year in which I realized just how corrosive that rot was within myself, how much I was talking about everything other than what was on my mind, with TV a great way to talk about “important” things without having to deal with my own shit. “Of course everyone knows I’m writing about me,” I’d tell myself, usually after a few drinks, and yet I doubt anyone knew or anyone even cared to consider that option. I speak to 28,000 strangers a day on Twitter and have maybe three friends in my life. My family and I love each other and also are the primary sources of our respective problems. I have a wife that used to see me at my best and now usually sees me at my most exhausted. I didn’t see any of this as a problem because I thought I was too privileged to have problems. That doesn’t mean my problems are equal or more or less than anyone else’s. I’m not trying to lump myself in with anyone or anything. I’m just here and realizing how miserable here is and realizing it’s OK to admit that it’s not OK. I don’t know what the fuck to do with this information a month after my forty-second birthday, but it’s still something akin to a breakthrough for someone that’s really good at analyzing theme in narrative television and absolutely awful at looking at the themes that consistently undermine my attempts at anything approximating consistent happiness.

1) The Leftovers

Recently I came across a bunch of handwritten report cards from my high school that my folks saved for me. Each one said something along the lines of, “I don’t know how Ryan does all the things he does and still excels.” These were wonderful things to right and absolutely cursed me to viewing any moment of inactivity as a wasted moment on the path to death. If I wasn’t being productive in some capacity, I was throwing away a chance to maximize my life, as if life was something to be conquered rather than experienced. That message carried through into college, and into my 20s, and once writing about TV became a possibility, drove me through a decade in which I worked on average about 10-14 hours a day. When I took vacations from my day job, I took the opportunity to just do more writing, watch more screeners, do more podcasts. I was here, but I wasn’t here. Not in a meaningful way. I was an outline more than a fully fleshed-out figure. Recently, I’ve been using my weekends to do anything other than something productive. Stepping off the treadmill is antithetical to my nature, and something that I’m admittedly not comfortable doing. I spent so much time wondering what people I’ve never met thought of my writing and almost no time wondering how it’s been a year since I’ve seen cousins that live ten miles away. Television taught me a lot for the past decade, and introduced me to a host of super smart people that did more for me than they’ll ever know. But looking at that screen (and the second screen, for that matter) for this long has come at a cost: It took way too long to see it, but it’s maybe not too late to do something about it.  These shows all helped me get to this place in my life, which is why they are my top ten shows of the year.

[rheanimalsachikokassielynn]

Major Essay 1

Rheanne Harkness

Professor Timothy Greenup

English 112

25 October 2017

All Sides of the Characterization Spectrum: Evolution Verses Devolution

 In the event that the average college student has taken even the most basic literature course, he or she should at least be somewhat familiar with and be able to tell the difference between three-dimensional characters, two-dimensional characters, and stock characters across a variety of different narratives - graphic novels being no exception. Three-dimensional characters (or “round characters”) may be traditionally thought of as the most important asset that a work of fiction has other than an engaging plot, atmosphere, or tone. After all, they by default, end up being portrayed as the most like real people, and as such, have the best chance of connecting with the reader on a deeper, more personal level, and audience identification can often be an essential part of what makes a story truly impactful to those who read it. No matter how much water this way of looking at round characters happens to hold though, that doesn’t mean readers of a particular work should entirely dismiss the roles stock and/or two-dimensional (or “flat characters”) play in strengthening its content as a whole - even if those roles are seemingly limited to serving as stepping stones that guide a potential round character as he or she goes through change. This begs the question: If both the flat and stock characters in a simple, straightforward comic like “Batman: Year One” only exist to help round characters in their development, are these same types of characters tailored to that same purpose in the more complex and formally depicted graphic novel that is “From Hell”?

To begin answering this question, there must be some semblance of comparison between the two pieces’ main characters and how interactions with other less imposing characters affect their motivations in the long run. In “Batman: Year One”, almost, if not every other character that Jim Gordon has ties to (particularly the few female characters) can be considered as more of a catalyst for change in his character than anything else. Take Gordon’s wife, Barbara for instance, throughout the comic, the reader never gets to learn much about her apart from the fact that she’s the supportive, pregnant housewife of his. Because Barbara is kept at arm’s length from so much of her husband’s troubles within the force until the very end of the comic and we only hear brief mention of the couple’s marital problems from Gordon’s perspective, Barbara represents nothing more than a stereotype, and thusly cannot be described as anything more than a stock character. But both her and Gordon’s unborn child are important nonetheless since Gordon’s desire to protect them is established as the driving force of his character from page one onwards. Sargent Essen is a representation of the “Femme Fatale” stereotype that’s seen so often in Film Noir; and again, the only bit of backstory we get from her is told to the reader from Gordon’s perspective in a single panel. She gives Gordon internal conflict to work through that works in tandem with the external conflicts he’s already facing. Three-dimensional characters are expected to have moments of weakness in their convictions. So, by having Essen as the vehicle through which Gordon deals with that weakness by having him torn between two places, (his obligation to his family and his newfound feelings for her) it makes the reader want to keep following him on his “Hero’s Journey” as well as call into question just how far he’s willing to go in order to do what’s right, as he himself isn’t so sure anymore - much like an actual human being might feel in the same situation.

If Lieutenant Gordon is the most prominent three-dimensional character from Frank Miller’s “Batman: Year One”, the most prominent round character from Alan Moore’s “From Hell” would be Doctor William Gull. Gull by contrast, doesn’t let other characters define who he is as one could argue for Gordon, (unless of course, the historical figures that Gull reveres so much - like William Blake and Nicholas Hawksmoor, are taken into account). It is seemingly established just how deep-seated Gull’s lack of empathy towards his fellow man really is from the first moment we see him purely out of plot convenience without any residual reason for it that wouldn’t have to be inferred by the readers on their own. To this effect, the essence of Gull’s character could simply be chopped up to his profession, in that many doctors do experience a loss of empathy while experimenting on human bodies for medical benefit; on top of which, he’d taken to dissecting animals (as is elaborately showcased in several disjointed panels with a mouse on the grounds of Beaumont Rectory) out of mere curiosity long before becoming a doctor in his adult life (Campbell Ch 2 p 6).

This aspect of Gull’s identity is significant and does give the audience some insight as to why he might and would eventually take on the “Jack the Ripper” persona. However, I don’t think that just being an emotionally detached doctor is enough to account for every facet of Gull’s character as much it sets the groundwork for those facets overall. Considering Gull’s long-dead heroes to be actual characters doesn’t feel terribly practical. So, it’s probably safe to assume that Gull has been shaped as a person by what he’s been exposed to more than who he’s been exposed to. The only time Gull lets others influence his actions at all is when they come into conflict with what he believes or stands for - like the whole reason he is committing these murders in Whitechapel to begin with. Gull is a firm proponent of the notion that men are superior to women, so the closer he gets to disposing of all these filthy prostitutes and by extension, fulfilling what he feels to be his divine purpose in life and throughout history, the more savage and less methodical the killings themselves become. It’s only when Gull briefly travels to the future a second time (in a purely non-character-driven plot point) and is so disillusioned by what he finds that he begins to lose heart with what he’s done. Up until then, though, Gull knew exactly who he was and what he wanted. Any other character who observed him (round, flat, or stock) could only do just that, observe and offer nothing (even unconsciously) that could sway him of his convictions whatsoever.

Conversely, what puts a major rift between “Batman: Year One” and “From Hell” in terms of how the protagonists can be thought of as round would be that Gull does not evolve as a character so much as he has devolved by the time his role in the story finally reaches its end. Nowhere does this erosion become more apparent than directly after Gull travels to what would have been the present day at the time this novel was written. More specifically, at the point where Gull takes the heart of the women who may or may not have been Mary Kelly out of the fireplace hearth and watches it burn on the tip of his surgical knife, a look of wistful melancholia has dawned his face, as if to say that only for a moment, even he realizes how empty and fruitless his endeavors toward any sort of divinity through murder truly were on principal. Although, of course, Gull would never dare admit it to anyone - least of all himself (Campbell Ch 10 p 29). This single panel image is made all the more telling when one pairs it with what Gull declares to Netley across a middle row of panels a few pages later as most of his face is eerily covered in shadow, but with an air of resignation about it: “I‘m finished. I have been climbing...all my life, toward a single peak. Now I have reached it. I have stood and felt the wind. I have seen all the world beneath me. Now there is only descent. Only the valley. Would that I had died there...in that light above the cloud line.” (Moore and Campbell Ch 10 p 33).

The icing on the cake and its effectiveness at cementing just how far Gull has fallen afterwards is really dependent upon whether or not one believes that he truly did come close to ascending to Godhood just before death in an insane asylum at the apex of chapter twelve. Being that Alan Moore leaves the answer widely open to interpretation, I personally would pose the argument that his apparent journey through time and space was merely a series of fragmented illusions that play out similarly to the concept of a person’s life flashing before their eyes as they’re about to die. Only in Gull’s case, his life wasn’t flashing before his eyes, but rather his abstract ambitions and ideas of what moving on to a higher plane of existence might be like were. If there is indeed a grain of truth in Gull’s last words to Netley the night he killed “Mary Kelly”, then the image of a poor old man mumbling incoherently within the walls of an asylum and never moving past his unhealthy obsession with achieving historical/spiritual greatness fits much more consistently with someone who both literally and figuratively has nowhere left to go but down.

Ultimately, I feel that the secondary characters in “From Hell” did not aid in developing Doctor Gull as a character in the way that they did for Jim Gordon in “Batman: Year One”. This is because, unlike Gordon, Gull never really forged any deeply personal relationships with others that were impactful enough to dictate his actions. His life experiences as a self-righteous doctor as well as a time traveler deprived him of the ability to genuinely empathize with the people around him. Thus, those experiences were consequently the only thing left to propel him through his journey and eventual derailment that awaits Gull at the end of the story. Every action of Gordon’s by contrast was performed for the sake of the people he cared about. Regardless of how uninteresting these flat and stock characters may have been to the audience, it’s no wonder that their existence as Gordon’s driving motivation made for such a relatable protagonist who we want to see rise above the challenges his environment has set for him by the time his story concludes. As far as Gull is concerned, he isn’t meant to be a relatable protagonist as much as the complete opposite. So, if the flat and stock characters aid him at all, it’s to mirror the audience members’ impressions of him (which are mostly rooted in fear, intimidation, curiosity, respect, and annoyance). I suppose in this way, if some characters need not be three-dimensional to be effective, one could also say that they need not be at the forefront of the round character’s main concerns for he or she to go through intended changes set in place by the author of the story either - still being just as effective, but in a different way!

Works Cited

Hamilton, Sharon. “Characterization.” Essential Literary Terms, Second Edition. Norton, 2017, p. 136.

Miller, Frank and David Mazzucchelli. Batman: Year One. DC Comics, 2005.

Moore, Alan and Eddie Campbell. From Hell. Top Shelf Productions, 2014.

[engagingjustice-blog]

Taking A Step Back, While Moving Forward

            I want to start off by saying that I loved this book. There are so many good points made in this book that a lot of people don’t even take the time to think about, and it’s sad. I will definitely be recommending this book to as many people as possible, including my mother. Mia Mckenzie is an amazing author and was able to make so many points in this book and do it so well. I also feel like there were a lot of entries that opened my mind even further than I would have expected.

            I will admit that there were some parts in this book that Mia points out that people do that I didn’t realize I was doing. In the entry “8 Ways Not To Be An Ally” (p.26) I was opened up to the idea that claiming yourself as an “ally” can ultimately hurt not help, when you use it as an excuse to feel better about yourself without necessarily always putting in the work required. Another entry that was very eye opening was “White Silence” (p.39) It made me feel more encouraged about speaking out in the appropriate settings, such as in conversations with other white people. It also helped me realize the importance of not taking the platform or space away from POC and to ultimately let their voices be heard first and foremost. The idea that I as a white person often need to take a step back while still showing solidarity was an important thing to think about and something I will work to make a priority in conversation.

While I was on facebook last week, I saw a protest sign that said “being scared since 2016 is privilege” and this lady just went crazy about it, and within the thread someone had tagged this page called “white nonsense roundup” which is a page dedicated to white people taking accountability for other white people and standing against racism. In a “missions statement” they say “If you are a Person of Color, you have enough on your plate! It’s not your job to educate white people about privilege, racism, and what’s really going on in the world. If a white person is filling your social media with nonsense – tag us and a white person will come roundup our own.” I thought this was a really great thing and felt that it related to what Mia Mckenzie says when she talks about how it isn’t the jobs of POC to educate white people but that white people should still always be trying to educate other white people because in the words of Mia “Racism is your problem. Act like you know that”

Today I was encountered by a Facebook post from a Facebook friend of mine that had racked up over 400 comments. As I weeded my way through every last comment, it was inherently obvious that one individual, a Woman of Color, was the target of a lot of backlash from many Conservative white folks. Now in the beginning of the comments on this post this girl was making really good points that most of the other people commenting just weren’t getting, and didn’t really seem open to the idea of getting, but instead insisted she was “playing the race card” and “always had to bring race into everything” so eventually she seemed to have given up trying to explain and just started getting angry (rightfully so). She ended up making a comment about 9/11 and everyone freaked out. I am not going to say I condone making light of such a tragic event, but in her comments I was able to relate it to the entry in BGD “Hey, White Liberals: A Word On the Boston Bombings, The Suffering Of White Children And The Erosion Of Empathy” (p.96) and when I quoted a portion of the afterthoughts from that entry, she told me that that was what she was trying to get across, and it hopefully helped the other white conservatives in the conversation better understand.

            I read this article called “It’s time to stop talking about racism with white people” and I found that it was very similar to the entry “White Silence”. I think all of the points that Zack makes here are really valid ones. I think that we as white people need to work harder at educating ourselves and not relying on the education to come from POC, and it’s not just enough to be educated about it, you have to spread the education (to other white people) and work to actually do something to make a change based on what you learn. I also added a link to an article with stats that explain how racism is still alive today, which I found to be very educational and I hope it can be educational for others as well.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/09/07/its-time-to-stop-talking-about-racism-with-white-people/?utm_term=.5c4ce871bb55

https://mic.com/articles/140107/racism-in-america-today-is-alive-and-well-and-these-stats-prove-it#.4YTleeX7l      

https://twitter.com/clintsmithiii/status/822886759004590086     

https://www.facebook.com/whitenonsenseroundup/

[douchebagbrainwaves]

QUIT YOUR JOB TO START A STARTUP IS A HUGE INCREASE IN THE FORCES AGAINST YOU CAN BE SURE IT WILL COME AS A SURPRISE TO A LOT OF IDEAS COME FROM THE MARGINS

For me, as for a lot of valuable advice about business, and also did all the legal work of getting us set up as a depressing, undifferentiated heap. Everyone likes to believe that's what makes startups kick butt, but rather the erosion of forces that had been more or less the meaning of is is. Measured by traffic, Reddit is much more damping. I propose is whether we cause people who read what we've written to do anything hard in. Efficiency is important, but the time to hypothesize that it was inappropriate to compliment a colleague or student's clothes. As McCarthy said later, Another way to fund a startup is going to be fairly laborious no matter what they're working on. But Steve Jobs actually has taste himself—such good taste that he's shown the first version of a tree that in the era of those fluffy idealized portraits of countesses with their lapdogs. I wanted to make enough from a startup is to run into intellectual property problems. Roughly that you can't fool mother nature. Suppose in the future, it seems likely enough that it would basically be Cambridge with good weather, it turns out to be worth suing for money. American trend.

How investors are reluctant to do anything differently afterward. Now I realize I might seem to be on the smart side of average rather than the order in which they encounter it, children tend to misunderstand wealth. We may be able to help with technical as well as limiting your potential and protecting you from competitors, that geographic constraint also helps define your company. Without hope of gain, they'd have learned pretty quickly that people looked stupid riding them. Somewhat surprisingly, it worked. When McCarthy designed Lisp in the late 90s said the worst thing a startup can least afford it. The view of it will be better for the people running a company, because only that scales. The angel investors who funded our startup let the founders have impressive resumes, just flash them on the Earth, if they want to do that: have rules preventing them from leaving, or fund them at the point where it was memory-bound rather than CPU-bound, and since they were three just because serving web pages recently got a lot more money than B-list actors. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those.

If there's something you're really interested in it, but I could tell a lot of work creating course lists for each school, doing that made students feel the site was their natural home. The effort that goes into looking productive is not merely the product of skill, determination, and luck. There's nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don't get it. It spread from Fortran into Algol and thence to both their descendants. It might seem this would require you to pick out a few individuals and label their opinions as correct. Be relentlessly resourceful is how you get there. Hackers Painters. So I say let's aim at the problems. Tricks are straightforward to correct for. We had a comparatively easy time of it; the colloquial version involves speech coming out of Demo Day, and partly a larger part than he would have had to use CLOS.

It was not so easy 25 years ago. The real problem is, the huge size of current VC investments is dictated by the upper level. You have to consciously turn them off and become pathologically cynical. Since there are no external checks at all. You shouldn't ignore them, and if there's a better way of preventing it than the other way too: the less energy you have left? That's normal for startups. If someone gets murdered by someone they met at a supermarket, the press will treat the story as if it were merely lack of the right companies, is the difficulty of valuing each person's work. Tricks are straightforward to correct for.

The Lisp that McCarthy described in 1960, would anyone have wanted to use our software. Part of what he meant was that in any language anyone has ever heard of. When the idea is so overlooked as one that's easier to solve. The trick of maximizing the parts of your software easier to test, because they will probably use small problems, and will necessarily use predefined problems, will tend to err on the side of speaking slowly. He thought for a second Demo Day in Silicon Valley are people you'd overlook on the street if they'd like to publish their lives semi-publicly on the Internet, and distractions always evolve toward the procrastinators. As well as being smarter, they tend to consider just good enough. But this seems the exception. More generally, you can say things you couldn't say anywhere else, and this makes scientists bolder. It's merely the adjective form of I don't like the idea of taking this rival firm's rejects. I don't think it has much to offer good programmers, one of which is the ability to gratify it. Even if your colleagues were impressed by your credentials, they'd soon be parted from you if your stated ambition is merely to start a startup with no idea, what do you do that, you should be able to increase it.

There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you fail at 22, so what? Fundraising is brutal. That's what the web naturally tends to produce. You tend to keep away bad people, because there is a qualitative difference between Silicon Valley and squish them in Detroit, but it's not the end of the spectrum out of business. A lot of people with the necessary skills. Only sites on a blacklist would get crawled, and sites would be blacklisted only after being inspected by humans. It's the people that matter.

S s: n. If the answer is that he likes the way source code looks. Viaweb. The optimal solution is to take yourself out of the blocks, and spend less than you think. It's a fine thing for parents to help their children indirectly—for example, set prices based on the idea part and less on the startup. I've already said at least one thing that might deter you from improving it. Hackers are not stupid, and if you have a spare hour, and days later you're still working on it can't be the best writer among Silicon Valley CEOs. Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond the thoughts themselves.

That still wouldn't be small enough to work together face to face contact that makes deals happen, but it's woven into the story instead of being impressed that you're half way through? Though the immediate cause. Google this way. Computers would be just as happy to be told what to do. A lot of people to make a silicon valley? Lack of empathy is associated with intelligence, to have a vested interest in perpetuating them. We had big doubts about this idea, but they love plans and procedures and protocols. Most founders who get contacted by corp dev already know what it means. Simple as it seems; those VPs' cushy jobs were probably payment for work done earlier.

[fatimakhans12345]

Crisis, order, Europe – speech by Foreign Minister Gabriel at the 9th Federal Congress on Cultural Policy

Crisis, order, Europe – speech by Foreign Minister Gabriel at the 9th Federal Congress on Cultural Policy

Ladies and gentlemen,

“Internal and external cultural policy” is the title you have chosen for your Congress. And you have tasked me with talking about this. You probably expected the Foreign Minister to focus on the “external” part of this title, that is to say the foreign policy dimension of cultural policy.

However, I must disappoint you from the very first sentences of my speech.

I believe that the division between internal and external, the division between what is happening here in Germany and what is going on out there in the world, is outdated and that we have known this for a long time.

It is plain to see that we can no longer shield ourselves from the course of things, from the crises in Europe, the conflicts in the Middle East, from the wave of authoritarian modes of government, such as in Turkey, and their consequences in the form of global migratory movements. And don’t think for one moment that the disintegration of the internal and the external will be comfortable. It’s going to be most uncomfortable.

After all, we in Europe are used to having our own unique character. The Americans have staked their claim to an exceptionalism that goes thus: “we know what is right and we will bring this to everyone else in the world, occasionally also with the means of military intervention.” We have trodden the opposite path, namely “we know how it’s done, but we don’t want to have anything to do with the world. The Americans are welcome to handle what’s going on out there – if something goes wrong, then we’ll have someone to blame. But we don’t really want to be a part of it.”

Those who fuse the internal and the external are given responsibility for the external. That’s sometimes particularly uncomfortable. Because, for example, there are sometimes situations in which, before you can get long-term changes under way, you have to ensure that people are no longer murdered. Those are difficult consequences because we preferred to keep such things at arm’s length in the past. I would like to tentatively point out that the times when you are no longer able to separate the internal and external are more strenuous than when you could keep the two apart.

These developments are reaching us in Germany and Europe in a very real way in the form of refugees. And we are feeling the shock waves up close here as a result. And, at the same time, these experiences are intermingling with parallel processes of economic and social change in our own society and throughout the world. Asia is growing. Africa is growing. Latin America is growing. We are shrinking. And if our children intend to continue to have a voice in the world, then it must be a European one – and not a national one. Even a strong Germany won’t stand a chance of being heard.

There is no doubt that all of this gives rise to uncertainties, to perceived and real material uncertainties among a part of the people here about their life prospects, jobs and security. Cultural uncertainties also emerge.

In all of this, there is no doubt that we are undergoing a phase of major processes of change. And it is becoming clear that the technological revolution that is digitisation, the economic competition in industry and the political challenge to the established international power of the West, as well as the trials and tribulations of a society of immigration are also increasing the fear of powerlessness among many people here, especially among those who no longer feel that they count or are represented.

A loss of power, a loss of control and orientation, a loss of or endangered social identity – anxiety has many facets and dimensions.

The temptation all around the world, also here in Germany, to seek to make up for the loss of economic and political influence, or indeed sovereignty, on the part of individuals is therefore all the greater. The focus here is not on clubbing together in order to win back the sovereignty that you no longer have when you stand alone. Europe doesn’t represent a loss of sovereignty, but rather helps to recoup the sovereignty that you would no longer have as a nation state. However, the answers that are posited are more tempting. Europe is complicated and there are simpler recipes, such as cultural sovereignty or identity. A chimera that appears to make a good impression on many people.

Along the lines of “if we have less of a say, then fewer people should say or decide anything at all”.

There is a new authoritarianism. And this new authoritarianism is the biggest challenge facing our liberal democracies as we know them. And, above all, it is a cultural challenge as this is about nothing less than a fundamentally different understanding of our coexistence than has been the case to date. Coexistence with our neighbours in the world and, of course, in our own country.

A new authoritarianism is bent on isolation and exclusion and not on partnership. It is certainly not concerned about the fact that many people gathering together has a far greater cultural value than the sum of individual interests.

This point was brought home a few weeks ago in an essay by the US President’s Security Advisor. Under the heading “America first does not mean America only”, a wholly changed world view is posited in which the international community no longer constitutes a common forum with regulated relations, but is an arena or battleground. States, associations, non-governmental organisations and culture are all part of this arena. It is not the strength of the law that prevails here, but rather the law of the strong. Those who form an alliance with the strong – in this case the US – are friends and may be accorded benefits. Those who don’t do this but define their own interests or even consider cultural differences to be necessary are enemies and are opposed.

That is pretty much the opposite of the idea of the West, which has never been a geographical notion, but a universal and cultural concept. This concept is focused on the benefits that emerge when we interact with each other in the context of legally, politically and economically regulated and reliable relations that are based on freedom, democracy and mutual respect, as well as on a desire for peace and cultural exchange. Coexisting in an international community, a common home – and not in a battle arena.

You can see therefore that this isn’t a question of the internal and external, but of our conception of coexistence both within and without. Or, as Willy Brandt once put it, a people of good neighbours – within and without.

The new authoritarianism is bent on the opposite – on superiority and arrogance instead of dialogue, exchanges and open communication.

Essentially, we are talking here about nationalism pure and simple, which ultimately entails isolation and denigration of people, societies, countries and cultures – namely those who are not on the side of the strong in the arena.

We sense that, particularly here in Europe, such new nationalist simplifications, which enjoy considerable electoral success, are being held up as the solution to our complex social problems. What is the AfD if not the German variant of this right-wing populist movement in Europe?

Such populists are bandying slogans about that would have us believe that individual states can recoup their lost glory by cutting themselves off from an interlinked Europe and a globalised world. Above all, by cutting themselves off culturally.

Ladies and gentlemen,

What bearing do these findings have on our cultural policy?

I believe that we must, on the one hand, face up to the real erosion of the importance of the nation state while at the same time doing our utmost to ensure that people do not fall into the trap of new nationalist narratives and promises with which populists on the left, but above all on the right, seek to turn these new uncertainties to their advantage.

There will be an opportunity for us to come up with an idea on this in the coming year. After all, 2018 marks the centenary of the end of the First World War. There will be plenty of narratives on this in Europe. We must take care to ensure that these aren’t all nationalist ones, but that there is also a common Europe narrative in the mix. And that mention is made of something that, unfortunately only after another world war, led to nationalist narratives being held in check in Europe. It is a good opportunity to respond to such an occasion with the instruments of cultural policy.

We must therefore mention the new “internal and external” in the same breath. We must ponder these dimensions together and respond with determination and conviction –

by making it much clearer than to date that the nation state of the 19th century is certainly not, nor can it be, the appropriate form of common thought, empathy and decision-making. In short, we must get a second Enlightenment off the ground!

And we should start with ourselves here. Our democratic culture, the entire democratic culture of the West, which is certainly not a geographical construct, but rather a foundation of shared values, is based on this very concept of Enlightenment.

Of course, we know that people have different fortunes and skills and varying economic, social or cultural backgrounds.

But we want to think of each other as equals. The clarity and potency of the first twenty articles of our Basic Law are founded on these paradoxes.

With all due respect for the debate on cultural identity – we do have one. And that is the first twenty articles of the Basic Law. These articles comprise everything that you need to know in order to lead a civilised life and to deal with others in a civilised way. I know of no cultural identity that is better than the Basic Law.

In his great speech to mark its birthday, Navid Kermani stated that as a beacon, indeed as a fundamental law for our actions, it doesn’t set out what is a reality, but what should be a reality – and is therefore an obligation for each and every individual! With this in mind, I have – as defined by Jürgen Habermas – always considered myself to be a constitutional patriot.

Why am I emphasising this?

Because foreign policy and cultural relations policy can help us to master this common challenge.

That’s not always easy, and not always stress-free. And sometimes we must be especially patient as in the example of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation’s intention to exhibit the collection of the Tehran Museum for Contemporary Art here in Berlin.

We are supporting this project and will continue to work on this. We must strengthen the cultural fabric that establishes connections especially where the political dialogue is difficult.

Of course, there is another key task for the coming years here in Germany that is particularly important to me and where the synergy of the internal and external must prove its worth far more intensively and urgently. How can we teach the Shoah in school classes in which 60 to 80 percent of the children grow up with very different narratives told around their families’ kitchen tables and in their friendship groups?

We need the experiences of cultural bridge-builders more than ever here. In the battle of the narratives, we must make our country’s story accessible, communicate it and make it a common narrative.

I have therefore asked the Goethe-Institut to summarise its experiences garnered abroad and to enter into a dialogue with the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany as soon as possible. Particularly in light of such a decisive question for the makeup of our country, we need, more than ever before, these experiences from abroad in order to have a greater cultural impact on the domestic stage!

And I would like to mention another aspect with respect to the Luther year. Some of us in this room may perhaps remember how difficult it was, as recently as in my childhood, for a Catholic girl to fall in love with a Protestant boy. How strongly religion – not belief – wanted to keep them apart.

No, religion is not necessarily a social adhesive as my Cabinet colleague Thomas de Maizière wrote recently. Religion certainly has the capacity to be that. In the best case, it is indeed that, but not necessarily.

But it is called upon to rise to this challenge. And religious communities are doing this on a large scale especially here in Germany.

Religious communities certainly have a responsibility for peaceful coexistence among people nowadays. It was with this in mind that we invited around 100 representatives of religious communities to the Federal Foreign Office a few weeks ago. We did this not only to find out about their experiences, but also to face up to this responsibility.

And to learn from the religious leaders’ experiences, as well as to come together to prevent religious experiences and narratives from being abused in order to create new lines of conflict. In order to do this, we also have to talk to people who think differently and who we find to be difficult. The “Bild-Zeitung” wrote about how terrible our choice of invitees was. If there were only nice people in the world, then we wouldn’t need to invite them. We will need to talk with people who aren’t nice, who are complicated and difficult. However, it’s just election time as you know.

I firmly believe that our experience out there in the world can only be useful also here in Germany.

And, against this backdrop, allow me to remark on a cultural policy debate that appears to be making more of an impact on this city right now than a number of other things. I must admit that the question as to whether it is appropriate to afix a cross on the dome of the newly constructed façade of the Prussian Stadtschloss appears a little strange to me. And incidentally not only because I come from a town that, by the way, is a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site on account, among other things, of the fact that it was planned and built in the shape of a church cross. I say this with all seriousness because I have made the acquaintance of Christians in this country who are refreshingly unorthodox and culturally open.

However, the question that we actually need to ask in view of this very metropolitan debate is this: did anyone actually ask themselves beforehand whose façade they are reconstructing? After all, if you choose to iconocise a Prussian-Wilhelmine façade, something that you can reject out of hand for good reasons, then you have to know what you are doing. Of course, architectural historians might wish to point out that the façade dates from the Baroque. However, the reconstruction of this façade does not, politically speaking, stand for the Baroque period, but for the Prussian-Wilhemine era. Of course, the dome and cross were an anti-democratic symbol of the divine right of the rulers of the German Empire. The entire resistance against the bourgeois revolution and this epoch’s understanding of itself were informed by this. The entire Stadtschloss in the heart of Berlin represents this claim to power targeted against the democrats – incidentally, also if the Prussian eagle and not the cross had been erected on the roof of the dome.

Indeed, we have a certain tendency in Germany to glorify the Prussian era. We’re big fans of Alter Fritz the music-lover, the miller who successfully sued the King, Sanssouci and quite a few other things besides. However, Prussianism also encompasses a military, aggressive drill culture and conservative, nationalist aspirations that facilitated the intellectual and political rise of extremely dangerous ideologies. In view of the historical references, I find it astonishing that the cross has triggered this row and not the political attitude of the Prussian-Wilhelmine age for which this palace also stands.

Anyone who reconstructs Prussian façades must also address the Prussian import of the façade. And it seems to me that this isn’t something that can be done by making alterations to it, which rather looks like an attempt to correct something that you hadn’t thought through beforehand.

But I’ll admit that I’m just a Social Democrat, and sometimes we react somewhat awkwardly to attempts to glorify Prussia and Bismarck.

As far as the current discussion surrounding the cross and dome is concerned, we should perhaps take a leaf from the book of the bourgeois revolutionaries, who certainly had their difficulties during the Prussian age. Although they were victims of the alliance between the church and authority, they had a relatively relaxed approach to the issue.

They set a new text extolling the virtues of civic spirit to the melody of an old song, an old ode singing the praises of the nobility, in what was essentially a form of “reconstruction”.

Translated into English, it goes like this: “Whether we are weighed down by crosses on our fronts or bear them on our backs, that doesn’t matter.”

And, in the next verse: “But whether we build something new/Or just reuse what we have/That does matter/Whether we create something for the world/Or just gawk at the world/That does matter.”

It is for this reason that I believe that a little bit more Republican composure would do us good in this discussion!

What matters is something completely different, however. In the 19th century, the Palace’s dome symbolised, to all intents and purposes, the illiberal alliance between the throne and the altar against the bourgeoisie.

We must therefore strive to transform the aristocratic Palace, or indeed its façade, into a democratic place. In a nutshell, this is not so much a question of symbols and icons as of filling rooms and buildings with the substance of democracy!

And part of this involves granting others in our world access to us and to our culture while reaching out to the world and to our partners’ culture in return. That is to say, treating each other as equals.

And I’m not concerned about the democratic context here.

However, I would like to use one example to illustrate how we as the Federal Foreign Office can do more to help here in the future. There are fragments of what are known as the Turfan mosaics here in the state museums of Berlin, and also in China, India, Russia and the UK. They were hammered out of caves along the Silk Road by archaeologists in the 19th century and taken to different places.

Together with the museums here in Berlin, with the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and the Federal Foreign Office, we are working to ensure that enjoying the sight of this World Cultural Heritage is no longer contingent upon buying a plane ticket to Berlin.

Instead, we want to facilitate joint access to these objects and their history across continents and also the current discussions surrounding the new Silk Road that we are focusing on with such intensity in the worlds of business and politics. It is incumbent on us to express an interest in its cultural and historical dimension.

In what we are calling a “Virtual Dome”, we intend to create a new form of unity in a virtual space, one which can then be supplemented with new tangible forms. This dome is intended to give rise to one thing in particular, namely access, critical engagement and a new sense of unity both through and within this forum.

And if this project is a success, then it could become a starting point for how we, far beyond the Humboldt-Forum, can alter the work of museums between the domestic and foreign realms.

We can do this not only by making the collections accessible in digital form, but also, through improved and closer collaboration between academia and culture, by making these archives and collections available for our joint work on the issues of the 21st century both at home and abroad.

Martin Roth, who is an important dialogue partner for me in all of these matters, intends to address this particularly intensively as the next President of the ifa. This is something that I am looking forward to tremendously!

Ladies and gentlemen,

At the beginning of my speech, I mentioned that we are experiencing upheavals and uncertainties.

However, we shouldn’t start scrabbling around for new truths at such times.

Instead, we should forge new trust in the power of culture and enlightenment. In so doing, our assumption is that art and culture and academia and education, when taken seriously with their freedoms, open up a different world and a different mode of perception, thought and experience.

This is why it is so important to create and protect these spaces, and also to open them up and make them accessible.

I experienced this for myself in my small home town of Goslar, where, thanks to civic engagement, thanks to the artists of the Kaiserring, access to culture is made possible in a most tangible way. Moreover, I am delighted that we had an opportunity to support a similar experiment, namely documenta in Athens and Kassel, in precisely this way.

It is for this reason that we are establishing branches of the Goethe-Institut abroad and supporting schools and cooperative partnerships between universities and research bodies. Because mutual understanding for what we have in common can develop in these spaces.

In the realm of Cultural Relations Policy, for which the Federal Foreign Office bears responsibility, we are resolutely pursuing the path of opening and compassion, as Willy Brandt once called it.

In so doing, we believe that we need bridge-builders between cultures more urgently than ever before if we intend to overcome the straitjacket of nationalism.

And we must come to the aid of those who have to flee in the face of nationalist pressure. This is why the Federal Foreign Office is supporting the Philipp Schwartz Initiative for persecuted researchers relocating to Germany, especially those from Turkey.

I am therefore delighted that the Deutscher Bühnenverein intends to take the Philipp Schwartz Initiative as an example for establishing its own programme to support “artists at risk”. You have our full support for these efforts!

Ladies and gentlemen,

Allow me, of course, to combine this appeal to the power of the culture of enlightenment with my particular thanks to the Members of the German Bundestag. It was they who worked with great commitment to ensure that we also have the funds for this.

Whether it be the language work and funds for schools and branches of the Goethe-Institut.

Whether it be the creation of cultural spaces or reforming Cultural Relations Policy to make it a policy of civil societies.

None of this would have been possible without the support of the Bundestag, and especially the responsible subcommittee and the Budget Committee!

Here are just a few examples:

As the Ukraine conflict is so entrenched in the politics between states, we are committed to fostering civil society exchanges both with and in the countries of the Eastern Partnership.

As the current emergency situations of forced migration not only call for a political solution and humanitarian assistance, but since culture is also a vehicle for humanity, we are working in such a wide variety of areas here.

From our commitment to protecting World Cultural Heritage, to which Minister of State Böhmer, as President of the responsible UNESCO committee, has devoted herself so resolutely, to the German Archaeological Institute and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which are working together to promote the cause of preservation and reconstruction in Syria together with 20 other institutions as part of an international project.

There are countless other similar examples. They remind us that, especially in times of crisis and in crisis regions, we must step up our efforts to facilitate the preservation of and access to culture and education.

Ladies and gentlemen,

If there were one place where the boundaries between the internal and the external are becoming blurred, then it is here in Europe.

Overcoming thinking in terms of the nation state and empathy with our closest friends and partners calls for a very deliberate and targeted policy.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have become the convinced European that I am today had I not gone on a visit to England in my youth. It wasn’t just open to the best of the best, recruiting students from the Humboldt and Oxford, so to speak, but also included Kassel-Nord, Goslar and Herne in its remit. By the way, this is something that has preoccupied me for years. Many of our funding programmes reach an incredible number of young people, but relatively often these are young people from families that could afford to do that anyway. And, at the same time, we have secondary modern schools in Germany where 90 percent of the pupils don’t leave the city in the summer holidays. I believe that we face a huge task especially among those who, for material reasons, but also owing to educational privation, have no access to cultural exchanges.

Making this possible once again is one of the objectives for the coming years. This also requires a different approach on the part of our institutions and project executing organisations, as well as more funding, of course. This is why we also believe that gratitude is the friendliest way to ask a favour. If I praise the Budget Committee now, then I think it’s clear to everyone what comes next.

Secondly, we intend to support city twinning projects once again if they promote such exchanges between citizens.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I therefore believe that we have much to do and great tasks ahead of us as far as the internal and external are concerned. But we also have incredible opportunities in our country. By the way, one of these is an artistic treatment of extremely difficult topics in the coming year. “Look back, think forward” is our slogan for the remembrance days.

At the next Franco-German Council of Ministers, we will propose that the branches of the Goethe-Institut and the Insitut Français be brought closer together where only one of the two has a presence.

So “Goethe mit Frankreich” and “La France avec Goethe”. There will be around ten joint locations to this end in the next four years.

We have also approached the Goethe-Institut and the Insitut Français, as well as our Dutch and Swedish partners and German and Turkish foundations with the idea of opening joint European cultural centres in Turkey.

We set aside one million euros last week to help establish these centres in Gaziantep, Dyarbarkir and Izmir.

These efforts include two new developments that are important also to me especially in light of the current situation. Firstly, we are not building entire structures of our own unnecessarily, but are strengthening those in the region with our expertise and thereby helping to preserve and expand existing spaces in both a literal and metaphorical sense.

Above all, we are attempting, together with our European partners, to find a common approach from conception to implementation.

We need more than just European partners though! I am delighted that we have set up so many cooperative partnerships here in Germany and with German institutions and that we will continue to expand these. Allow me to thank you most sincerely for this cooperation.

And I firmly believe we can work together to ensure that blurring of the boundaries between the internal and external not only gives rise to uncertainty and fear, but also to a thirst for knowledge, zest for life and an interest in the unknown. With the power of culture and enlightenment, we will be able to forge connections and ties both between and within our societies. That would be my objective at any rate.

Not abusing culture as a sphere of distinction for isolation and denigration, but seeing it as the unifying force between countries, peoples and individuals with the most diverse backgrounds.

Thank you for listening.

from UK & Germany http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/EN/Infoservice/Presse/Reden/2017/170615_BM_Kultur.html?nn=479796

[fvinstitute288-blog]

Staying Together – How to Create a Healthy Committed Relationship

When we make a commitment to our partner, our usual expectation is that our relationship will last for life and that our love will see us through the inevitable hard times. Yet, when reality sinks in, we have to acknowledge that while love is one of the components of a relationship’s longevity, it really takes more to make it through the long haul. It takes community and family support (which isn’t as available as it once was in our society) – and it takes skill. Many of us have failed to learn how to negotiate our way through relationship difficulties to build a lasting connection. Psychologists have carried out substantial research over the past several decades trying to understand the secrets of why some couples are able to stay together and others are not. For instance, John Gottman, Ph.D., at the University of Washington, has studied over 2,000 couples, and he has had remarkable success in predicting which couples will make it and which will not. Contrary to popular wisdom, one of his findings is that increased sex does not necessarily improve a relationship. He also found that financial problems do not always imply trouble for a couple. One of Gottman’s major findings is that couples who fight are not necessarily on the road to a breakup. In fact, he makes the point that arguments may be constructive in building a long-term relationship because they help us to clarify our needs and increase mutual respect between partners. But whether the arguments will lead to a breakup or not depends on how the couple resolves its conflicts. There are positive ways to resolve conflicts that may strengthen the relationship. Arguments don’t necessarily mean your relationship is in trouble – and they might be an essential component of a long-lasting relationship. One finding to emerge from the research is that couples are likely to succeed if they have a healthy balance between positive and negative emotions and interactions. In fact, strong relationships have a five to one ratio – five parts positive interaction to one part negative. Couples who break up, on the other hand, tend to have more negative than positive interactions. Positive Behaviors in a Relationship What are these positive interactions? They are found in Showing interest in what your partner is saying, Expressing affection to your partner both verbally (“I love you”) and nonverbally (holding hands, doing kind little things), Showing you care – perhaps by making a phone call during the day or bringing home flowers, Showing appreciation by remembering the good times in your relationship or telling your partner how proud you are of him or her, Indicating your concern – instead of acting defensive, show that you are concerned about your partner’s troubling experiences or apologize if you say something hurtful without thinking, Conveying empathy in your facial expression and verbal feedback – show that you truly care about what your partner is going through, Displaying acceptance of your partner’s thoughts and feelings – this shows your respect for your partner, Joking around, which includes playful teasing, laughing together, and maybe acting silly together, and Sharing your joy when good things happen. The Negative Cascade A relationship in trouble is one that falls into a negative cascade. One negative reaction leads to the next until there is a seemingly insurmountable wall between the two partners. Relationships that enter this destructive phase need attention and can benefit from the trustworthy, confidential intervention of a professional therapist. Sometimes the two partners fail to notice when they have entered this cycle because they feel justified in reacting as they do – but the price they pay is the slow erosion of their relationship. It may seem impossible for them to recapture the love that brought them together in the first place. Here are the phases of the negative cascade: Criticism Criticism involves attacking your partner’s personality or character, not just his or her behavior. There is usually an element of blame in the attack. Criticizing your partner leads to defensiveness and may encourage your partner to withdraw from you – after all, if your partner feels blamed because of a personality flaw, it would be difficult thing to repair. A complaint, on the other hand, especially if it is stated as an “I-statement,” is an expression of your feeling that allows your partner to correct the situation. Stating a complaint, though it may not be pleasant, can enhance the relationship because it gets problematic behavior out in the open where it can be talked about. Complaints often begin with the word, “I,” and criticisms might begin with the word, “you.” To repair this pattern, try stating your criticisms as complaints that your partner can respond to and not take as a personal attack. Make your complaints specific and talk about them as a behaviors that can be changed. Take responsibility for your own part in the problem. Criticisms vs. Complaints Criticism – “You’re a workaholic! You don’t care about me!” Complaint – “I feel unloved when I have to be alone so much when you work late at night.” Criticism – “The world revolves around you – you need to have the last word, always.” Complaint – “I get upset when you interrupt me.” Contempt If the criticisms within a relationship are not addressed, the interaction between the two partners may lead to contempt. This stage of the negative cascade is seen when there is an attempt to insult your partner, as in, “You’re just a pig around the house and I don’t know how I could ever have loved you.” Contemptuous remarks go right to the heart of your partner’s sense of self. They are meant to hurt. There are several forms of contempt, such as name-calling, insulting jokes about your partner, mockery, and body language (such as sneering, eye rolling, or curling your upper lip). If a relationship gets to this stage, it is difficult to recapture the love and it may be vulnerable to a breakup. To make this situation better, both partners need to identify the contempt and to replace it intentionally with words of admiration and respect. They need to work on trying to achieve the ratio of five positives to one negative. Defensiveness When a person is bombarded with criticism and indications of contempt, it is natural to feel like a victim – and victims go into a defensive posture (“I haven’t done anything wrong, so stop picking on me”).Defensiveness is an attempt to protect oneself and to guard against further attacks. The victim feels justified in doing this. However, what is not often understood is that defensiveness tends to escalate a conflict rather than quelling it. The partner who does the blaming feels that the other one doesn’t “get it” and is resistant to addressing the problem. This can result in a standoff where constructive communication comes to a halt. Rather than trying to mutually solve the problems in the relationship, the two partners spend their energy defending themselves. Nothing is resolved, the conflict escalates, and the negative cascade continues to damage the relationship. The way to address the defensiveness phase of the cascade is to learn how to stay calm. When anxiety is reduced, it is possible to ward off criticism, put it into perspective, and avoid reacting defensively. It is helpful to learn how to react to the overall situation rather than to only the words that are spoken in moments of conflict. Staying calm protects us against the possibility of feeling overwhelmed during heated moments. Stonewalling In the final phase of the negative cascade the couple finally breaks off normal contact. Gottman found that 85 percent of stonewallers are men. This phase characterizes a stage in the damaged relationship where one of the partners decides that no communication is better than the destructive feelings and words that have prevailed prior to this point. Withdrawing from interaction sends a powerful negative message – and the stonewaller may feel that this is the only option left. It is important to note that a common fighting technique between partners is for one to use the “silent treatment” – but this is not the same as stonewalling. The silent treatment is used on occasion, while stonewalling is an habitual reaction for the couple and is preceded by the first three phases of the negative cascade. Relationships that get to this point are still salvageable, but they are fragile. At this stage, the couple must want to work hard to save the relationship. In order to address the problem of stonewalling, the couple should address issues like learning to stay calm, speaking non-defensively, and becoming aware of the thoughts that maintain their distress. A therapist can help a couple learn all of these skills. Making Positive Relationship Changes There is still hope for couples who find themselves in destructive patterns, but they must learn new skills. Consulting with a trained therapist is generally the most effective way to do this. One skill to learn is how to avoid flooding, which is a feeling of being overwhelmed by your partner’s negativity and your own reactions. In flooding, you feel that you have reached your limit and can take no more. A person who experiences flooding feels hostile, withdrawn, and defensive. This person feels the need to calm down and may feel like running away from the situation just to get some relief. A therapist can teach the partners how to stay calm in these situations and to use positive thinking techniques. Both partners also need to redefine the attacks on them as simply the way the other person is trying to make a point. Arguments are not necessarily a sign that the relationship is in trouble. In fact, conflict is a way to clarify our expectations about our role – and our partner’s role – within the relationship. This clarification allows both partners to feel comfortable and secure. The couple needs to know that they can trust each other. Mutual respect can emerge Committed Relationship out of productive arguments. Making conflicts constructive is a skill that can lead to a lifetime of love, intimacy, and the experience of knowing that you are cherished by an important person in your world. Some Skills for Creating a Healthy Relationship Gottman points out four strategies for improving relationships. Most of us are not especially adept at these skills, especially when we enter into a significant life relationship, but learning them gives us a good chance to increase the success of both our relationship and our total life experience. Learn to Calm Down – This skill is especially important when we need to deal with flooding, and it also allows us to stay objective in the face of conflict. Staying calm allows us to see the overall picture rather than over-reacting to the stresses of the moment so that we can access the more understanding and caring parts of ourselves. When we are physiologically aroused, we are prone to losing ourselves in the emotions of the moment – and that can mean allowing our anger to go out of control. There are a number of techniques that can help us to calm down – Take your pulse. Take a timeout when things get out of control – a twenty-minute recess allows us to return to our baseline level of arousal. Change your thinking from distressful thoughts to self-soothing thoughts (“He’s angry now, but this isn’t about me”). Try deep breathing and try to capture some peaceful thoughts. Learn progressive muscle relaxation techniques – your therapist can teach you this. Aerobic exercise can lead to a calm feeling. Speak and Listen Non-defensively –Deliberately make yourself have positive, caring thoughts about your partner. Focus on what is right in your relationship, not on what is wrong and needs to be changed. Share these thoughts with your partner through praise, compliments, and words of appreciation. This may be a difficult skill to master, especially when we feel irritated, but the reward to your relationship is invaluable. Validate Your Partner – This means showing empathy for your partner’s situation. Let your partner know that you appreciate the experiences he or she is having and that you consider them valid, even if you don’t agree on a point. Take responsibility for what your partner might blame you for. It takes strength to apologize – but is it better to be right or to have a healthy relationship? Compliment your partner on his or her ability to make their needs known. Overlearn These Skills – It may be relatively easy to try these techniques from time to time, but the clue to a successful long-term relationship is to use them daily and over the long term. These skills need to be automatic, and that comes from practicing them. You – and your partner – will be better off for it. Follow and click the link to read more about this article and see many more leading articles on marriage, couples, and family: http://fvinstitute.com/article/staying-together-create-healthy-committed-relationship/

[naivelocus]

Education Unbundled: What knowledge will we lose if we automate the professions?

Education Unbundled

What knowledge will we lose if we automate the professions?

Automating the Professions

  Unique among the outpouring of articles and books about automation over the last few years, Richard and Daniel Susskind hope that the professional knowledge in fields like medicine, law, and education will be dispensed by machines. The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts (OUP, 2015) argues that automating professional knowledge would spread the benefits of practical expertise, empowering those who do not now have access.

Usually when we think about automation we might imagine factory jobs being lost to robots. Instead, the Susskinds imagine jobs like teaching being unbundled and decomposed into tasks that machines can carry out, which would turn teachers into something like babysitters: low-skilled and low-paid. Conversely, the implication is that education should no longer be in the business of supplying students with the kinds of professional knowledge that machines will take over.

On the one hand, the Susskinds’ model is supposed to provide access to professional knowledge to those who can’t afford the current system. Think about how we have all used the medical knowledge on WebMD to avoid a doctor’s visit at some point. But I’m willing to bet that we have also all experienced frustration when hoping to speak to a real person on the phone when we are trapped in automated menus.

Beyond the frustrating brittleness and inflexibility of machines lays a new kind of systematic inequality that comes from algorithmic biases and the commodification of our personal data. Try to imagine coping with an inflexible machine that has misidentified your face, which is a real problem for African Americans, according to The Atlantic: “Facial-recognition systems are more likely either to misidentify or fail to identify African Americans than other races, errors that could result in innocent citizens being marked as suspects in crimes.”

While the threat of automation, much like the threat of offshoring, is often used to erode the bargaining power of labor less skilled labor, the Susskinds squarely take aim at the professions and argue that automation would be “the preferred direction of travel” (377). I question whether their reliance on the market to provide more efficient solutions in the form of automation would really lead to a more equal future. At the center of my critique, I argue that their approach will lead to the consolidation of the monopoly power of Big Data, the mass standardization in the delivery of professional services, and the erosion of skills and knowledge that are needed to deal with a changing world.

Free Market Fantasies in the Age of Internet Centrism

  Why should the professions be automated? The Susskinds argue that the professions are a bad solution to the problem of “limited understanding” because “they act as gatekeepers who maintain, interpret, and apply the practical expertise from which we wish to benefit.” (69) They envision a shift: “as the industrialization and digitization of the professions; as the routinization and commoditization of professional work; as the disintermediation and demystification of professionals.” (427)

The language of disintermediation, industrialization, and routinization is congenial to corporate power. The Susskinds seem to think that capitalism works just fine, much like like Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee are “skeptical of efforts to come up with fundamental alternatives” (208), which shows when they identify the three main drivers towards more automation: “market forces, technological advances, and human ingenuity.” (286) But unlike Brynjolfsson and McAfee, they don’t see a future when humans and machines complement each other, writing “it is not at all clear why professionals will be able to secure their place indefinitely in these joint ventures.” (410)

Instead of jobs, they argue we will have tasks and each should be carried out in the “most efficient way.” (349)  Just as “market forces and technological advances have eliminated” previous generations of craftspeople, we should expect the same of the professions. (290) Indeed, we should hope for it, since it is “widely recognized that there is insufficient funding available to run high-quality schools and universities if teachers and professors operate in the traditional way” (300). While they they offer no source, their “widely recognized” conclusion reveals that budgets more than equity might be driving their argument.

They imagine 12 future roles for people, which which fits with the neoliberal skills agenda that’s emerging as the prime challenger to the conservative standardized testing movement. As one example of a role, “In the future there will be a need for wise and empathetic, discipline-independent individuals —empathizers—who can provide the reassurance to recipients of their work that is often as important as the correct answer. Empathizing of itself will be a decomposed part of some professional services.” (376)

However, I doubt that we want an empathizer to comfort us at school or in the hospital. Rather, we want our teacher or doctor to empathize with us, to understand our frustrations and hopes, and to use that empathy to shape their interaction with us. I can’t see how I could divorce my empathy for students from my professional knowledge as a teacher in cases where I might reduce the amount that a struggling writer needs to put on the page in order that they might begin to enjoy writing and build their confidence.

The Susskinds are well aware that many will object to their proposal, but they seem more concerned with systematically delineating and refuting objections, than in truly taking on board the concerns that others have articulated about automation. For example, the Susskinds dispatch with Michael Sandel’s worries about how “market norms are increasingly replacing non-market norms” in just four paragraphs. (342) They argue that the “consequences of liberalization will be greater, not less, access to affordable expertise”, and that in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, “marketization has not undermined access” because private individuals do not need to pay for service. Yet, one study estimates that “at least £5 billion of the NHS’s recurrent i.e. continuing, year-on-year running costs relate to the market.”

There is no reason to think that market forces and technological advances won’t simply carry us farther down the path of polarization and inequality. Algorithms “tend to punish the poor,” as Cathy O’Neill argues. “The privileged, we’ll see time and again, are processed more by people, the masses by machines.” (15) Turbo Tax for the masses, Mossack Fonseca for the wealthy. As The Guardian reports, “According to the US economist Gabriel Zucman, 8% of the world’s wealth – a vast $7.6tn (£5.3tn) – was stashed in tax havens.”

If the Susskinds are concerned with equitable access to professional expertise, why not pursue other parallel paths to making professional knowledge widely available?  For even if it is possible to automate expertise, there is no certainty that access will be cheaper, more democratic, and of a high quality. Rather than wait for automated doctors, why not allow registered nurses to prescribe medication?

While I don’t doubt the Susskinds’ stated motivation to make expertise more accessible, Internet Centrism shines through their argument more vibrantly than a sustained analysis of social inequality. Evgeny Morozov sharply criticizes the essentializing and epochal terms where “rupture talk and revolutionary rhetoric tend to displace all other forms of analysis.” (48) Central to the Susskinds’ argument is the idea that we have left behind a “print-based industrial society” in which “it did seem to be the case that the most effective way of sharing practical expertise was through face-to-face interaction.” Now that we live in a “technology-based Internet society” we should let go of the “veneration for tradition”  and embrace “more effective ways to produce and distribute practical expertise that make less use of personal interaction.” (379)

It’s odd to contrast print and technology; surely print is a kind of technology, not its categorical opposite. And despite the rhetoric of the New Economy, material industry has not been left behind for the immaterial Internet. The supply chains, fossil fuel extraction, and waste dumps create what Naomi Klein calls sacrifice zones, a kind of inequality we need to account for just as much as the access to professional knowledge.

The Consolidation of Big Data

The kind of smart machines that the Susskinds envision presuppose big data, and more worryingly they argue that the boundaries between different services should collapse since there are “fundamental benefits for clients of having one provider looking after many or all of their professional interests.” (178) It would certainly give those providers more power over our lives. Try imagining the same provider having access to your financial, medical, educational, and legal information. Mark Zuckerberg is probably thinking such thoughts as we speak.

Even though the Susskinds say that any consolidation of services should be “consistent with settled principles of privacy and data protection”, it isn’t clear that those principles are strong enough to keep corporate powers in check. (175) For example, Facebook has already filed a patent to use the data they collect from our social networks to influence our credit rating: “When an individual applies for a loan, the lender examines the credit ratings of members of the individual’s social network who are connected to the individual […]. If the average credit rating of these members is at least a minimum credit score, the lender continues to process the loan application. Otherwise, the loan application is rejected.”

In contrast to the Susskinds’ irrationally optimistic argument, Frank Pasquale offers the kind of sober tech criticism that we need if we hope for a more democratic and fair future. In The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information, Pasquale argues that “Despite the promises of freedom and self-determination held out by the lords of the information age, black box methods are just as likely to entrench a digital aristocracy as to empower experts.” (218)

Pasquale writes that opacity already “prevails in many critical transactions in order to give privileged insiders an advantage over their clients, regulators, and risk managers.” (3) Google not only protects it’s algorithms that determine search results, but their search engine’s power comes from the vast quantities of information they have accumulated from and about us. Thus, the actual trend in automated knowledge has not been to more open and transparent systems, but to monopoly power built on opacity and our data. “What Thomas Piketty said of unlimited capital accumulation applies as well to untrammeled tech giants: ‘the past devours the future.'” (162)

Unbundling Education

  The Susskinds make arguments about specific professions in Chapter 2, titled ‘From the Vanguard’. Since education is my area of expertise, I will focus on their suggestions for the future of teaching. They argue that we should apply the Big Data approach to education:

“In Learning with Big Data: The Future of Education, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier describe how the handful of data points traditionally used in education—test scores, report cards, attendance records, and so on—are likely to be dwarfed by far larger, and far more diverse, data sets. A rich range of data is captured, from where students click on the screen to how long they take to answer a question. And the data can be collected and stored in respect of hundreds of thousands of students.”

But who would those “far larger, and far more diverse” data sets really benefit? Should one provider have access to a student’s disciplinary records, data about how quickly they process information, attendance, and library records?

How would we guarantee that education providers would work like a good librarian, helping students expand their intellectual horizons, rather than like Amazon or Netflix, locking them into what we already ‘like’ and profiting from it?

Overall, the Susskinds’ section on education exemplifies a larger pattern where they list various technological changes that have happened, but offer no critical assessment of whether or not they help bring about a more equitable world. In their catalog of changes that excite them, they briefly mention personalized learning systems, Edutopia, Moodle, Kahn Academy, Edomo, MOOCs, learning management systems, and compare online intelligent tutoring systems to the tutor system at Oxford.

Sure, Kahn Academy videos and adaptive software can offer a ‘personalized’ learning experience, but they fall far short from the experience of discussing a book with a teacher or tutor. In fact, those ‘personalized’ experiences are a kind of mass standardization, more like a McDonald’s than like a chef at a restaurant who customizes meals based on what customers want to eat. And while adaptive software might quickly tell students when they have the right or wrong answer, it won’t be able to have a conversation about how a novel inspires their dreams for the future.

In the unbundled view of education, the constructivist dream of the teacher as facilitator would come true. Perhaps these facilitators would simply shuffle kids from Khan Academy, to the lunch room, to an adaptive test. Throughout the book, the Susskinds lean heavily on the cases they present in this chapter, arguing that it is “simply not the experience of those who are working at the vanguard of the professions” that, as David Autor argues, “many of the tasks currently bundled into these jobs cannot readily be unbundled … without a substantial drop in quality.”

David Autor is right. No one has shown that replacing a teacher (or any other professional) with a bundle of software, systems, and videos comes anywhere close to matching the quality of education that a discerning teacher can provide. We can also learn lots from people like Audrey Watters who have charted the long history of attempts to automate education.

Deskilling the Planet

As the Susskinds tell the story of IBM’s Watson, it is one full of optimism and hope, yet short on factual details. Perhaps Watson is the future of flexible machine learning, a “landmark development in artificial intelligence.” (243) The Susskinds take Watson as evidence that “the technologies already exist to support the development of powerful systems in other professions. The day will come, for most professional problems, when users will be able to describe their difficulties in natural language to a computer system on the Internet, and receive a reasoned response, useful advice, and polished supporting documents, all to the standard of an expert professional practitioner.” (245)

First, note the Susskinds’ discursive bias which construes knowledge as something that primarily takes linguistic form: description, reason, advice, documents. As Barry Allen argues, that discursive bias infects nearly all Western philosophy. However, the knowledge involved in performing a complicated surgery or managing a classroom cannot be reduced to descriptions and instructions. Even at the point of diagnosis, we ought not to expect that patients simply describe their difficulties. A good doctor has an educated perception; she can notice something that’s off, detect an odd bump, or suspect that beneath the reported difficulties lays an issue that the patient doesn’t know how to talk about.

Much the same is true of the pedagogical knowledge that teachers possess: you can’t fully articulate how you keep a classroom of 30 kids going on their individual projects without the whole class descending into chaos. And no set of explicit instructions automatically translates into skilled practice. When should you intervene when a student is struggling? When should you let some misbehavior go without comment because you know the student is having a bad day?

It’s also unlikely that we will be able to dispense with the human expertise that makes a  judgment about whether Watson has provided a good diagnosis, especially when we take into account Watson’s failures, which the Susskinds studiously avoid talking about. David Autor explains that machines, even impressive ones like Watson, exhibit a kind brittleness in contrast to the flexibility of human cognition. (57:00) In final Jeopardy, Watson made a mistake that no human Jeopardy champion would when it responded to this final answer in the category of ‘U.S. Cities’: “Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle.” Watson guessed “What is Toronto?”. I don’t know how the Susskinds hold up Watson as the future of automated intelligence without discussing the continuing role of humans in spotting those obviously wrong answers.

Much like the brief treatment of other important topics, their section on Watson contains less than 850 words and 3 sources. They fail to provide the contextual circumstance where Watson operate most effectively, note its limitations, or provide the necessary evidence for their assertions.

But suppose that Watson were to replace doctors, what then? Would we somehow miss the craft of doctors? The Susskinds devote a section of their book to this objection. While they begin considering teachers and surgeons, they illustrate their idea with a rather trivial case: the rise Nespresso. Apparently Nespresso and Lavanzaa are used in “fifteen Michelin-starred restaurants in the United Kingdom, by over 100 in France, and in Italy, arguably the home of coffee, by more than twenty.” Nespresso even wins “blind tests.” (348)

Far from an in-depth study of technological change, their only reference is to an article by Julian Baggini and his one blind test featured four people. Not the most convincing example, given that bespoke coffee does thrive in places and people do feel that the outcome of Nespresso is not as good. Here, the Susskinds really need a solid case to convince us, and they don’t produce.

Instead of the rather trivial example of Nespresso, we ought to consider knowledge in what philosopher Barry Allen calls the “ultimate context” of human flourishing and survival as the global population grows, becomes increasingly urban, and wreaks increasing ecological destruction.

Allen discusses how too many of our artifacts demand less and less of users, which may seem to be a boon, “But being indifferent to differences among users, such artifacts blunt any effort to cultivate knowledge through their use.” (269) That is, when it comes to making Nespresso, you will be as good as you will ever be by the second or third cup. But if our whole culture shifts away from cultivating knowledge across fields like medicine and agriculture, we will lose the capacity to cope with the truly unexpected.

A Nespresso machine only operates with both a narrow range of inputs (the standardized capsules) and outputs (a cup of black coffee). This is one way to achieve automation, by controlling the environment. As David Autor puts it, we simplify the world so inflexible machinery can do useful things in a carefully curated environment. (49:00) Much automation aims to eliminate variation, but we if we are thinking about knowledge in the “ultimate context,” we cannot assume that our world won’t change and that variation won’t be important. We need to acknowledge that our global problems are going to radically alter our daily lives and require the continuing cultivation of knowledge to cope with them.

Suppose that through standardization, we automate large parts of medicine, engineering, and teaching. What then happens when we are hit with a novel strain of flu? Or have the need to design a new kind of building? Or find that students want to learn something that we haven’t anticipated?

Will we simply turn to the machines and the human empathizers?

Allen writes that “The most ‘productive’ tools and systems ask increasingly less of their operators and increasingly more of society, which gets stuck with the rising cost of management error, insurance, and diluted competence… It is good, we think, to be able to pick up a tool and within minutes be doing something ‘productive’ with it. But good for whom? And productive of what?” (270)

So instead of Nespresso, let’s imagine a consequential case of deskilling in detail. Industrial agriculture would seem to pass the Susskinds’ test of producing ‘better outcomes’, so what difference could the process of production make? Suppose ecological devastation reached the point where we could no longer use massive amounts of fertilizer to support monocultures that we ship across the continent. Would a farmer that has been forced into using the methods of industrial agriculture have the knowledge and ability to return to more sustainable methods? It’s doubtful.

As the anthropologist Glenn Davis Stone argues, industrial agriculture has already “disrupted” this “ongoing process of skilling” that should take place during farming where farmers are supposed to “learn how practices and technologies perform together under variable conditions.” Moreover, since we have forgone healthy soil in favor of fertilizers, it would take years of work and care to repair the land.

From the perspective of the market and efficiency, all of the problems with industrial agriculture are externalities. That’s the real danger that the Susskinds fall into when they dismiss non-market logics, as I argued earlier. Among those externalities, Barry Allen points out that “farmers traditionally did not produce only crops; they produced farms, farmers, farming communities, and fertile soil. Far from a presumably more efficient way to farm, agribusiness is another giddy adventure of the unhinged greed we whimsically call the free market.” (280)

We cook less and less, and lose our knowledge of food which makes it difficult to build a movement to resist industrial agriculture because as consumers, we have too been standardized by agribusiness and food chemists. Both our pallets and life routines have been rendered less knowledgeable despite the apparent abundance in our stores. It’s hard for us to even realize what we have lost because it seems normal. Shannyn Kornelsen argues that “By gaining experiential knowledge of food, food preparation, appreciation of taste and quality, and increasing food literacy, one renders the range of products and services offered by the industrial food system as both useless and undesirable.”

But it takes knowledge and skilled perception to know that we have lost appreciation and taste, which is precisely what we risk losing by giving expertise over to automation.

Economic Planning for Everyone

It’s frustrating that the Susskinds spend so little time on what the future of employment will look like and how we will ensure that we all profit from automation. Arguably, this is ought to be the most important part of their argument. Suppose that corporations automate professional expertise and offer a better service than what humans can. If that service becomes another monopoly power or gatekeeper, then there would be no reason to prefer automated services.

The crucial question is not whether services can be automated but whether we can ensure automated services lead to more equality. Even if services seem to be ‘free’, like a Facebook account or Google search, that would not be enough to guarantee a more equal future since those companies make incredible amounts of money from our data.

The Susskinds would clearly like to avoid another monopoloy or gatekeeper and they invoke the famous egalitarian John Rawls’ thought experiment asking us to choose the future direction of society from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’. That is, if we didn’t know whether we would be born rich or poor, male or female, healthy or sick, would we choose a society where we have professions or where we automate that knowledge? Would Mark Zuckerberg make different choices behind a ‘veil of ignorance’? I’m not sure that I give a shit since what we have to in fact deal with are the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world who act in their corporate interest.

There are I think two broad lines of argument and resistance that we need to pursue.

In the first case, we need (as a public, government, as educators) to change the narrative about innovation that makes it the provenance of rugged individuals, and which views character traits, such self-reliance and the capacity to be a ‘lifelong learner’, as the primary determinants of an individual’s success. Instead, as Marina Mazzucato argues in The Entrepreneurial State, we need to stop socializing risk and privatizing rewards. We are already way behind on this front.

Second, beyond a UBI, we should, as Robert McChesney and John Nichols argue, socialize those services that are essential, such as medicine, education, legal representation. Thus, rather than people having a small fixed budget that they must use as they prioritize whether they will buy food or go to a doctor, we should ensure that everyone has the basic goods. This would prevent all of the risk being shoved onto the individual.

As McChesney and Nichols argue, in direct opposition to the Susskinds, we should “simply remove certain functions from the market altogether”. (249) Much like Mazzucato, they point out that “we have plenty of economic planning”, but “the problem is that it is done by and for the elites.” (269) That’s the real problem we have to solve.

Featured image – Zen Capitalism by Oskar Krawczyk

The post Education Unbundled: What knowledge will we lose if we automate the professions? appeared first on Long View on Education.

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[kraut-und-ruam-4-diversity]

homosexuality and racism: review of two articles

For university I read two interesting articles about homosexuality and racism so I’d like to share the information and my own thoughts with you.

“Beratung von Lesben und Schwulen” by Kurt Wiesendanger in “Das Handbuch der Beratung” by Frank Nestmann, Frank Engel & Ursel Sickendiek (2007)

Consulation of lesbians and gays

Summary

“Not the homosexual is pervert but the situation he lives in” (Rosa von Praunheim)

Heterosexism

The article starts with this quote followed by pointing out that you can find the main reason for anti-homosexual violence in heterosexuals who reach their own mental limits in interaction with homosexuals. The violence caused by heterosexuals can have a massive impact on the mental health of homosexuals. The reason for the lack of reflection of a lot of heterosexuals can be a result of heterosexism: a social behavior and image that considers heterosexuality superior in comparison to other sexual orientations. Unfortunately, in our society heterosexism is a behavior which (nearly) all of us learn and internalize. Homophobia is caused because of insecurities in relation to the own sexual identity. The bad thing is that no one can escape heterosexism – neither hetero- nor homosexuals – and that causes an erosion of the own identity by homosexuals which can lead to self-destructive problems. Homosexuals always have to decide if they want to out themselves in our heteronormative society. Is it at work or in school – the decision is never easy.

Homophobic violence and causes

Homophobic violence comes in different ways:

heterosexual presuppositions

“funny” jokes

derogating comments

physic acts of violence  

Lesbians are more often victims of (good) known persons while gays are rather violated by strangers.

Homosexuals are always confronted with heteronormativity:

in their families

in school

in their everyday worklife

in movies

in theaters

in fairytales

in advertisements

etc…

This can cause a lot of unaware mental problems: Dissatisfaction, restlessness, lethargy, depressive episodes, anxiety disorders, phobias, compulsions, psychosomatic reactions or even suicide.

Professional consulation

So what should professional guides consider while working with homosexuals?

The following main aspects should be internalized by professionals:

unconditional accepting attitude

empathy

congruent relationship with clients

A basic knowledge about the socialization of homosexuals is also very important. Finally a deepened self-exploration with the own sexuality is essential to work with homosexuals.

Own thoughts

In this article I learned a lot new about the situation of homosexuals in general and also about myself, as I am bisexual. The statistic numbers were really interesting and enlightening. Furthermore the tips for working with homosexuals were very informing but I think if you decide to work with them you should learn more about how you can develop an effective and efficient way to work. What I liked most was the explanation of heterosexism because that’s what I started to think about in my head and discussed with friends a lot of times. In my opinion, we as a society train the younger generations to being heterosexual. We teach them that it is normal and all other forms of sexual orientation are deviating instead of teaching them that all forms are worth the same. I guess it takes a lot of time to erase this picture in the heads of the people but I hope that one day it is removed by one that is marked by equality.

“Was ist eigentlich Rassismus?” by Birgit Rommelspacher. Extended version of the speech held at the conference: “Rassismus – eine Jugendsünde?” in Bonn (2005)

What is racism?

The term is very complex and hard to define. It is also a very politicized term. Stuart Hall states that racism marks differences and provides the exclusive group privileged access to different resources. Historically already at Aristotle’s philosophy the slaves were attributed with less rationality than “the others”. Racism is a system of discourses and practices which legitimize and reproduce historic developed and actual power structures. Modern western racism is based on thinking of differences in human races based on biological characteristics. Naturalization, homogenization, polarization and hierarchy play big roles. Researchers in Germany made yearlong interviews and found out that racist attitudes already reached the middle of society. It wouldn’t be true to say these people are all racist as most of the time there is a labile balance in their heads between nationalism and globalization, being afraid of foreign infiltration and multiculturality.

Manifestations

Structural racism: the social system causes marginalization with legal bases, political and economic structures.

Institutional racism: references on structures of organizations like habits, values and guiding principles.

Individual racism: is based on personal actions and attitudes and refers to direct personal interaction.

Racism permeates the whole society, aims on different groups and uses different ideologies.

My thoughts

While reading this article, the complexity of racism emerges. I found it very hard and exhausting to read it. What I didn’t like so much is that the whole time it is only talked about the problem but nothing is mentioned in regard of a solution or coping strategies. Of course I could learn new informations.

What came to my mind while reading was that I am really happy and grateful that I was in a kinda nice class during compulsory school. We were all mixed up and presented the great diversity our society offers. As some kids were more efficient in learning, others were less, some were Austrians, others came from India, Czechia, Albania etc… One was physically disabled and had to use a wheelchair and so on. So for me I learned from the beginning that there is no standard and that differences are normal.

 -xoxo Yasss Queen