LEDA
A woman becomes
the landscape of her body,
deltas and valleys,
orchard, fruit. But I was
young, I was
a meadow and a stream.
Then the white beating
of heavy wings —
or maybe those were clouds
wind-torn into swans?
The beak pinched my neck,
the weight pushed me
down, until I lay
forgotten as the earth,
the water and the sky.
I too heard the tale
of how the winged god
descended, bladed
with purple and gold —
The sun was scream-bright,
a blizzard of swan, a city
in flames. Maybe it was
the first blood of sunset —
I was a girl of thirteen.
The ground was hard.
~ Oriana
Leda and the Swan, Greco-Roman mosaic, 3rd century CE
*
THE ART OF THE INSULT: VIRGINIA WOOLF
Almost 60 years ago, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? premiered. Instead of doing the usual content about Edward Albee, I thought I’d serve up a different (extremely cold) take: a brief and incomplete selection of moments that remind us how certain people really should have been afraid of Virginia Woolf, because she was full of epic—and sometimes kind of horrible and classist—insults. Writers, of course, make the worst enemies. Oh well, at least we can make ourselves feel a little bit better by reading all of the very mean things Woolf wrote in her diary about other people. You don’t even have to feel guilty for gossiping, because everyone in question is dead. Onward, street-walking civet cats:
African civet, Civettictis civetta
“Pale, marmoreal [T.S.] Eliot was there last week, like a chapped office boy on a high stool, with a cold in his head, until he warms a little, which he did.” From a diary entry, February 16, 1921
On Freud: “A screwed up shrunk very old man: with a monkey’s light eyes, paralyzed spasmodic movements, inarticulate: but alert.” From a diary entry, January 29, 1939
“I am reading Point Counter Point [by Aldous Huxley]. Not a good novel. All raw, uncooked, protesting.” From a diary entry, January 23rd, 1935
“I have read 200 pages [of Ulysses] so far—not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first 2 or 3 chapters—to the end of the cemetery scene; and then puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom, great Tom, thinks this is on par with War and Peace! An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anemic, as Tom is, there is a glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again.” From a diary entry, August 16th, 1922 [Tom = T.S. Eliot]
“Yesterday the Granta said I was now defunct. Orlando, Waves, Flush represent the death of a potentially great writer. This is only a rain drop, I mean the snub some little pimpled undergraduate likes to administer, just as he would put a frog in one’s bed: but then there’s all the letters and the request for pictures—so many that, foolishly perhaps, I wrote a sarcastic letter to the N.S.—thus procuring more rain drops.” From a diary entry, October 29th
“Hope (Mirrlees) has been for the weekend—over-dressed, over elaborate, scented, extravagant, yet with thick nose, thick ankles; a little unrefined, I mean.” From a diary entry, November 23, 1920
“[F]ate has not been kind to [Elizabeth Barrett] Browning as a writer. Nobody reads her, nobody discusses her, nobody troubles to put her in her place.” From “Aurora Leigh” in The Common Reader
On E.M. Forster: “His mother is slowly dispatching him, I think—He is limp and damp and milder than the breath of a cow.” From a May 1926 letter to Vanessa Bell
On Katherine Mansfield: “I shall have to accept the fact, I’m afraid, that her mind is a very thin soil, laid an inch or two deep upon very barren rock. For Bliss is long enough to give her a chance of going deeper. Instead she is content with superficial smartness; and the whole conception is poor, cheap, not the vision, however imperfect, of an interesting mind. She writes badly too.” From a diary entry, August 7, 1918
“We could both wish that one’s first impression of [Katherine Mansfield] was not that she stinks like a—well civet cat that had taken to street walking. In truth I’m a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard & cheap.” From a diary entry, 1917
Another version of the civet insult: “A more despicable set of creatures I never saw. They come in furred like seals & scented like civets, condescend to pull a few novels about on the counter, & then demand languidly whether there is anything amusing.” From a diary entry, January 13, 1917
*
“No mortal lives who is untouched by grief
and disease. Many have to bury children
and bear new ones; death is ordained for all.
And humans feel anxiety for this—in vain:
earth must return to earth, and life for all
be mowed, like wheat. Necessity insists.”
~ Euripides
*
THE ANTI-ISRAEL SENTIMENT OF THE EXTREME LEFT AND EXTREME RIGHT
~ This is something that I saw in France from 2000 with the start of the Second Intifada (called Oslo War in Israel):
Academia is particularly anti-Israel. It is as if knowledge has led people to be awful or knowledge is itself awful.
The left is particularly ready to accept lies from the Islamists. Like during the Oslo War, they believed that Arafat still wanted peace and that actually the Al-Aqsa Brigade was independent of him.
The left was the recipient of the religiosity of the West and would believe any lie about Jews and Israel. Listening to them, the Middle Ages made perfect sense.
Muslims are especially anti-Israel. The fact that they can claim to be a “minority” leads the left to be permissive about it. Or maybe they believe they are a useful tool against the Jews.
The alliance of leftism with Islam looks like the Germano-Soviet pact between Hitler and Stalin. It is equally ominous and powerful. We know how that one collapsed, how will this one evolve?
23 years later we see exactly the same thing. It is as if nothing happened and the articles, the slogans, and the indignation were already written up and only the date needed to be put on the messages.
It is tempting to say that antisemitism is in the modern West almost exclusively a phenomenon of the left. There is much truth to it.
Still, there are a few things one cannot ignore. Some caricatures of George Soros as a great manipulator behind the scene are Nazi in their art. We did see some avowed supporters of Trump say “Jews will not replace us” (this does not imply that Trump is antisemitic, but that some of his supporters are). So, it is not like the right is free of it.
So, when one Jew (forget the name, sorry) said that looking forward from 2000 we will see
both the left and the right being antisemitic and both accusing the other of being antisemitic, he was certainly on to something. ~ Matthieu Dutour Sikiric, Quora
A NEW WAVE OF ANTISEMITISM
The U.S. is currently experiencing one of the most significant waves of antisemitism that it has ever seen. Jewish communities are shaken and traumatized.
Jewish and civil rights organizations both in the U.S. and in other Western countries reported a rise in antisemitic incidents following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli military response. The Anti-Defamation League reported that in the first week after Hamas’ deadly attack, in which 1,400 Israelis were killed, antisemitic incidents in the U.S. tripled in comparison to the same week last year.
Similarly, London police recorded a 1,353% increase in antisemitic crimes compared with the same period a year earlier.
In addition, antisemitic symbols and rhetoric seem to be part of a growing number of protests that erupted around the globe following the escalation of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Most scholars agree that the term “antisemitism” describes animosity and discrimination against Jews. Broader definitions, such as the one adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, include the singling out of Israel and the demonization of its character, such as the claim that “the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”
My team of researchers at UMass Lowell and Development Service Group, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, compiled and analyzed a comprehensive dataset of antisemitic incidents in the U.S. between 1990 and 2021. We wanted to understand what factors led to antisemitism. We covered violent antisemitism as well as incidents of antisemitic intimidation and vandalism. We included any attacks against Jews which were motivated by the religious identity of the victims – even if it was motivated by anger about Israeli policies.
Our study, which will be published soon, found a startling new phenomenon: The ideology underlying antisemitism in the U.S. now encompasses both sides of the political spectrum. And it allowed us to develop three other insights regarding the intensifying linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and antisemitism in the U.S.
1. Antisemitism is not exclusive to the far right
Traditionally, antisemitism in the United States was promoted by far-right organizations and movements, such as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups and skinheads. Such groups focused on propagating traditional antisemitic narratives alleging Jews’ racial inferiority, their control of the financial sector and their role in global cabals aiming to undermine America and Western civilization.
More recently, progressive and left-leaning movements that are critical of Israel’s policies – especially with regard to the Palestinian population in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 – have become linked to antisemitic practices, too.
In a survey conducted in 2018 in 12 European Union countries among victims of antisemitism, 21% indicated that they were physically or verbally attacked by what participants called “left-wing” activists. In the U.S., our data shows that 95% of antisemitic incidents motivated by Israel’s policies were perpetrated by far-left or unidentified activists. Just 5% were perpetrated by known far-right activists.
Further indication that antisemitic violence is no longer the sole domain of far-right extremists can be gleaned from an analysis of our data that looked at the geographic characteristics of antisemitism.
We find that antisemitic hate crimes are occurring especially in politically progressive areas of the country. The New York metropolitan area and the Northeast in general, and urban centers in Florida, California, the Northwest and the Midwest are experiencing the majority of antisemitic incidents.
While these regions of the U.S. were usually considered hospitable to minorities, our data reflects that in the past decade they are the most substantial hubs of antisemitic violence.
2. US antisemitism is strongly correlated to escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
The outbreak of violence between Israel and Palestinians seems to inflame antisemitism in the U.S. and is exploited to amplify long-standing antisemitic tropes.
Rigorous analysis of our dataset found conclusive evidence that these escalations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – such as the violent clashes between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip in the past few years – are accompanied by an increase in antisemitic incidents in the U.S.
For example, in the months leading up to the Israel-Hamas war of May 2021, there was a gradual increase in antisemitic attacks that peaked in May 2021 and gradually declined in the following months.
3. Israel’s policies and antisemitism abroad are connected
The growing connection between Israel’s policies and antisemitic violence abroad, and especially in the U.S., reflects the view among many Americans that American Jews unquestioningly support Israel’s government.
The Anti-Defamation League’s leader put it bluntly when he stated following the May 2021 Israel-Hamas war that “the violence we witnessed in America during the conflict last May was shocking … it seemed as if the working assumption was that if you were Jewish, you were blameworthy for what was happening half a world away.”
Thus, it is not surprising that following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, Jewish organizations on American campuses became the main targets of violent activism by Palestinian rights supporters. Nor was it surprising that the first reaction of U.S. law enforcement agencies in the wake of the Hamas attack was enhancing the protections of Jewish schools and communal facilities.
4. Antisemitism today exploits long-standing antisemitic tropes
American Jewish communities had traditionally strong links to the state of Israel, and many extended their support in various ways. They included contributing money to Israeli cultural, educational and social institutions, as well as advocating for U.S. support. This was explicit acknowledgment of the importance to the Jewish people of having a homeland.
In recent years, however, many Jewish communities, especially their younger members, became increasingly critical of Israeli policies and the country’s ongoing military control of the occupied Palestinian territories.
Despite such developments within the Jewish community, efforts by organizations sympathetic to the Palestinian cause to link American Jews as a whole to Israel’s policies seem to have intensified. Such linkages reflect an extension of one of the most resilient and long-standing antisemitic tropes, in which American Jews are portrayed as having a dual loyalty and a preference to support Israel’s interests over American ones, especially in times in which they may conflict.
In the past, sentiments regarding American Jews’ alleged dual loyalty were mainly exploited by extremists on the far right. Lately, it seems also to be manifested in left-wing discourse and actions that support or legitimize marginalization of Jews in the U.S. by blaming them for Israel’s policies.
Examples of this new manifestation of antisemitism include the exclusion of American Jewish organizations from progressive campaigns and events and the exclusion of Jewish activists from progressive associations.
Combating the new antisemitism
The reactions to the recent escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict illustrate a profound change in the ideological roots of antisemitism in the U.S.
The many cases in which professional and student associations as well as political organizations were quick both to legitimize Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians and direct their animosity toward U.S. Jews showing solidarity and sympathy with Israeli victims are prime examples.
That means any effort to combat antisemitism in the U.S. must take into consideration the growing ideological diversity behind contemporary incidents of antisemitism.
Those efforts will need to understand the nuances that shape American Jews’ relationships with Israel – and recognize that despite the substantial progress U.S. Jews experienced in the U.S. in all aspects of public life, antisemitism is still a part of the American political landscape.
https://theconversation.com/antisemitism-has-moved-from-the-right-to-the-left-in-the-us-and-falls-back-on-long-standing-stereotypes-215760
Mary:
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FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS IS BECOMING FASHIONABLE AGAIN
~ For years, free speech advocates have complained about “safetyism” on campus — shielding students from discomfort at the expense of freedom of expression. Now that the speech is painful to Jews—history’s most convenient scapegoats — university administrators are declaring their commitment to freedom of speech.
“Safetyism” is a moral culture in which perceived safety (whether real or not) becomes a sacred value, rendering people unwilling to make necessary trade-offs. For a decade or longer, through "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” initiatives, campus administrations have prioritized “feeling safe” over intellectual rigor, viewpoint diversity, freedom of expression, and institutional neutrality.
For example, in 2015, 13 college administrators at Yale University sent a message asking students to choose inoffensive costumes that wouldn't make others feel demeaned or alienated. Erika and Nicholas Christakis were hounded out of their residential positions in Yale's Silliman College after hundreds of students said they no longer felt “safe” as a result of an email in which Erika asked whether students, technically adults, could choose their own costumes and talk to one another face to face if they felt offended.
At UCLA earlier this year, graduate students objected to psychology professor Yoel Inbar as a potential hire because of his views about institutional neutrality and the requirement that faculty applicants submit DEI statements. They complained that Inbar’s comments “frame diversity statements as a threat to ideological diversity, and reflect a lack of prioritization of the needs and experiences of historically marginalized individuals across the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability.” He was not hired.
When the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) were called to testify at a Congressional hearing about campus antisemitism, Harvard alumna Elise Stefanik, a representative from New York, asked each of the presidents whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated their schools’ codes of conduct. MIT President Sally Kornbluth explained that it could constitute harassment “if targeted at individuals, not making public statements.”
Harvard President Claudine Gay said “it can be, depending on the context,” adding, “When it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation; that is actionable conduct and we do take action.” Penn President Elizabeth Magill, who was forced to resign four days after testifying, said, “if the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.”
These responses were baffling to most observers—and certainly to an incredulous Stefanik, who questioned whether “conduct” meant committing the act of genocide. She declared all three presidents’ answers “unacceptable… across the board.” Because safetyism has been the standard, it was striking to see how Jewish students are expected to face the discomfort of hateful speech when other groups are not.
But free speech advocates understood what the university presidents were clumsily trying to communicate: As legal scholar Ilya Shapiro recently explained, “Sometimes ‘speech’ isn’t speech. Sometimes it rises to the level of conduct that prevents others from being able to live their lives. Right now we need people to discern the difference.” None of the three university presidents seemed capable of doing that.
To be fair, they can hardly be blamed. The speech climate at each of their universities is anything but free. Harvard has the distinction of coming in dead last in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s college free-speech rankings—with a rating of “abysmal” and a score that had to be rounded up to zero. Only 30% of Harvard students say it is never acceptable to shout down a speaker. More than half say it can be acceptable to block other students from attending a campus speech. And fully 30% say it can be acceptable to use violence to stop a campus speech.
Only 11% of Harvard students say it is “extremely clear” that the college administration protects free speech on campus. That number is 6% at both the University of Pennsylvania and MIT. When asked how likely it was that the university would protect a controversial speaker’s right to speak on campus, 6% of students at Harvard said it was extremely likely, 7% at MIT, and 4% at Penn.
The Ivy League fared poorly over all. Out of 248 colleges and universities surveyed, Penn was ranked second to last. Dartmouth came in at 240; Yale, 234; Columbia, 214; Cornell, 212; Princeton, 187. At number 69, Brown University is the only Ivy in the top half. Ivy League-adjacent MIT ranks in the bottom half.
Harvard’s conduct code reads, “Bullying, hostile and abusive behavior, and power-based harassment directly threaten the ability of community members to engage in the free exchange of ideas and pursue their educational and professional goals. Such behaviors, as defined in this Policy, are prohibited.”
This policy sounds reasonable. And yet graduate student Laura Simone Lewis was able to bully Carole Hooven, co-director of the undergraduate program in Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. Lewis's conduct threatened Hooven's ability to engage in the free exchange of ideas and pursue her professional goals. And Lewis did so in her official capacity as director of the Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging task force of Hooven’s department. Why was this permitted?
In 2021, Lewis, who refers to herself as a “Blewish feminist mermaid,” complained on social media—using her official title—that the popular lecturer’s science-based assertion that there are two (and only two) sexes was “dangerous,” “transphobic and harmful,” and “directly opposed” Lewis's ability to “create a safe space.”
“Even though someone publicly maligning my speech in their official capacity as a representative of the institution is a clear violation of Harvard’s Free Speech Guidelines,”
Hooven later wrote in a searing indictment of Harvard’s abysmal record on academic freedom, “the person who maligned me was not sanctioned.”
Administrators failed to defend Hooven's right to express her views and to communicate biological facts, they made no statement on her behalf, and they never apologized. This created a climate in which even senior faculty members were too afraid to publicly defend Hooven, for fear of reprisals.
As a result, Lewis’s campaign led to such a hostile work environment for Hooven that she eventually felt she had no choice but to resign. Lewis’s “safe space” was freed of the “harmful” and “dangerous” claim that there are two sexes.
How could someone so clearly violate Harvard’s policies and not be sanctioned? A year ago, all Harvard undergraduates were required to participate in an online Title IX training at which they were taught that “cisheterosexism,” “sizeism,” and “fatphobia” perpetuate “violence,” and that using non-preferred pronouns constitutes “abuse.”
Remember, “abusive behavior” is not tolerated at Harvard. The problem is that “bullying,” “hostile behavior,” “abusive behavior,” and “power-based harassment” are not clearly defined in Harvard’s policy. This gives DEI administrators license to define as a violation speech it doesn’t like, while protecting speech it likes. As a result, students learn they should avoid things like fat phobia and non-preferred pronouns, while calling for the genocide of Jews isn't on any list.
In 2019, Harvard law professor and criminal defense attorney Ronald Sullivan, was accused by undergraduates of making them “feel unsafe” because of his willingness to defend the accused rapist Harvey Weinstein. Despite his being among the most accomplished scholars at Harvard, he was terminated as dean of an undergraduate residential college.
So far, no one appears to have been fired or expelled for making Jewish students feel unsafe by defending Hamas terrorists who violently gang-raped Jews. (And no protesting students appear to feel unsafe around others who are willing to defend Hamas rapists.)
in 2020, University of Chicago associate professor of geophysics Dorian Abbot was disinvited from a prestigious lecture he was scheduled to deliver at MIT because students said he made them “feel unsafe.” Why? He had co-written a Newsweek article offering “Merit, Fairness and Equality” as an alternative to DEI.
In November, Jewish and Israeli students were “physically prevented from attending class by a hostile group of pro-Hamas and anti-Israel MIT students.” Kornbluth warned disruptive MIT protesters that if they violated school policies, they would be suspended. On the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, they violated school policies. They were not suspended. Some were international students and suspending them, she said, could impact their visas. One professor reported that “MIT admin’s silence makes Jewish and Israeli students feel unsafe.”
Harvard offers an anonymous reporting hotline through which students can report “behaviors that make you or those around you feel unsafe or unwelcome.” And Harvard’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging page exhorts faculty to “recognize and avoid microaggressions.” In 2018, Harvard’s School of Public Health flagged seven classes for review after those classes each drew three or more student reports of in-class microaggressions.
What counts as a microaggression? According to the material linked on Harvard’s website, asking an ethnically Asian person “where are you from” communicates “you are not American.” Saying “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” gives the message that “people of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race.” And a university’s buildings being named for “white, heterosexual upper-class males” is an “environmental microaggression” that communicates to students of color “you don’t belong.”
Celebrating the rape, torture, kidnapping, murder, and beheadings of Jews is not on the list of offensive microaggressions. There is no training that explains why it gives the message “you don’t matter.” And none of the three university presidents who testified before Congress could cogently articulate the circumstances under which calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their code of conduct.
Despite Jewish students saying they feel unsafe as a result of regularly hearing chants like “glory to the martyrs” (who murdered, raped, kidnapped, and tortured Jews), “globalize the intifada” (a violent uprising that targets Jews), and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (referring to the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel, which exists between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea), so little has been done about it that Congress held a hearing.
Undergraduates at Penn filed a complaint in Philadelphia federal court claiming that Penn committed “egregious” violations of federal civil rights law by selectively enforcing its rules of conduct to “avoid protecting Jewish students from hatred and harassment.”
At Harvard, anti-Israel protesting students disrupted classes with chanting, sometimes in large groups, sometimes one person with a bullhorn. Harvard Hillel, a Jewish campus organization, publicly asked the university to hold accountable both the people and organizations involved. “Students were terrified,” the organization said. A Title VI investigation has been requested.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act provides that no person in the United States shall, on the ground of actual or perceived ancestry, ethnicity, religion, or national origin be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. While defending campus freedom of speech is laudable and necessary, given these institutions’ histories of denying freedom of speech to those whose expressions are disfavored, it is unsurprising that lawsuits complaining of antisemitic discrimination through selective enforcement of rules are proliferating.
“The ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil,” wrote Rabbi David Wolpe, in his letter of resignation from Harvard’s antisemitism task force days after the Congressional hearing. “Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil. Belittling or denying the Jewish experience, including unspeakable atrocities, is a vast and continuing catastrophe. Denying Israel the self-determination as a Jewish nation accorded unthinkingly to others is endemic, and evil.”
In order to avoid the selective enforcement of campus policies, administrations have two options: They can censor speech Jewish students find hateful the way they censor all the other forms of speech considered hateful by various identity groups. Or they can stick to policies that protect speech and punish harassment, threats, intimidation, and the creation of a hostile environment.
It would be a mistake for universities to enact speech codes designed to censor antisemitic speech. They can address antisemitic harassment, bullying, and discrimination by following existing rules and clarifying definitions. Doing that, however, requires dismantling the poisonous ideology that silences disfavored speech, keeps antisemitism in place, and blinds people to the antisemitism in which they participate. Only then can free speech campus climates flourish.
When college campuses are places where diverse viewpoints can be shared without fear, they will also be places where students can speak about Israel without fear, and where Jewish students can wear Jewish symbols and religious paraphernalia without fear.
Meanwhile, if antisemitism on campus has a silver lining, it’s that it has made free speech fashionable again.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/happiness-and-the-pursuit-of-leadership/202312/how-antisemitism-is-defeating-safetyism
Oriana:
I don't know if "fashionable" is the right word. But the good thing is that free speech is being discussed.
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HOW RUSSIANS FEEL ABOUT PUTIN’S PIVOT TOWARD ASIA (Misha Firer)
Don’t believe the hype: Russians are unhappy about Putin’s pivot to China and Asia. I can’t emphasize this point strongly enough.
Russian education system with all its flaws and rote learning is still Eurocentric: students study European history, culture, and inventions of European scientists and the gravitational pull has always been towards the West.
Hundreds of thousands of Russians in the past two years have immigrated to Europe and America rather than to China and India.
The vast majority of the population live in the European part of Russia and despite their love/hate relationship with the neighbors to the west, they rather consider themselves belonging to that culture than to Chinese or Indian; the latter remain unfathomable to them.
Beside sharing common culture, Russians know well enough that their country is not self-sufficient contrary to Putin’s claims of a “separate civilization” to the scope that the Soviet Union used to be, and that they need to trade raw materials for technologies and products.
They can also see the double standards of the political elites — despite belligerent rhetoric, public officials and their lackeys continue to drive Western cars, own real estate in Western countries, wear Western clothes and watches, and have not given up on Western merchandise.
Putin has surrounded himself with spineless sycophants who do whatever pleases him and cater to his geopolitical games, however now and then you can see a small rebellion.
Russian Football Union officials set an ambitious goal to move participation in club league international competitions from Europe to Asia.
At some point, due to the echo chamber effect, the board seemed to have been all for the transition to the new football confederation.
However, the chief of the Russian Football Union Alexander Dyukov announced that “Russia is a European country, not an Asian country” and so they will continue to play matches and participate in championships in Europe.
UEFA also appears to be all for keeping the ties with Russian football associations.
RFU continues to receive various grants from UEFA and retains the right to issue coaching licenses with the UEFA category.
The Russian U17 team was brought back to competitions supported by UEFA and FIFA.
Several Russian club managers and employees received positions in various European football structures.
Alexander Dyukov remained on the UEFA executive committee and reciprocated by not letting the Russian Football Union cut ties with Europe and drift to Asia.
As long as Europe keeps sending signals that they do not want to break up with Russia, there will be brave officials to resist pressure from the government to do otherwise.
Oh no, the passenger door of a Russian electric car prototype fell off during testing! The prototype design looks like a car was mounted on top of a pre-squashed car, welded and painted bright red.
Students of Moscow Polytechnic University created a prototype of compact electric vehicle on behalf of the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade for the Kaliningrad Automobile plant Avtodor.
Russian automakers and businessmen were allocated 10 billion dollars to produce electric cars and they outsource design work to university students. I mean they can’t manufacture gasoline cars, so how would they produce electric ones? It’s like failing to invent a wheel and then try to construct a train.
Avtodor used to assemble cars for BMW, KIA, Hyundai, and Ford. It now tries to manufacture an electric car whose door fell off before a test drive.
Russia’s Baltic exclave Kaliningrad Oblast in Europe is famous for extensive deposits of amber, a fossilized tree resin.
Amber is jantar in Russia that originates from the Sanscrit word jantara, a lucky charm, a talisman.
Now that Russia is officially an Asian country would it make more sense to name the new electric car Jantara since Sanscrit is the sacred language of Hinduism?
And yet, the electric car was named Amber.
Ravil Garfieldulin had a plan so cunning that if he put a tail on it he could call it a weasel.
Ravil mounted a super-light, pointy (because round is not scary) international ballistic miss-ile on his Lada Nineth re-designed as a launcher and drove from his home with half an acre of sodden marshland in Tver Oblast with an empty town hall on it to our tsardom’s shining capital on a hill betrothed to us by our Mongol suzerains.
However, In Vyshny Volochyok, a Renault Logan rammed into the mock-up rocket launcher at an intersection.
The drivers escaped with minor injuries but Lada Nineth was rendered scrap metal and incapable of continuing on its weapons of mass destruction voyage to Washington. ~ Quora
Irin Shept:
Russia will soon be in for a rude awakening once it finds out that it belongs to the pragmatic, meritocratic Confucian world even less than it belongs to the post-Renaissance, post-Reformation, and post-Enlightenment West.
Milojko Ružić:
Islamic world is the most similar thing to Russia, especially morally.
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HOW DO RUSSIANS ACCEPT MILITARY CASUALTIES IN UKRAINE? (Misha Firer)
I live near the Square of Three Railway stations in Moscow and I regularly see lost soldiers in military fatigues and black sneakers trudging through the snow on leave from special military operation in Ukraine.
I have divided them into three main categories.
Les Mizérables
These men of undefined age look the part — totally miserable. It’s hard to tell if the man in front of you absorbed in self-pity and a feeling of total inadequacy is in his twenties or forties.
They sign military contract not to get higher wages, like “I earn 40k wouldn’t it be great to make four times more?” but to escape grinding poverty, in which every day is a struggle to get by.
They absolutely don’t care if they die today, and it’s these men that Putin tapped to die for his geopolitical ambitions rather than from vodka. Although it often happens on the battlefront that they die from both at the same time.
Ztarship Troopers
Willing young men who spend their wages to buy their own uniforms and gear. They have bespoke shoulder patches featuring an eclectic mix of Soviet cartoons, American superheroes, and Roman letters.
They treat war like a POV shooter computer game. Raised on military science fiction novels, in which Red Army soldiers in space suits fight Nazis with laser guns and spaceships in the post-apocalyptic future.
In Ukraine, they’re battling meta Nazis. Like augmented reality of spiteful propaganda superimposed on soldiers not very different from them.
They’re darlings of military bloggers for effective photo shoots and they look good with medals and balaclavas in school classroom conducting “lessons about important.”
The Jinxed
They didn’t want to go to war, but wound up in the trenches more or less accidentally.
Perhaps they got caught at a construction market when local military commissar sent riot police to ambush the disfranchised to get yearly quotas.
Or they went to the military office while drunk and feeling like they must fulfill their duty to the state, or help out their comrades only to have pangs of regrets next day when it’s too late.
They are the ones who desert or refuse to fight and get thrown into the dungeons to be tortured or killed.
There’re more categories, in fact as many as there are soldiers. But what most of them have in common is that they have gone to war out of their volition, or were extremely unlucky.
This is the general perception of the population regarding the soldiers at the special military operation — they wanted to be there or were out of luck.
People generally support their armed forces because they’re the reason why they can live in peace. Unfortunately, and I wrote that many times before — Russians don’t have much empathy for Ukrainians. On the other hand, there’s no hatred, which one might think is prevalent among Russians having watched blood thirsty clips from Vladimir Soloviev show.
And this is the people that Vladimir Putin has raised, groomed and molded in his own image, and he believes quite correctly to be united with them in a perfect harmony of heartlessness. ~ Quora
Benzion Inditsky:
“harmony of heartlessness” !!! From Misha Dostoevsky. To be inscribed in stone.
Tim Froese:
These are human beings being sent to kill and die, based on lies and in the service of pointless political ambition. But they are described as soldiers, casualties, as though they were state assets rather than confused or desperate men. Russian indifference to these deaths dehumanizes both the soldiers and citizenry.
Ivan Danilov:
It should be understood that the war itself hasn’t had direct consequences for the majority of Russians. People just keep on pretending that nothing’s happening. It’s not them going to trenches. It’s not them dying there. It’s not them killing off Ukrainian soldiers or bombing civilian apartment buildings. It’s not them suffering from newly imposed tyrannic laws, etc. So shrugging shoulders and going on minding their own business is easy. It’s a survival skill learned during all those years of Soviet rule: just keep minding your own business and don’t get involved, and you’ll be all right. The state propaganda machine is busy reinforcing this state of minds.
At the same time Russian society is extremely atomized. We are individualists to the extreme. We distrust each other in every single regard and we seem to be unable to create functional communities or organizations independent from the state. More precisely, the things that were built here over the years — NPOs/NGOs, political parties and funds, self-organized communities, no matter what those communities and organizations really did — were destroyed in a single sweep by the state, what’s left is dying out under the pressure. The state wants for people to feel lonely and deprived of human rights. And we oblige, of course.
I don’t see how we can overcome any of those issues. It seems that the damage done to the Russian society will define the reality for decades to come. I have no hope to see any substantial changes in my lifetime anymore.
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ABORTIONS IN THE SOVIET UNION
~ Soviet women had abortions with an absurd frequency; married women — especially so. And I got old enough during that period, that I knew about it. It was an open secret in Soviet society — a dirty secret, the kind of ugliness everyone knows about, but assumes 11-year-old girls don’t understand.
Most people in the Soviet Union were very poor, and there was a perpetual housing crunch. There is no way to force couples to have scads of children when they share tiny rooms in communal apartments.
I know my mother had at least 6 abortions, and my father was pressuring her to have more. To this day, my father is convinced I don’t know about it, even though I’ve told him explicitly that I do know. (He’s very “pro-life”, you see.)
My maternal grandmother had upwards of 12, mostly during the period when it was illegal. But her husband was a cop, so no one was going to report them. My grandmother had hers in the kitchen of a communal apartment, without anesthesia and in unsanitary conditions. One such procedure resulted in a devastating pelvic infection which landed her in the hospital for several weeks and left her with extensive scar tissue.
I vividly recall one instance, when my grandmother was in her sixties and doubled-over with abdominal pain, when grandpa called an ambulance and had the following irritated conversation with the person on the other end: “Yeah, she had some kind of stomach thing when she was in her thirties. She was in the hospital for that. Women’s problems. What? How the hell should I know? It’s women's issues, those have nothing to do with me.” ~ Kate Stoneman, Quora
Catherine Harris:
I can verify this. I’m an OB/Gyn and was doing my residency in Baltimore. At the time, there was a large Russian immigrant population and we would see these women with an interpreter. Obviously, in OB we are going to ask your pregnancy history, and it was surprising how many abortions these women had had. It became obvious that they considered this their method of birth control. That was in the early 90’s.
Oriana:
“Russia was the first country in the world to legalize abortion, in 1920. The procedure was briefly driven underground, when Soviet leader Josef Stalin banned abortion in an attempt to encourage women to have larger families.
But after Stalin’s death in 1953, the ban was lifted. A decade later, the practice had become so common that the USSR officially registered 5.5 million abortions, compared to just 2 million live births.
Abortion techniques have come a long way since the Soviet era, when 35-year-old Olga Lipovskaya related her experience in Francine du Plessix Gray’s acclaimed book "Soviet Women Walking the Tightrope."
“You stand in line before the door of the operating room, waiting to be taken in,” she says. “Then it's your turn, and you go into a hall splattered with blood, where two doctors are aborting seven or eight women at the same time; they're usually very rough and rude. If you're lucky they give you a little sedative.”
According to du Plessix Gray, Olga estimated that she had had about 14 abortions in total, and she knew women who had had as many as 25.”
https://www.rferl.org/a/Abortion_Remains_Top_Birth_Control_Option_Russia/1145849.html
Adolf Hitler’s painting of the joys of maternity (Quora)
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A GENERATION Z WOMAN EXPLAINS WHY SHE’S NOT PLANNING TO HAVE CHILDREN
If temperatures weren’t rising, I’d choose the name “Athena” for a girl. If the rivers were safe, I’d choose “William” for a boy. If I could breathe clean air on my morning commute, I’d paint the nursery a warm yellow. If I could see hope for a sustainable future on this planet, I wouldn’t be spending time mourning the children I’ll probably never have.
If things were different, I’d be honored to become a parent — indeed, I think there is no greater privilege or responsibility. But each day, the current state of the world dissuades me more and more from having children. Like many folks in Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012), my main concern is climate change. And, as climate catastrophes are already well in motion (coupled with a host of related socioeconomic and equality issues), I feel as if I would be doing an increasingly irreparable injustice to any children I would bring into this world with my inability to offer them a future.
I am 21, and as I’ve found, my near-certain choice to hold off on parenthood is a commonly shared sentiment among many Gen Z’ers and our millennial older siblings. For instance, in a 2021 NBC article, 39-year-old English teacher Jessica Combes stated: “I refuse to bring children into the burning hellscape we call a planet,” citing climate change and health care as among the reasons she feels her “trepidation was well justified.” Research shows she (and I) are far from alone.
Even those in the public spotlight (and with considerably more resources than the average person) have vocalized their discontentment with bringing children into a climate disaster-ridden world. In an interview with ELLE Magazine, Miley Cyrus vowed not to bring children into the world until she could be sure “[her] kid would live on an earth with fish in the water.” Additionally, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York posed the question I’ve been wrestling with to her Instagram followers in a 2019 livestream: “Is it okay to still have children?”
Climate anxiety is becoming unbearable
Climate anxiety knows no national borders — according to a study from the University of Bath, nearly 40% of 16- to 25-year-old participants from several countries stated that they were hesitant to have children because of climate change. Other organizations, such as the Canadian “No Future No Children” group, have gained considerable traction among teens, many of whom are pledging not to have children until their government takes climate change more seriously. Among them, then-18-year-old Emma Lim stated in 2019 that she was “giving up [her] dream of having a family” until she could be assured her children “will have something to live for and a healthy family to live on.”
As these testimonies illustrate, building a family — and particularly, raising children — isn’t so much a matter of preference, anymore. It’s also a matter of feasibility and, more importantly, ethics. How do we justify bringing children onto a planet where the future feels more indeterminate than ever?
The enormity of climate change, which often feels hopeless and irreversible, and the anxiety and fear about the future that goes with it, seems to have no exit route. It feels like there’s a weight on my chest — and, in discussions of climate, this weight intensifies. I’ve spent many sleepless nights watching footage of forests ablaze and communities flooded, paranoid that someone I know was among the casualties. I’ve seen my own anxieties leap, like a contagion, to my little sister. My climate anxiety doesn’t just spark feelings of fear or sadness — but anger, frustration and resentment for a future I’ve been denied.
I know I am far from the first person, both in Gen Z and in history, to reckon with events of an existential scale when grappling with questions about the future, especially those related to having a family. The past century, alone, is riddled with near-doomsday crises, including WWI and WWII, nuclear threats during the Cold War and frightening economic downturns. In those instances, generations who came before me made different choices — ones that I respect, and which led to the lives my peers and I now enjoy.
But to me, where climate change and other events diverge is human cooperation and responsibility — while war and financial disasters are always caused by humans, they are also rectified by them. However, unlike wartime conflict and periods of financial uncertainty, I can see no hopeful reference point in history to show how humanity might come together to recover from climate change. People are fighting, but their efforts are falling on too many deaf ears.
The US, alone, is an increasingly fractured nation — with unrelenting tides of bigotry and racism, political divides, split loyalties on global conflicts and domestic attacks on LGBTQ rights, women and other groups — and to garner the same level of cooperation with other nations seems like an impossible task. As environmental catastrophes reach a caliber we cannot predict or conceive, having children is becoming less of a risk I’m willing to take.
Why I don’t think I’ll change my mind
At my age, concrete discussions of family and having children are still far down the line — but this is a decision I’ve held firmly to since I, myself, was a child. Passing on my own climate anxiety would be akin to a generational curse — nor do I think the joys of childhood should be tampered with doomsday clocks, higher risks of disease and health issues and climate change’s ripple effects on the economy, violent conflict and education.
As a US citizen, I wield enormous privilege by virtue of location, alone. Coupled with the resources and opportunities that the US provides, my hypothetical children likely wouldn’t be among the worst-affected by climate change. However, that shouldn’t immunize me from considering how my decisions and environmental surroundings may not only impact my own children, but others in less fortunate circumstances (both domestically and internationally). Rather, if I do change my mind and choose to have children, the decision will be heavily prefaced by responsible considerations of ethical sustainability, available resources and the future crises at hand (not to mention the more practical questions of financial security, partnership and preparation).
While it’s dramatic to assume that my choice, alone, would be the catalyst for unstoppable climate catastrophe, many of my decisions emerge from a need for control. Like many Gen Z and Millennial individuals, I feel largely powerless within today’s environmental and political climate. As Greta Thunberg and two other young climate activists — Sophia Kianni and Vanessa Nakate — articulated earlier this year, President Joe Biden’s decision to approve the detrimental Alaskan oil venture, known as the Willow Project, was one of many legislative “betrayals” of younger generations.
Such demonstrations from political leaders only reinforce my distrust of a legislative and political system that continues to fail younger generations — and will probably continue to fail the ones that follow. Not only do some political officials deny the existence of climate change altogether, but even our more “progressive” leaders fail to follow through on their environment-protection promises.
With larger policy control out of the picture, I find myself grasping for any miniscule way to assuage my climate anxiety — finding green travel alternatives, reusing plastic bottles until they fall apart, buying locally sourced food and repurposing any clothes or unwanted items. My decision over whether to have children is yet another example of exerting control over events that seem to be, at this rate, uncontrollable. Still, I wouldn’t feel the need to make these life-altering changes if the main contributors to climate change — such as the uber-wealthy elite and huge corporations — would forego their catastrophic practices.
Reflecting on my experience isn’t a call to action for all young or middle-aged people to abandon their visions for their families, whether those include children or not. Nor do I wish to shame those who choose to have (or have already had) children. Rather, it should provide some insight into what many young people in the US and across the world are having to reckon with — a future that looks incredibly different and less hopeful from our older counterparts. Under today’s environmental and political climate, I find it is better to regret not having children than regret having them.
As temperatures rise and climate policy continues to shake public confidence, the vision for my ideal family looks less, well, ideal. Clamoring voices and pattering feet, the opportunities reaped from my family’s generational sacrifice and the lifelong commitment to raising someone to their greatest potential, have been replaced with depressing alternatives. At most, there’s a frustratingly clean, one-bedroom house, with hours to fill and quiet pervading the halls. But, unless there’s drastic change, and soon, Athena and William will only remain names. ~
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/11/opinions/not-having-children-lee/index.html
Oriana:
It's tempting to think that the young woman who wrote this article has merely found an excuse not to have children. Many may suspect that her real reason is the desire for freedom to pursue "adult" interests, including writing opinion columns for good pay, and enjoying travel, sports, fine dining, and other pleasures that having children makes much less attainable. Even if she were rich enough to afford a nanny, this young woman is probably smart enough to realize that she still wouldn't have the freedom available only to women who don't have children.
And now we have social media and vastly more honesty from women, some of whom say, "If I could do it over again, I wouldn't have had kids." The first time I encountered this, I was shocked: no mother would have dared to say it when I was young and pondering my options. It was the ultimate taboo.
Back then, it seemed as if mothers considered it their duty to encourage younger women to have children. If interviewed, even famous career women practically always said that the most important thing in their lives was their family. Even high-achieving men swore up and down that the most important thing was their family (not that men were as likely to be asked that question).
That social consensus is no longer in force. As for "Who'll take care of you when you're old?" the answer isn't clear, as we witness adult children moving far away from their parents and unwilling to take up yet another burden: we can't deny that they are now adults and their own lives and needs come first.
Fortunately there is the social safety net: Social Security, Medicare, assisted living (which can be luxuriouos if you are rich), all kinds of discounts and and even free services for the elderly. Imperfect as it is, it seems more reliable than one's offspring, busy with their own lives (as they have every right to be, just as they have the right to move thousands of miles away and rarely visit).
But what about the joys of motherhood? It's entirely possible that the author of this opinion column hasn't witnessed any. What she is likely to have witnessed as a child was her mother's levels of stress when dealing with the chores of child-rearing. Parenthood could (and should) be made easier, but it will never be easy. Ask any mother: she'll tell you that having children is the hardest thing in the world. Hardest and most terrifying.
I remember the time I privately asked a famous woman writer what it's like when the nanny has her day off. "It is a nightmare," the woman not so much said as chanted in an eerie way.
That's not to deny the joy and the great adventure of parenthood. But we have a hard-wired bias for remembering the negative more vividly. And the decision for or against can be made as early as in childhood. Or during the teen years, when the girl starts baby-sitting.
That's not to say that Generation Z doesn't have legitimate concerns about the environment and the looming climate disaster. If new heat records keep being reached practically every year, anxiety about humanity's very survival is not misplaced. The irony is that if more and more women "choose freedom" instead of children, the survival of humanity becomes a great deal more questionable.
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GLOBAL WARMING AND THE DEMISE OF WINTER
A snowy winter in New York City brings with it a kind of magic. The air goes crisp, then brittle, and fragile snowflakes sift down in the early dark, silvering the trees and blanketing the sledding hills in the parks. After the first big snow, children and adults alike rush out to make snowmen, creations that delight passersby for the next two frigid months, until the snow finally thaws. When I took my older son, then a toddler, out for his first-ever sledding session, he squealed with awe at the crystalline world before him, shouting, “It looks like Frozen!”
Today he’s 5, and I doubt he remembers what sledding feels like. It’s been more than 650 days since Central Park, where snow is measured daily, got more than an inch of snowfall at one time; last winter, the park got just 2.3 inches in total, less than one-tenth the normal amount. In early December, Brooklyn saw a few anemic flurries, and my son told me excitedly that his friends had tried to build a snowman during recess. But there was nowhere near enough material to work with. They settled for “a pile of snowflakes.”
This sense of winter melting away before our eyes is not unique to New York. While blazing-hot summers and stormy autumns come with their own dangers, scientists say winter is actually the fastest-warming season. Snowfall is decreasing across the Northeast, the flakes slowly replaced by raindrops. The Great Lakes have experienced a 22 percent drop in maximum ice cover since 1973, and are frozen for a shorter percentage of the year. In December 2022, Utqiagvik, the northernmost city in Alaska, posted its warmest winter temperature ever at 40 degrees Fahrenheit, a full 36 degrees above the frigid average for that time of year.
The effects are felt around the world, from the Southern Cone to the Arctic Circle. For some, the loss of cold is already an emergency, as winter warming exacts a devastating environmental and human toll. But for many, it’s a slow drip, something they notice in the small details of daily life.
These incremental changes alter the way we celebrate holidays, the way we get dressed to go outside, and even, on a deep level, the way we feel. The philosopher Glenn Albrecht has coined the term “solastalgia,” or “the homesickness we feel while still at home,” to describe the disorientation some of us experience as the planet we once knew changes drastically around us.
“There’s this sort of existential offness,” said Heather Hansman, a Colorado-based ski journalist and author of the book Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns, and the Future of Chasing Snow. “My body knows that this isn’t right.”
Winter is woven into the fabric of human life
Like worsening summer heat waves, winter warming is caused by companies and governments burning fossil fuels. The resulting emissions intensify the greenhouse effect, in which the earth’s atmosphere traps heat from the sun, making temperatures on the ground warmer. The greenhouse effect is strongest at the poles, and it’s also most pronounced during winter, said Kenneth Blumenfeld, a senior climatologist with the Minnesota State Climatology Office.
As a result, the frigid winters many people remember are slowly giving way to something warmer — and weirder. In Minnesota, “It’s not that it never gets cold, because it sure does,” Blumenfeld said. But “it doesn’t get cold as dependably, as frequently, or as severely as it used to.”
“I have some winter jackets that have been two years in the closet without any use,” Juan Antonio Rivera, a researcher at the Argentine Institute for Snow Research, Glaciology, and Environmental Sciences, said in an email. “Frosts in the winter mornings now are a rare thing to see.” (A winter heat wave earlier this year pushed the temperature to 86 degrees in Buenos Aires, where winter highs are usually in the 60s.)
Warmer temperatures around the world are bringing more rain and less snow. As I write this, for example, the Christmas trees for sale down the block are being soaked in a very un-Christmassy downpour. But even as overall snowfall declines, extreme snowstorms are increasing in some places, and there’s some evidence that climate change is leading to more intense cold snaps in places like Texas and California, where the infrastructure simply isn’t built for snow and ice.
Winter can be a bleak and unforgiving season, but it’s also one for which different cultures around the world have developed unique coping mechanisms — and even one many people have come to love. In northern Minnesota, where the season can stretch for six long, dark months, “it’s sort of built into how we live,” Blumenfeld said. Residents have made winter pastimes like ice-fishing, skating, and snowshoeing into thriving industries, with specialized gear and dedicated vacation destinations. “From the outside, it looks like it’s a celebration of winter, but it’s really just what people do.”
When psychologist Kari Leibowitz conducted research in Tromso and Svalbard, Norway, hundreds of miles north of the Arctic circle, she found residents had what she calls a “positive wintertime mindset”: Rather than approaching the winter with dread, they tended to talk about what they were looking forward to, from sitting in front of a fire to skiing to watching the beautiful four-hour sunsets of the polar night. “The winter is a really special time in Tromso,” said Leibowitz, author of the forthcoming book How to Winter: Harnessing Your Mindset to Embrace All Seasons of Life.
But as winters warm, many of the activities humans have developed to survive and thrive during the colder months are slowly vanishing. Skiing, for example, is becoming more difficult in Norway and around the world as rain replaces snow. Leibowitz said that she fears that climate change will leave Norway with the darkness of polar winter but none of its joys. “We won’t have snow to reflect the light. We won’t have ice to make beautiful patterns. And we won’t have all of the recreational activities that come with snow and ice.” One study estimates that, in a worst-case scenario, the majority of US ski resorts will be unable to continue operating before the century’s end.
The decline of sports like skiing has real economic and social effects, experts say. When the weather isn’t cold, “people don’t book vacations, they don’t buy gear, they don’t think about winter,” Hansman said. In towns that rely on skiing and other outdoor tourism, the entire economy can suffer.
In mountain towns in the US, the loss of a source of connection, meaning — and jobs — can also have psychological effects. “A lot of cold places in the Mountain West have remarkably high suicide rates and poor mental health outcomes,” Hansman said. “If you don’t have that sense of purpose, if you don’t have that sense of community, if you’re not seeing your friends out and about, that can have a negative impact.”
The change to winter can also affect people’s sense of who they are. “In Svalbard in the winter, you can snowmobile across the fjord to go camping, you can go ice climbing,” Leibowitz said. “In Tromso, you can ski to work.”
“These activities are a part of the fabric and culture of these countries,” she said. Losing them is “really going to change people’s relationship with the places where they live.”
Experts sometimes use the terms climate grief and climate anxiety to capture the emotional impact of the current environmental crisis. In a 2005 paper, Albrecht described developing the term solastalgia to capture the pain expressed by residents of Australia’s Hunter Region as they saw their local landscape scarred by open-pit coal mining. He combined the word nostalgia, which originally referred to an actual illness caused by displacement from one’s home, with the concepts of solace and desolation.
Nostalgia for winter could help save it, some experts say
While the warming of winter still manifests in some parts of the world as a sneaking sense of something amiss, it has already reached crisis proportions across much of the Arctic and subarctic. In Alaska, for example, the disappearance of sea ice, habitat destruction, and disease caused by warming waters have made it difficult or impossible for indigenous hunters to catch marine mammals, a practice that has been their livelihood for thousands of years. “A relatively small temperature change in sea ice, and also in sea temperatures in the Arctic and subarctic, results in complete ecosystem collapse,” said Joan Naviyuk Kane, an Inupiaq poet and essayist who grew up in Alaska. For many of her friends and community members, “a subsistence lifestyle is no longer within reach.”
People who live and work in cold climates are finding ways to adapt to their new reality. In Alaska, some indigenous communities are learning reindeer herding from Sami practitioners, Kane said. When hunters can no longer rely on the sea, “some of these land-based practices actually may help us continue to survive into the future,” she said.
For Kane, sorrow isn’t a meaningful frame for thinking about the loss of people’s way of life. “Indigenous people can perform grief and perform our trauma endlessly if that’s what non-Indigenous people want,” she said. But “by doing so we’re taking away time and energy and resources to engage our anger and to meaningfully enact policy change in the Arctic.”
Some experts believe that nostalgia for a vanishing winter can be harnessed to fight climate change, reaching people who haven’t yet been personally affected by the crisis in more immediate ways. “For a lot of people, recreation or a family vacation or the places where they’re open to the environment” can provide a much more relatable, concrete example of the unfolding disaster than statistics about global temperature change, Hansman said.
The group Protect Our Winters, for example, founded by pro snowboarder Jeremy Jones, brings together winter sports enthusiasts to reach out to voters and lobby lawmakers on climate issues. It is already making headway influencing legislation on renewable energy infrastructure and more.
Meanwhile, the long, chilly winters of yesteryear — and the way people responded to them — may still have something to teach us. Positive wintertime mindset is about adapting to your circumstances, both realistically and optimistically, Leibowitz said. That same can-do spirit can help us “think about what’s possible” when it comes to fighting climate change, she said.
“Our mindset can help empower us to see opportunities in difficult things,” and it can help us feel “inspired to work towards protecting winter,” Leibowitz said. “Changing our relationship with the darkness might inspire us to say, what else can I envision?”
https://www.vox.com/culture/24001256/snow-winter-climate-change-solastalgia-warming?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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INSIDE THE MIND OF CHARLES MANSON
~ Manson's ideology is considered an early example of “accelerationism." It's a radical view that seeks to bring about political or social change by accelerating societal collapse. ~
In August 1969, a string of violent murders stunned the entire world. Charles Manson, whose name has since become synonymous with cult-led violence, was the mastermind behind the infamous "Tate-LaBianca" killings. The first killing occurred on the night of August 8–9, and the victims included pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four of her friends who were visiting that night.
Manson had apparently chosen the house where Tate lived because he believed a record executive who had rejected his songs was still living there. The following evening, the "family" also murdered supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, at their home in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles.
In the trial that followed, Manson and his followers testified that the killings had been intended to precipitate a race war since they intended their crimes to be blamed on black activists. As a result of his involvement in these killings, Manson was sentenced to death in 1971; however, his sentence was eventually reduced to life in prison. Manson would spend decades in jail until his death in November 2017 at the age of 83.
Of his surviving followers, four remain in California prisons.
In August 1997, Manson, who was then 63 years old, was transferred to Pelican Bay State Prison for drug trafficking charges while in prison. Also known as California's "supermax" prison, Pelican Bay housed the most dangerous inmates who were serving long sentences (i.e., 25 to life with the possibility of parole). Due to being previously diagnosed with severe mental illness, Manson was housed in Pelican Bay's psychiatric service unit (PSU).
Ever the subject of controversy, questions were immediately raised about whether Manson was truly mentally ill or whether he would be better suited for the prison's special handling unit (SHU.). As a result, he underwent a comprehensive psychiatric examination, the full details of which only became publicly available following his 2017 death.
A recent publication in the Journal of Threat Assessment and Management provides an overview of Manson's assessment, including his formal diagnosis, his criminal history, and why he has become a role model for extreme right-wing terrorist groups over the past decade in the United States. The lead author, Tod A. Roy, a forensic psychologist now practicing in Phoenix, Arizona, conducted the 1997 assessment and secured permission from the California Department of Corrections to publish the previously confidential report.
Along with a battery of tests, including the Rorschach Psychodiagnostic Test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2), and the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), Manson's extensive criminal history, both inside and outside of prison was also examined. At the time of his assessment, he had spent 46 of his 63 years behind bars, including 25 years for the Tate-LaBianca murders.
The results, which Roy and his coauthors recently reanalyzed, proved to be as complicated and conflicting as anyone familiar with Manson's case might expect. For instance, the findings of the MMPI-2 and Rorschach tests that Manson took provide evidence that he struggled with significant psychological disorders that couldn't be neatly classified according to existing systems such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
As a result, the question of whether Manson could be considered psychotic as well as psychopathic remains as controversial as ever, even after his death.
The significance of these discoveries lies not only in trying to understand Manson but also in understanding the more far-reaching aspects of his ideology, particularly in the context of contemporary extremist movements related to “accelerationism."
What is meant by "accelerationism" is the concept that accelerating the collapse of society would bring about the political or social changes extremists want. The ideology of Manson, which he used to justify the heinous murders he ordered, can be interpreted as an early example of this radical worldview.
It is helpful to discern and combat similar extremist views in today's world if we have a better understanding of what motivated someone like Manson and those who followed him. In addition, the case of Manson highlights problems regarding the characteristics of psychosis and the degree to which mental illness might have an impact on criminal behavior.
Certainly, the article by Roy and his coauthor raised troubling questions about the intersections of psychology, criminality, and the effect of society given Manson's life, the crimes he committed, and the later psychiatric tests conducted on him.
The life story of Manson is not only a chronicle of a criminal mastermind, but it is also a case study of the terrorist cell he created and the need to remain cautious against the ideologies that motivated his crimes. It is also a reminder of the significance of psychiatric evaluation in the process of comprehending criminal behavior and trying to prevent similar tragedies in the future.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/media-spotlight/202312/exploring-the-mind-of-charles-manson
Charles Manson in 2014, three years before his death
from another source:
Tod Roy, a psychologist who’d just started working at Pelican Bay, was given the job of giving Manson a psychological exam. For more than a week, Roy asked Manson questions from a battery of psychological tests. He also gave Manson the Rorschach test, getting his reactions to the various ink blots on cards.
Roy recalls that Manson was “curious,” “gregarious,” “aware of his notoriety” and mostly civil. To this day, Roy refers to Manson as “Charlie.”
But there were moments when Roy was reminded he was in the room with a cult leader. On their second day of interviews, Manson showed up with a haircut that exposed the swastika tattoo on his forehead. Another day, Manson described the car Roy owned. Through a prison window, Manson had spied Roy in the parking lot.
“That was kind of intimidating,” Roy says. “But, at the same time, it tells you about his observational capacities.”
After the evaluation, Roy gave a diagnosis that allowed Manson to get mental health treatment: “I basically said he had an antisocial personality and was a psychopath.”
Prison officials asked Roy to hand over the materials from his evaluation, but he refused.
“They were fearful that I was going to go out and publish it,” he says. “I said, ‘Well, I do because I think there’s some scientific importance here.’ ”
So they made a deal. Roy agreed not to publish anything until Manson died. Manson agreed.
After Manson died in 2017 at 83, Roy began thinking about that agreement.
“I had never written an article for a journal in my life, so I started looking into the requirements to do it, and I knew I was going to need some help,” he says.
So Roy contacted California psychologist Reid Meloy, who focuses on extremism and does risk assessments. Meloy consulted for the federal government on the prosecutions of the Oklahoma City bombers and has researched threats to the British royal family.
Intrigued by Manson’s anti-government ideology, Meloy agreed to help and started assembling a research team.
Alan Friedman, a Northwestern University psychologist, and David Nichols, an Oregon psychologist, agreed to look at Manson’s Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, known as the MMPI-2, which is based on 567 true-false questions. Using her own assessment system, psychologist Joni Mihura of the University of Toledo would re-examine Manson’s reactions to ink blots.
Now, the team of psychologists has published a paper in the Journal of Threat Assessment and Management that examines Roy’s 1997 diagnosis and finds that Manson’s symptoms were consistent with bipolar illness.
“There has always been this controversy: Was he schizophrenic?” Friedman says. “We found he was more on the manic end of the spectrum. He was an aggressive guy — antisocial, narcissistic, a psychopath.”
Manson didn’t demonstrate hallmarks of schizophrenia such as despair and feelings of alienation, according to Friedman.
Manson “was able to attract others, and that would certainly be more consistent with feelings and behaviors suggestive of grandiosity and euphoria, as distinct from the characteristics of schizophrenia, which is more despairing, alienated,” Nichols says.
Mihura studied Manson’s outlandish responses to ink blots. During the 1997 Rorschach test, the cult leader had described one image as “two Rip Van Winkles asleep” and another as “two KKK men with wings.” Many of his descriptions involved sex.
Fewer than 1% of people see the things Manson said he saw, according to Mihura, who says he didn’t seem to be faking his answers.
Mihura also watched a 1993 interview Manson did with ABC-TV’s Diane Sawyer and saw how he tried unsuccessfully to overpower her and control the interview.
“He’s very ‘plan-ful,’ ” Mihura says of the interview. “He’s trying to disrupt Diane Sawyer’s interview. His thinking wasn’t disorganized.”
Mihura determined that Manson’s Rorschach test and ABC interview showed organized thinking, so she ruled out schizophrenia. Instead, his thinking was “consistent with but not definitive” of bipolar illness, which includes the two poles of mania and depression.
She says Manson appeared to display signs of hypomania, a milder version of mania — that he seemed talkative, driven, full of energy and in control.
Also, according to Mihura, Manson was a psychopath and had “lower-level personality organization,” with difficulties showing empathy and having intimate relationships.
Manson’s mental illness most likely was triggered by his traumatic childhood, according to the psychologists’ review. During his childhood, he’d repeatedly been abandoned by his teenage mother, who was a sex worker and alcoholic.
“They say she once abandoned him for a pitcher of beer,” Roy says.
When Manson was 5, his mother was sent to prison for robbery. At 7, while in foster care, he stole a neighbor’s Christmas presents and set them on fire. He later was arrested for auto theft and robbery. When he was 13 and in juvenile detention, he was raped. He became an aggressor.
In 1967, two years before the infamous Los Angeles killings, Manson was released from a prison in Washington state. He was so accustomed to living in a state institution that he asked for permission to stay, which was denied.
“Manson had this severely adverse background, all of these things that were going on,” Friedman says. “I think today, when people have those kinds of histories, there’s more likely to be interventions done to redirect the person away from violent pathways.”
Manson didn’t physically participate in the Aug. 9, 1969, killings but orchestrated his “family” — mostly women — to carry them out. They’d been taking LSD and other drugs, which it’s believed likely lowered their inhibitions about killing.
“Manson’s specific fantasy, the ‘Helter Skelter’ fantasy, was that, by committing these atrocities that they did in Los Angeles, it would bring about the collapse of white society but that black individuals, even though they would win the race war, did not have the intelligence to govern themselves,” Meloy says. “And he would come out of the desert with his ‘family’ and rule the new society.”
Meloy says some extremist groups today are adherents of Manson’s “accelerationist” ideology.
“Acceleration is the philosophy that we promote and actually engage in violence as a way to accelerate the collapse of society,” he says.
According to Meloy, some Nazi-inspired groups are among those that believe in acceleration.
“These kinds of beliefs and patterns of thinking can arise in any mental health setting,” he says. “And we believe that clinicians need to alert themselves to these possibilities.”
The Manson study also found that “targeted attackers such as Manson will harbor a personal grievance 80% of the time. Such grievances are typically composed of major loss, humiliation, anger and blame.”
Before the killings, Manson was upset that Melcher — the music producer, who was actress-singer Doris Day’s son — refused to record songs Manson had written, according to the study, citing previous research.
Manson and his followers partied with Melcher and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson in the year prior to the killings, which occurred in a Benedict Canyon home in Los Angeles that Melcher was renting until he moved out in January 1969.
Tate and her filmmaker husband Roman Polanski began renting the home that February. Polanski wasn’t home during the slaughter six months later.
Later, Manson family members said they knew Melcher no longer lived there but that Manson wanted to frighten him.
For more than 50 years, researchers have sought answers for how something so horrible could happen.
“Among terrorists, the personal grievance is usually joined with moral outrage concerning a suffering group, which is then framed by an ideology, but the severity of psychopathy in Manson would preclude any moral rectitude at all,” the study reported. “One is left with the homicidal drivers of personal grievance and his grandiose fantasy of world domination.”
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2023/1/20/23559781/charles-manson-sharon-tate-psychological-study-andrew-friedman-northwestern-university
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CHILDREN AND SANTA CLAUS — A HARMLESS DECEPTION?
Towards the end of every year, many parents find themselves fielding difficult questions, such as: how does a man fly across the entire world in a single night to deliver presents? How does he fit down a chimney? Does he really eat cookies at every house?
Children start to distinguish fantasy from reality around preschool, but a belief in Santa Claus or Father Christmas usually lasts longer, to around seven or eight years old, according to research conducted in the United States in the 1980s and ’90s. This isn’t too surprising: many parents continue to tell their children that Santa is real for as long as possible, and they sometimes enact elaborate schemes to provide evidence of his existence. But, inevitably, there comes a time when cracks in the Santa story start to appear. If you’re a parent, relative or teacher and you’re interacting with children at this stage of their belief in Santa, you might be wondering about the best way to respond – or what the loss of belief might be like for them.
In 2014, a mother wrote in to Slate’s advice column Dear Prudence, written by Emily Yoffe, with concern about how to break it to her child that Santa was made up. The mother thinks that, once her daughter is old enough to ask questions about Santa, she should be told directly. ‘I feel very dishonest about this and worry that our daughter would feel hurt by the extreme steps we took to keep her in the dark just so we could enjoy the innocence and magic for a little while longer,’ she wrote. Yoffe responded that one of the ‘delights’ of childhood was to ‘spread a little fairy dust occasionally’ – but many readers subsequently wrote to the magazine describing how they had been hurt by believing in Santa well into puberty, because of how their parents had kept the myth alive.
Is it really possible that promoting the Santa myth to your children is a kind of harmful deception? To find out, a pair of psychologists, Candice Mills at the University of Texas at Dallas and Thalia Goldstein at George Mason University in Virginia, recently investigated how children and adults learned the truth about Santa, and how they felt about it.
For their paper in Developmental Psychology, they asked children aged six to 15 how they found out Santa wasn’t real, and the emotions they experienced afterwards. Then they asked 383 adults to remember how they came to disbelieve in Santa.
About a third of children and half of adults said they felt some negative emotions when they learned Santa wasn’t real. It was the child and adult participants whose parents had heavily pushed the Santa story who also tended to have more negative emotions upon learning the truth. The adults who remembered feeling the worst were at an older age when they learned about Santa, they tended to have found out abruptly, and from another person, rather than figuring it out on their own.
Yet a similar number of children, and around 13 per cent of adults, recalled experiencing positive emotions upon learning Santa wasn’t real. ‘Some said they were relieved that they finally had resolution to some of their nagging questions,’ Mills and Goldstein wrote in an essay for The New York Times in 2023. ‘Others reported pride, as if they’d solved a complicated puzzle.’
As well as the ethical aspects of exploding the Santa myth, understanding how and when children grow out of it offers a way to examine how children develop skepticism. According to Jean Piaget’s influential theory of cognitive development, when children are in a ‘preoperational stage’ and aged around four to eight, they can’t easily tell the difference between reality and fantasy. That ability emerges in the next stage – the ‘concrete operational stage’; in the 1970s, researchers suggested that losing the belief in Santa could mark a transition moment between these cognitive stages.
But back to the delicate issue of whether you should encourage or slow children’s understanding of the true nature of Santa Claus. ‘As developmental psychologists, we’ve long been interested in such questions, in part because they raise larger issues about the role of imaginative play in the life of a child and how parents might best engage with it,’ Mills and Goldstein wrote.
In their essay, Mills and Goldstein offered advice on how parents should talk about Santa with their children. If your children start asking probing questions, they said there is no need to tell them lies. ‘Consider answering by asking your child what she thinks, talking about what “some people” believe or simply acknowledging that she has asked an interesting question,’ they wrote. Even kids who are upset by suddenly finding out about Santa seem to get over it relatively quickly – usually within a year – and both children and adults said they would still incorporate Santa into their own holiday traditions.
‘Your child may have imaginary friends and believe in the Tooth Fairy – that’s OK,’ Mills and Goldstein wrote. ‘Blurring the line between fantasy and reality is a normal part of being a young kid.’
https://psyche.co/ideas/at-what-point-does-the-santa-myth-become-a-harmful-deception?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=47d2a3631c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_12_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-a9a3bdf830-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
Anita Spinks:
Apparently I was one of the 15% of children who felt betrayed by my parents when given ‘the talk’ at around 9 years of age. A further 30% are upset when the truth is revealed to them. On reflection, I think my sense of betrayal was exacerbated by a deliberate lie when I stumbled across Mum and Dad wrapping the presents. Instead of using the event as an opportunity for truth telling, I was told that parents performed this task to assist Father Christmas.
In case you’re wondering I played down the magical elements myself though did not eliminate them entirely as there are neighborhood children to consider. I did not stoop so low as to manufacture evidence, I hasten to add.
Responses from the group were overwhelmingly in favor of perpetuating the myth with some saying that they never told their children ‘they just found out!’ A couple were more circumspect and thought it was morally wrong to allow children to believe above the age of 5 years, and one member who was ‘freaked out’ by the commercial addition of the ‘Shelf Elf’.
My feelings as an adult are that the world itself is full of natural wonders to inspire and delight without the intrusion of commerce, but it’s not wise to go against the grain when culture strongly supports belief. Not for a while…anyway.
Ragged Clown:
When my son was growing up, my wife thought it was very important that he not be the last one in his friend group to find out about the Santa myth for fear of teasing. So we sat him down one day when he was about 6 and gave him the little preamble speech about how sometimes parents make up stories to explain the world and make childhood more fun.
At that point, he interrupted and blurted “There’s no God, is there!? I knew it!!”
Oriana:
That’s precisely why some people say that the Judeo-Christian god is “Santa Claus for adults.”
I’m not sure if I ever knew a child who seriously believed in Santa Claus. We were supposed to believe in Baby Jesus, not Santa. To us, the most real thing was the animals around the manger.
I especially adored the donkey — those soft ears to longed to stroke, and those soulful eyes. And the little lambs were beyond cuddly.
To me Santa was like fairy tales — to be enjoyed as a fiction. So there was never a crisis. never a feeling of betrayal. My parents tried to firmly establish the non-existence of ghosts, witches, good and bad fairies. But mostly I figured out this stuff on my own. The church with its insistence on an invisible deity was a problem, but at least it provided the Nativity scenes.
Now, religion classes were something else. I started out with the belief that we are being told another set of fairy tales — but god was mean and punitive, more like a wicked witch, far from a jolly Santa. Still, the nuns who taught catechism classes seemed to believe that such a being exists, and has the power to throw you into hell forever if you dare doubt.
In adulthood I wondered if children raised without religion had a much happier childhood, free from the anxiety about going to hell. My mental health would have been better, but I’d be out of step with my peers, not understanding religious references both in daily life and, later, in literature. But apparently there were enough such children for one of my colleges to have a class on “religious and mythological backgrounds in literature.”
And it felt like an achievement to work my way out from that labyrinth of stories so they no longer had the power over me they once did. I still had nightmares about hell in my adult years, but I found them interesting.
Now, deliberately lying to children does feel wrong, though there might be rare special cases when it’s the best practical solution, hopefully temporary. Pleading ignorance can also be respectable solution. Cherry picking, that is, being very selective about what one takes from the myriad beliefs permeating any culture, is perhaps best.
As for the figure of Santa, for me the interesting part has been witnessing how Santa and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer seem to have completely taken over Christmas, leaving Baby Jesus far behind. How did that happen? Follow the money.
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DOES LOW BIRTH RATE MEAN THE END OF THE HUMAN SPECIES?
The Roman emperor Augustus was already concerned with the dwindling birth rates of Rome’s upper classes. He went as far as to enact a special law for this called the Jus trium liberorum, meaning “the right of three children” under which special privileges were provided for couples who had more than three children. This way he hoped to boost the birth rates.
Just a week ago, North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un made an emotional appeal to his nation’s women to “have more children”. While still almost double the 0.8 child-per-woman birth rate of South Korea, North Korea’s has been dwindling, too… and the Kim Dynasty is concerned.
Augustus knew two thousand years ago what Kim knows to be true today — a culture cannot survive if it does not reproduce. Rome’s overall birth rate during Augustus’ reign wasn’t even dramatically low, but the nobles and many of the ‘original Romans’ had few children. As a result, Rome become less and less “Roman” as time went on… because just like today’s world, Rome did import workers and slaves from other places. It didn’t work in the long run. We will find that the same goes for us.
This is what kills a civilization, in the end. Sometimes it’s rapid, most of the time it’s more of a slow burn. But widespread access to birth control and widely available education for both genders have caused a worldwide decline in birth rates. Historically speaking, that’s what ends civilizations — the people who built the civilization simply die out and with them, so does the civilization itself. ~ Jean-Marie Valheur, Quora
Alessandro Cattaneo:
It happened other times already in history: civilizations produce many children as long as they are expanding, but when well being, education and peace becomes a given, people tends to entertain themselves with higher purposes.
It’s almost a cycle: countries need to go down so that maybe they can rise up again. If they do it and God knows when.
Oriana:
China’s one-child policy introduced the idea that one or none is OK. China is now urging couples to have three children, but people are not buying it. You could say they got spoiled by child-free, or only one child, life style.
Matt Macho:
North Korea has outlawed all birth control. The ancients (Roman or otherwise) only had access to the “rhythm method", the least effective means of avoiding pregnancy in existence. So much for blaming access to contraception for the collapse of civilization.
And anyway, who other than li'l Kim wants to perpetuate North Korean society? The world (and especially North Koreans) will be better off without it.
It's self-evident that we cannot continue sustaining a population that doubles every couple generations. Reduction of population by natural means (reduced birth rates) will mean the population will age and decline. This will produce challenges but it certainly doesn't have to mean societal collapse.
Not sure if the world would be better without North Korea, but it most likely would be better without Kim (or Putin, and a few others we could mention).
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MOTHER TERESA “FELT NO PRESENCE OF GOD”
~ Mother Teresa’s seemingly unbreakable bond with God was much more complicated than she let on in public. For nearly 50 years, she felt God had abandoned her.
Letters made public years after her death in 1997 revealed that Mother Teresa spent nearly half a century without feeling God’s presence, “neither in her heart or in the eucharist,” as TIME reported in 2007:
Mother Teresa was aware of the contradiction between her public persona and private feelings. She called her smile “a mask” or “a cloak that covers everything.” Her letters reveal she wrestled with the existence of God. In an undated prayer to Jesus at the suggestion of a confessor, she said she had no faith.
Such a lengthy crisis of faith becomes all the more significant as Mother Teresa has been declared a saint. “I’ve never read a saint’s life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness,” Rev. James Martin, author of My Life with the Saints, told TIME in 2007. “No one knew she was that tormented.”
The revealing letters were published in a book entitled Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, compiled and edited by Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, Mother Teresa’s postulator. In an interview with the New York Times this August, Kolodiejchuk called Mother Teresa’s perseverance “heroic” in the face of the the “darkness” she felt.
“She was suffering that loneliness, that sense of being unloved, unwanted in her relationship with Jesus,” he said. “but in solidarity with and identified with others who were in some way living that sense of loneliness and being unloved.”
https://time.com/4476076/mother-teresas-faith-history/
postulator = the person who nominates someone for sainthood or beatification
Oriana:
She certainly believed that “suffering is good for you”
Oriana:
Perhaps it was to cover up that doubt that she was such a zealous servant and propagandist of the church. It seems she cared little or nothing about actual individuals; she equated the poor with Christ in the hope of being rewarded with a mystical vision of Christ like Teresa of Avila. She was bitter that this never happened. (“But it all means nothing because I don’t have Him.”)
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TALKING TO THE CEILING
“Some are atheist at age 5, and some at age 50. For me it was 23, and happened overnight, and was due to a sudden, anti-climactic realization — during a prayer — that I was talking to a ceiling.” ~ a reader’s comment
I’ve had the sense of talking to empty air many times before I finally trusted my mind. It took a different realization: “It’s just another mythology.” I knew then that all religions were mythologies, not just the ones designated in that way, e.g. the “the Greek mythology” — as if the Hebrew mythology was not a mythology, but described actual events. Jonah and the Whale — absolutely factual!
So it took both two-three years of struggling with increasing doubt, and just an instant. In retrospect, the doubt started during my first religion lesson when god’s invisibility was discussed. I smelled the rat right then. But I had a child’s strange notion that whatever adults said was the truth.
The intellectual side of the journey was not complete until I read Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct. Until then, I had moments of what I call “Theist Doubt” — but perhaps some unknown deity, the “real god,” exists? Jesse Bering brilliantly showed that this idea is due to a common cognitive error.
So the break may be sudden and dramatic, but the journey continues for years. Basically it’s an evolving lifetime experience.
At the same time, just as I loved the Greek myths, so I remained fascinated with what was officially classified as religion. My two favorite classes in college were The Bible as Literature and Comparative Religion.
Jonah and the Whale, Arabic version
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WHEN GENTLE PARENTING DOESN’T WORK
A study cited in support of the ineffectiveness of gentle parenting techniques was conducted by Dr. Robert Larzelere; possibly the most outspoken advocate of spanking today. Many parents are surprised to find that Dr. Diana Baumrind, who developed the parenting ‘styles,’ was also a spanking proponent. Drs. Baumrind and Larzelere say, “On average, authoritative parents spanked just as much as the average of all other parents. Undoubtedly, some parents can be authoritative without using spanking, but we have no evidence that all or even most parents can achieve authoritative parenting without an occasional spanking.”
This runs counter to many parents’ values today since parents’ use of spanking is declining. Other researchers have found that spanking predicts the deterioration of children’s externalizing behavior (which is what researchers call ‘acting out’) over time: the very thing that parents who spank are trying to change.
The challenge with citing academic research on effective parenting methods is that an idea can be supported by research, but not fit with our values. We don’t have to look far to find other ideas that fit this description: the racist notions that head size is linked to intelligence and that we can selectively breed humans with desirable traits were both supported by scientific research.
I believe that scientific research findings reflect the ideas that are prevalent in society at the time. It isn’t enough to know that an idea is supported by research; we also have to check whether it fits with our values.
What do writers mean when they say gentle parenting doesn’t work? Because parents transmit their values to their children, when a parenting method ‘doesn’t work,’ we can think of it as failing to transmit important parental and cultural values.
According to Dr. Larzelere, in the same study as before, a parenting method that ‘works’ “reduces non-compliance.” Other measures of success in studies cited in these articles include “identifying what parents need to be taught to reduce disruptive child behavior,” a “reduction in their child’s behavioral problems,” and “increased compliance” with parental demands. These terms all point toward obedience as a cultural value.
But when we look at what parents in Eurocentric cultures say about their values and desires for their children, obedience is not at the top of the list.
Obedience is far more important among conservative than liberal parents. A 2014 survey found that 38 percent of consistently liberal parents want their children to learn obedience, compared to 82 percent of consistently conservative parents (who are more likely to lack confidence in the scientific community).
The importance of obedience has waned over time. One study found a decline in mothers’ desire for strict obedience in children from 64.4 percent in 1924 to 42.8 percent in 1978, while the desire for children’s independence more than tripled from 15.8 percent to 75.8 percent.
Another study found that parents held values related to happiness, learning, and being a good person: “I remember having an interesting conversation with (partner) cos I was saying, ‘Well I want them to be happy.’ And he said, ‘I want them to be good.’ Not good as in well behaved, but good people have a, you know, proper moral sense…”
Parents want ease, not obedience
In a remarkably forward-thinking 1943 paper, Dr. Harold Saxe Tuttle observes that obedience is “a convenience, a very great convenience, and, at certain stages, an indispensable convenience” as it protects children from harm — a great benefit with a young child about to touch a hot stove.
Obedience may be convenient, but it isn’t our ultimate goal. What we parents need most of all is ease. When our need for ease is met, we have time, energy, and capacity to enjoy our children and to take care of ourselves as well. Our children’s obedience may get us a bit of ease in the short term, but it works against us in the long term in two ways.
Firstly, an obedient child will continue to rely on our judgment to maintain obedience, because they haven’t learned to exercise their judgment. We’ll continue to be the referee: “Don’t do X;” “Hurry up and do Y;” “Why on earth would you do Z to your sister?”, becoming increasingly frustrated as we go — the exact opposite of meeting our need for ease.
Secondly, if our goal is to raise an independent child who cares for others and treats them fairly, requiring obedience is unlikely to help us reach that goal. We can’t tell them to do exactly what we say and expect them to develop and use their moral judgment on their eighteenth birthday.
How to get more ease
The first step in making parenting easier is finding out your and your child’s real needs. The needs I most commonly see in parents are for ease, peace, and collaboration with their children.
Our children are people with needs too; some of the most common needs I see among children are connection, play, and autonomy.
The ‘what to do when gentle parenting isn’t working’ advice offers obedience-based tools: consequences, selectively rewarding or ignoring specific behaviors and time-outs. When we require obedience, we tell our child: “I don’t care why you’re misbehaving; all that matters is that you do what I tell you to do.” When we instead look to understand the child’s needs, we find ways of meeting their needs that help us to meet our needs as well.
Maybe your child is disobeying you because they know that if they do, you’ll pay attention to them as you tell them off (need for connection).
Maybe they are being accidentally aggressive as they try to start or stop playing with a sibling, and we can show them other ways to convey their needs.
Maybe they are resisting you because the thing you’re asking them to do feels deeply wrong for their body, and the most powerful word they know is “No!”
Neither I nor anyone else can tell you how to handle each of these issues because we don’t know why your child is doing these things; we don’t know your child’s needs. In my book, Parenting Beyond Power, I offer some conversation starter questions to help you understand their needs which then provides a path to meeting your needs as well. These include:
Can you tell me what you were trying to do when…?
Can you share why...wasn’t working for you?
Can you tell me why you don’t want to…?
Once you take a step toward meeting their needs, your needs for ease, peace, and collaboration will be met as well. No obedience required!
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-beyond-power/202312/why-people-claim-that-gentle-parenting-doesnt-work
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CAN AN UNHAPPY PARTNER DRAG DOWN YOUR HAPPINESS?
Romantic partners tend to be similar in several ways. They have similar attitudes, personality traits, and even similar levels of physical attractiveness. They are also similar in how happy they are. It could be that birds of a feather flock together—happy people are attracted to happy people and misery loves company.
However, research has shown that this similarity tends to increase over time. This could be because both couple members experience similar life events that affect their happiness. But another intriguing possibility is that partners could influence each other's level of happiness. Happiness, or unhappiness, could be contagious. If so, which partner is more likely to influence the well-being of the other, the happier partner or the less happy partner? New research by Olga Stavrova and William Chopik, just published in the journal, Social Psychological and Personality Science explores well-being contagion within couples.
Moods tend to be contagious. Numerous studies on depression show that depressive states can be contagious between people. This is especially likely to occur in couples, whose day-to-day experiences are so intertwined. For example, one study found that on days when one partner reported poor mood, so did the other.
But which partner has more influence, the happier partner or the less happy partner? Much research in psychology supports the notion that bad is stronger than good. For example, people are more upset about losing $20 than they are happy about gaining $20. In studies of marital conflict, negative behaviors have a bigger influence on satisfaction than positive behaviors, and negative social interactions have a larger influence on health and well-being than positive ones. This suggests that the unhappy partner is more likely to influence the happy partner than vice versa.
Stavrova and Chopik used data from two large long-term studies of couples. The first study included a sample of over 18,000 German couples who completed an annual survey for 37 years. Each year, both partners rated their level of life satisfaction on a 10-point scale. The results showed that the happier partner experienced a decrease in satisfaction over time, whereas the less happy partner held steady. By the end of the 37 years, the initially happier partner experienced, on average, a 2.2-point drop in satisfaction. This change was so profound that by the end of the 37 years, on average, the happier partner had become the less happy partner.
To test a broader set of variables relating to well-being, the researchers also analyzed data from a Dutch sample of about 3,000 couples who were surveyed annually for 14 years. Respondents completed questionnaires assessing their life satisfaction, positive emotions, negative emotions, and self-esteem. For all four of these outcomes, the happier partner's scores declined over time, and the less happy partner improved somewhat. However, they didn't exactly meet in the middle; the declines experienced by the happier partner were greater than the improvements experienced by the less happy partner.
A savvy reader may suspect that this occurred because the happiest people just tend to show the biggest declines. When you start high, there is a long way to fall. However, additional analyses revealed that this was not the case in either of these studies. It was the participants who were the least happy to start with who showed the largest declines in well-being.
These studies both found that well-being is contagious. Romantic partners' happiness levels tended to become more similar over time. However, rather than the two partners meeting somewhere in the middle, the less happy partner had an outsized influence. The less happy partner tends to bring the happier partner down.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/close-encounters/202312/can-an-unhappy-partner-erode-your-happiness-over-time
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WHERE DID THEY ALL GO? HOW HOMO SAPIENS BECAME THE LAST HUMAN SPECIES LEFT
At least nine hominin species once roamed the Earth, so what became of our vanished ancestors?
Just 300,000 years ago – a blink in evolutionary time – at least nine species of humans wandered the planet. Today, only our own, Homo sapiens, remains. And this raises one of the biggest questions in the story of human evolution: where did everyone else go?
“It’s not a coincidence that several of them disappeared around the time that Homo sapiens started to spread out of Africa and around the rest of the world,” says Prof Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London. “What we don’t know is if that was a direct connection.”
There are many theories around the disappearance of our human cousins, and limited evidence to decipher exactly what happened. But recent studies are providing tantalizing clues.
What we do know is that from about 40,000 years ago, H sapiens was the last human standing out of a large and diverse group of bipedal hominins. Hypotheses range from benign, such as H sapiens having better infant survival rates than other hominins, or climate changes pushing other species to the brink. Others suggest a more active role, such as H sapiens hunting other humans or interbreeding with them and assimilating their genetics.
About 300,000 years ago, the first H sapiens populations were springing up in Africa. They didn’t look like modern humans, but they are more similar to us than other Homo species. They had tall, rounded skulls with an almost vertical forehead. They didn’t have the glowering brows of Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) or the protruding jaw of archaic-looking species such as Homo naledi. They also had chins; something that no other Homo species has had (although we don’t know why only H sapiens has the protuberance).
A study published in Nature this year exploded the idea that H sapiens originated from a single place in Africa in one great evolutionary leap. By analyzing the genomes of 290 people, the researchers showed that H sapiens descended from at least two populations that lived in Africa for one million years, before merging in several interactions.
Palaeoanthropologists continue to argue (quite vociferously) over who the last ancestor of H Sapiens was, but so far there is no conclusive evidence. Also, there is no single origin for H sapiens. There are ancient remains of early H sapiens in Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, Omo Kibish in Ethiopia and Florisbad in South Africa, suggesting that our species arose from multiple sites.
When H sapiens moved out of Africa is also the subject of debate. Genetic evidence suggests there was a big foray out of the continent between 80,000 and 60,000 years ago. But it was not the first expedition. A perplexing H sapiens skull in Apidima in Greece has been dated to being at least 210,000 years old.
We know of several other Homo groups that existed alongside H sapiens between 300,000 and 100,000 years ago. Some were quite similar to H sapiens. Stocky Neanderthals endured Europe’s chilly weather and the mysterious Denisovans eked out an existence in the rarefied air of what is now Siberia and Tibet, and possibly further afield.
Homo erectus, the long-legged “cosmopolitan” species – so called because of the impressive geographical range it spanned – still wandered through parts of Indonesia; Homo longi (also known as the “Dragon man”) lived in China. Homo rhodesiensis (also known as Homo bodoensis or Homo heidelbergensis – scientists continue to debate its name and membership) was alive in central and southern Africa.
Other species were rather distinct from us: H naledi, with its ape-size brain, rambled through the woody grasslands of South Africa, and the diminutive Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis lived, breathed and died on the islands of Flores and Luzon in Indonesia and the Philippines respectively.
“Hominin species were likely dying out all the time,” says Prof Eleanor Scerri, head of the human palaeosystems group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. “It’s probably unusual that we are still around.”
From Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes, researchers have inferred that they lived in small groups and frequently interbred. Some population estimates, based on mitochondrial DNA (inherited maternally), suggest that at their most abundant there were about 52,000 Neanderthals in Eurasia before they began to decline. Others suspect that there could have been between 20,000 and 50,000 individuals.
An important advantage that our direct ancestors appear to have had was population size. “Because of those small population sizes [among Neanderthals and Denisovans], there was a lot more interbreeding and the genetics reflects that,” says Scerri. The lack of genetic diversity would have rendered these populations more susceptible to diseases and thus less likely to survive.
H sapiens, by comparison, had larger groups and greater genetic diversity. The consequences of this extend beyond fitness against disease. “In H sapiens, we see larger social networks extending across the wider landscape,” says Stringer. “Having wide networks gives you an insurance policy because if you’re related to people a bit further away, if there is an environmental crisis – you’re running out of food or water – you can move into their environments and they’re not enemies, they’re your kin.” Such networks also allow for the exchange of ideas and innovation, Stringer adds.
This social resilience could have helped H sapiens survive climatic changes that would have killed off less adaptable individuals and species. A 2022 study in Nature modeled the ancient climates and ecosystems in which H erectus, H heidelbergensis and Neanderthals lived and found that they lost significant portions of their environmental niches before disappearing.
A larger 2023 simulation, which included six Homo species and the climate and vegetation over the past 3m years, found that later Homo species were able to live in a wider range of habitats, particularly H sapiens.
Prof Axel Timmermann, a co-author of this study and director of the IBS Centre for Climate Physics in Busan, South Korea, believes that H sapiens outcompeted Neanderthals, ultimately leading to the latter’s demise.
He built a numerical model, outlined in a 2020 paper, that simulated H sapiens’s spread out of Africa and combined it with available food sources. Using this, he tested three hypotheses for the extinction of Neanderthals: that they were assimilated into H sapiens; that there was a huge climate catastrophe; or that H sapiens outcompeted them. “It’s only the last one [competitive exclusion] that is able to contribute to a realistic extinction of Neanderthals,” Timmermann says.
The model didn’t investigate what the specific competitive advantage may have been, although it could have included better tools, better offspring survival rates, or maybe even social hunting, he says.
Interbreeding human species
Stringer believes a number of small advantages allowed H sapiens to outcompete its cousins. “We know now that Neanderthals were very capable, but maybe H sapiens was just slightly more capable,” he says. Seemingly small innovations, such as weaving or sewing needles (both were known in the H sapiens fossil record from 35,000 and 30,000 years ago respectively), could have tipped the scales in H sapiens’s favor, he says.
“Once you weave, you can make baskets or snare nets… A sewing needle gives you a better seal [on materials], so you have better-insulated tents and you can keep your babies warm, which is of course critical for infant survival.” Larger social networks would also have allowed H sapiens to share such innovations, he adds.
Another possibility is that H sapiens assimilated its cousins into the gene pool – and there is genetic evidence that this did happen, although whether it is responsible for the disappearance of the other species is still contentious. Some people currently living in Eurasia have up to 2% Neanderthal DNA. In fact, some geneticists claim they can assemble about 40% of the Neanderthal genome from the sequences of living people.
Meanwhile, populations in Oceania, which comprises Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, have between 2% and 4% Denisovan DNA. Some groups have an even higher percentage. There’s also the tantalizing mystery of an unknown human ancestor, who contributed between 2% and 19% of their genetic ancestry to people living in west Africa today.
In 2020, two researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles obtained the genomes of more than 400 people living in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Gambia. They estimated that the ancient humans interbred with H sapiens in the region at some point in the last 124,000 years. “This raises an important philosophical argument,” says Scerri. “Did they really die out, or are they still with us in some way?”
Some groups – whether a different species or not – definitely fared better than others, with our own direct forebears surviving. This is in large part because of luck and their behavior, agree the experts I spoke to – and is something people living today need to recognize to overcome the challenges on the horizon.
“Networking is important, the ability to adapt to change is important, and that’s certainly something we’re all going to face with climate change,” says Stringer. “Humanity will be faced with either cooperating in the face of those crises or competing. And what we see from Neanderthals and H sapiens is that the groups that cooperated better were the ones that got through.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/nov/18/where-did-other-human-species-go-vanished-ancestors-homo-sapiens-neanderthals-denisovans?utm_source=pocket_collection_story
Leda and Swan, Tintoretto (Oriana: I chose this painting as comic relief)
*
ending on beauty:
EVERY SNOWFLAKE
“Every snowflake tells a story,”
the meteorologist explains.
Look, he says:
is your snowflake simple,
one ride up and down the atmosphere?
Or is it luxurious, crystal
branches feathering more crystal?
The snowflake that’s most exquisite
is the one that’s traveled farthest.
O silent six-pointed star,
what harsh heavens do you know?
Winter breath,
how far do you go?
Because the voyage must be made,
no matter how icy the wind,
how dark and heavy the clouds.
Let reckless faith
swirl us into beauty like a blizzard.
~ Oriana
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