INTERESTING TIMES

When stupidity is considered
patriotism,
it is unsafe
to be intelligent.
--Isaac Asimov, quoted in TheBulwark.com

 On Tuesday this week I attended the opening lecture of a lecture series hosted by the nonprofit organization Portland Literary Arts.  I had little idea what to expect.  The speaker was someone I hadn't heard of, or at least didn't remember, but I will remember him now.  The name is George Packer.  He was a staff writer for the New Yorker for a long time, and now is on staff writing for The Atlantic.  He also has written some books and essays, largely about culture and politics.

I was impressed.  He was there to promote his latest book, Our Man, which is about the controversial diplomate Richard Holbrook and the old America that he symbolizes.  The new America is something different.  Packer understands the changes in our culture better than most and I fully intend to seek out his writing in the future.  I have probably read him in the past but the name did not stick in my head.

Our Man is written in an unusual style for a biography.  Rather than being overfull of dates and details, it is told in narrative style by a fictional narrator who is older than the author.  The narrator was "there" for the whole story, and tells it in a style that the author repeated calls "a yarn".  I'm sure it will be a good read, and I will read it as soon as the demand for it at the library goes down a bit.

The book that he wrote in 2013 is called The Unwinding and it is about the cultural shifts that led to the election of Trump--except that at the time nobody knew it would lead there.  It is on my reading list.  The NY Times says it explains why Trump was elected.  For many of us that bears some thought.

When Packer first took the stage he looked up at the audience in the Schnitzer auditorium and he said that Portland is not the biggest city, but it was the biggest crowd.  The auditorium is huge and a beauty.  It holds 2,500 people, and it was full.  After his talk he took out his phone and photographed the crowd from his view on the stage.

Portland, Oregon is an interesting place, full of many highly educated individuals who dearly want to save the world.  They share Packer's sadness and fear about the changes that have come to our country and our politics in the last 20 years.  The patterns of applause during the Q&A period at the end reveal the overall agreement of this crowd with Packer's assessment of what is happening because of Trump.  His answer to the question about Syria (after the Trump-licensed Turkish bombing of the Kurds) made the situation more clear to me than months of reading in the Times.

Packer recommended three books to read (not his own) at the end of the talk.  I put them all on my library list but the one that really excites me is more current.  It is called Intellectuals and Race, by Thomas Sowell.  Amazon says it is an inclusive critique of the intellectual's destructive role in shaping ideas about race in America.  Other sources talk about how much ruckus this book has raised.  Intellectuals don't like to be criticised but in this day and age, they need to respond to criticism rather than dismissing it.

I would say that the ivory tower has made some missteps in shaping ideas about sexuality and gender, too.  I have been subject to some pretty strong progressive brainwashing in this town and witnessed it being misused to shame and alienate.  We would do well to pay attention to George Packer and other thoughtful people in the future as we try to find a way out of the stalemate we are in culturally and politically.  Our democracy is on its way toward failure and if we care about this experiment enough to continue it, we need to find a way that we can talk across the rather deep divisions.

It's 3:44 am and I've been restless, unsleeping.  I slept at first then woke with thoughts of Epstein, who just suicided because he didn't want to sit through a long trial about his sex trafficking of young girls.  He didn't want to be someone's bitch in prison after having made so many young girls serve as his bitch.  According to one report I read he wanted to inseminate as many women as possible to bear his children.  I wonder how many of his progeny already exist in the world.  According to another report he wanted his head and penis cryogenically preserved after his death.  I wonder if his penis is frozen somewhere after his ignominious suicide in prison.  I wonder how many American men secretly hold him as a hero.  He got stinkin' filthy rich though I read that it's not because of his skill as a financial manager.  He must have got that rich because men will pay a lot of money for girls they can abuse and get away with it.  This is one horror of our culture.

Then Lorena Bobbit came to mind.  She's the woman who cut off her husband's penis and threw it out the car window as she was driving away.  I saw a recent news bit about her, she's doing fine.  She did remark that everybody was fascinated about the penis, which was found and reattached.  Her husband went on to be a porn star, I imagine abusing women on camera.  People weren't nearly as interested in why she did it.  Why did she cut it off?  I'd bet she was furious.  She said it was because her husband "forced himself on her".  Not just once: many times.   She didn't use the word rape but I will.  Her husband considered sex with her to be his right and he raped her, so much and so unpleasantly that she was angry enough to cut off his penis.  Temporary insanity sounds like a nice plea deal but not the truth.  The truth is something more like justice.  If rape doesn't sound like a bad enough crime to you to justify that punishment, you are probably a man.

Another thing that comes to mind is this article, The Female Price of Male Pleasure.  This is truth.  Men get their rocks off and women tolerate.  The woman's pleasure is rarely a priority, much less her orgasm.  Men just want to get off.  If she's uncomfortable or in pain, they ignore it.  If she seeks medical help for her discomfort in sex, her care is not as well covered by insurance as his is for getting an erection.  As if men have more of a right to a big fat erection than women have to not be hurt.  Part of the obliviousness of men is because testosterone makes them that way.  They are impulsive and aggressive because their hormones make them that way.  Sex is an obsession dictated by evolution.  But their selfish behavior is in part due to a gender imbalance in our culture.

How many husbands have wives that never have orgasms, with them at least?  How many even know that or give a damn?  I know only about a few, but that's because they've confessed to me in private.  Usually the blame is on the woman for not doing what it takes to have an orgasm.  What if the whole experience is so unpleasant that women wait for the man to get off and fake orgasms so that they can be set free from the imbalanced sexual process for at least a few more hours?  Lots, that's my estimate.

I know all of this from my own experience.  My best lover ever was a woman.  We didn't have the hottest sex in the world, but she made the effort to give me orgasms.  She was sensitive and curious enough to learn how, and she taught me the lesbian creed of reciprocality.  Our orgasms might not happen at the same time, but we can each give the other one.  Lesbians emphasize this.  It just doesn't happen in many male-female relationships.  The male's orgasm is all that matters--the female can "take care of herself".  The male gets resentful if he has to "take care of himself".  This is disgusting.

My lesbian lover knew from her own experience how sensitive a woman's breasts are, how they can be used to excite, and how easily they can be hurt.  I can't tell you how many times a man has been cruel to my breasts and painfully pinched the nipple or grabbed one in his hand and squeezed it like a water balloon.  My breasts are not for men.  If men cannot use them to give me pleasure, they do not get to touch them.

And then there is porn.  You don't have to look much to know that one of the biggest themes is domination and abuse of females by males.  To start with females are expected to be unnaturally shaven and denuded of protective hair.  To follow up with that we're supposed to enjoy being tied up, abused, ejaculated on.  Maybe some do enjoy this but I can tell you that the vast majority of women want to be caressed and adored, we want to be seduced, not raped.  But a whole lot of really sad young men have their only sexual experiences interacting with this twisted porn, and it makes them even more messed up than they were to start with.  How are they going to learn how to seduce a woman from this?

So in addition to all the other crises facing our time, there is this.  Women are deeply angry because we've come to realize that we've been mistreated and it does not have to be this way.  The sexual imbalance in our culture has come into very clear focus.  We are furious.  Sexism in sexuality is an ugly thing.  Men can't help that they have testosterone and are horny, but they can decide to be egalitarian, they can learn to be good lovers and sensitive partners.  They can take on the lesbian practice of reciprocality in pleasure and orgasm.  For many in the boomer generation it may be too late; they are stuck in their ways.  But for Gen X and onward I think there is still hope that men and women can find a new equilibrium in which women's pleasure is given at least equal priority and men don't think they have a right to sex in spite of how unpleasant it is for their partner, much less license to rape little girls or their wives.

I suppose we have the creep in chief to thank for this nexus.  His naked misogyny in addition to the nasty racism has emboldened a lot of creeps to act out, and women have had to defend ourselves more and more.  A supreme court justice who probably had some fun at the expense of many young women is just one of three accused on our highest court.  The reversal of Roe v Wade is on the horizon, and with that men will be able to legally hijack a woman's body for the purpose of propagating their sperm.  Add to that the fact that abortion is getting harder to access even before the Roe reversal, and that in some states rapists have parental rights, and we have even more reasons to be furious.

I'm not in favor of abortion in general, I think it is an archaic solution to a problem that should be addressed much earlier in the sequence of events.  No woman should be raped or in any other way get pregnant when she is not prepared to raise a child.  But this is another issue that would require all night to even just begin writing about.  Then there's income equality which puts women in a dependent position, and many more sticky wickets.  The pit is deep.

But just one more thing.  We have every right and reason to be angry.  Women have been through a lot of crap in service to men's desires, and it is our turn to serve ourselves.  It is our turn not just to have pleasure instead of pain, but to run this place and change the culture.  We are not bitches, we are justified and motivated.  We don't need men; we only need sperm if we want babies.  Justice may be a ways off but I can smell it through my tears.  Look out all you creepy guys who buy and bully for sex.  The world is changing.

Thy noodle come, Thy sauce be yum, on top some grated Parmesan. Give us this day our garlic bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trample on our lawns. And lead us not into vegetarianism, but deliver us some pizza, for thine is the meatball, the onion, and the bay leaves, forever and ever.

Amen.

--John Scott 

There are lots of theories about what names do to us.  The trends in the naming of babies also say things about what is happening in our culture. 

It was only about a decade ago that "Noah" suddenly took the lead as top boy's name...suggesting to me that a lot of people from a Christian culture were getting worried about some great catastrophe like maybe sea level rise.  Instead of thinking that your kiddos are going to suffer because of global warming, it's much more enjoyable to convince yourself that they will be saviors.

I just read that since 2015 the name "Donald" is down by 11%, whereas "Melania" is up 227% and "Ivanka" is up 362%.  Guess the women in that family are more worthy.

 Yoga has the potential to transform both our inner and outer selves in a way that would allow us to see past differences of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and any other artificial identities we create, to be able to recognize the presence of the divine in one another and all of existence.

Suhag Shukla, executive director of the Hindu American Foundation

There are those who would say I am an a-hole because I have a hard time telling apart the three Indian men that I know.  They are all great people, and I really have nothing against their origins or accent or skin tone.  I just didn't grow up around people from India.  I knew more people of African and Asian origin, and they look less the same to me than people from India.  I was slightly reassured that I am not actually an a-hole when I read this article (below).  World wide, across many cultures, people are likely to have difficulty distinguishing individuals of a race that is entirely unfamiliar.  This is not xenophobia, and it is not a-holishness.  It is just a fact of our evolution, or rather a fact of brain development.

In our first couple years of lives our brains grow very large.  Neural connections form based on our experience.  When we do not have experience of something, part of the brain gets "pruned" away.  A lot of pruning happens when we are toddlers.  It has to happen because we are having a lot of experiences and the brain has to get rid of unused parts in order to make room for all the connections we are making based on living a rich life.  When I was toddling, I didn't know any Indian men.  When I met one or two later they were unusual and they got lumped together into a category.  Now that I'm in my 50's I'm finding it embarrassingly hard to rewire fast enough to keep up with all the new people in my world.

It occurs to me that not being able to tell people apart is a basis for fear.  It is perhaps one of the reasons that humans are naturally untrusting of those who look very different from themselves.



RACIAL PROSOPAGNOSIA 2017

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/some-people-suffer-from-face-blindness-for-other-races/

Some People Suffer from Face Blindness for Other Races

Certain individuals are seriously impaired when it comes to recognizing individuals of another color

By Agata Blaszczak-Boxe on May 1, 2017

We tend to be worse at telling apart faces of other races than those of our own race, studies have found. Now research shows some people are completely blind to features that make other-race faces distinct. Such an impairment could have important implications for eyewitness testimony in situations involving other-race suspects.

The ability to distinguish among members of one's own race varies wildly: some people can tell strangers apart effortlessly, whereas others cannot even recognize the faces of their own family and friends (a condition known as prosopagnosia). Psychologist Lulu Wan of the Australian National University and her colleagues wanted to quantify the distribution of abilities for recognizing other-race faces. They asked 268 Caucasians born and raised in Australia to memorize a series of six Asian faces and conducted the same experiment, involving Caucasian faces, with a group of 176 Asians born and raised in Asia who moved to Australia to attend university. In 72 trials, every participant was then shown sets of three faces and had to point to the one he or she had learned in the memorization task.

The authors found that 26 Caucasian and 10 Asian participants—8 percent of the collective study population—did so badly on the test that they met the criteria for clinical-level impairment. “We know that we are poor at recognizing other-race faces,” says Jim Tanaka, a professor of psychology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, who was not involved in the research. “This study shows just how poor some people are.” Those individuals “would be completely useless in terms of their legal value as an eyewitness,” says study co-author Elinor McKone, a professor of psychology at the Australian National University. The world's legal systems do not, however, take into account individual differences in other-race face recognition, she notes.

One's lifetime level of exposure to other races could factor into a person's ability to recognize people of another color, according to the findings published in the January issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Among 106 Asian participants born and raised in Australia, only about 3 percent were blind to Caucasian faces. In comparison, nearly 6 percent of the Asians born and raised in Asia had the impairment.

The effect extends to other races, too. In a study published in 2001 in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, black people recruited in South African shopping malls, who had average levels of interracial contact, were better at recognizing faces of their own race than of others.

This article was originally published with the title "Are You Blind to Faces of Other Races?"

 

 

"You can kill a man,
but you can't kill an idea."
--Medgar Evers before his own assasination 

Whenever I bemoan the culture of "safe spaces" and "microaggressions" on college campuses, said Andrew Sullivan, people argue that "the real world isn't like that."  But that's no longer true.  More and more of our public discourse is now shaped by the neo-Marxist Left's "identity-based, 'social justice" worldview, in which all interactions are defined by a hierarchy of power and oppression.   Free speech itself is falling into disrepute, as a tool of the patriarchy.  When some feminists recently got wind of a forthcoming Harper's essay criticizing the #MeToo movement, they not only personally vilified author Katie Roiphe, they also tried to force the magazine to drop the piece before publication--a "real-world echo" of students shouting down speakers.  Writers, like students, now know that one "incorrect" opinion on sensitive issues of race and gender can result in "instant social ostracism" and demands they be fired--so they remain silent.  Men cannot discuss sexual harassment; whites cannot talk about racism.  The goal of our society is not "the emancipation of the individual," but permanent placement of the individual in the proper identity group: white, black, brown, female, gay, etc.  "We used to call that bigotry.  Now we call it being woke."

--Summary of Andrew Sullivan's article (NYMag.com) from The Week February 23, 2018.