Israel Killed 31 of My Family Members in Gaza. The Pro-Palestine Movement Isn’t Helping.
I remain very pro-Palestine. I’m also in favor of peace and pragmatism. I’m vehemently opposed to everything Hamas represents and all of their vile acts against the Israeli people. I also think Prime Minister Netanyahu is a war criminal, responsible for killing my family members along with tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza. He has blood on his hands and will not be easily forgiven. Balancing these multiple truths is not something many activists seem capable of doing. They’re genuinely unwilling to acknowledge that the goal should be coexistence. To achieve true peace and anything approaching a realistic solution, we need to talk to each other as equals.
The Great Awokening What happens to culture in an era of identity politics?
An artist can be so perfectly attuned to the moment that he or she makes machines precision engineered to flatter contemporary taste. An artist can also be so perfectly attuned to the moment that he or she sees what’s unsaid and so says something new. The first category is disposable; the second is not. The work of a critic — alert to ideals, alert to ambition — is to tell the difference.
Your Laughter Is My Trauma: Hannah Gadsby and the Comedic Art of Emotional Manipulation
But trauma is increasingly becoming the mark of honor in today’s vomitous culture of constant revelation. Hannah Gadsby and other high-profile confessors will be fine, with access to the kind of counselling and other services that exist to ease victims of trauma back into everyday life. But texts like Nanettecreate dramas of revelation and exposure that serve as templates for everyone else, and reinforce an already widespread cultural prerequisite that women in particular continually define themselves by their traumatized selves. Attend any social justice event on matters like prison abolition and you will find panels of mostly women, mostly women of color, often LGBTQ-identified, beginning their presentations with their tales of trauma. People who do this have spoken (usually privately, and only in trusted circles) that they are often explicitly told, by funders and “allies,” that they must present their tales of woe if they want to be taken seriously.
Paglia possesses all sorts of knowledge that any student could benefit from understanding. (Understanding doesn’t imply agreeing.) The identitarian conceit is that trans people and survivors of sexual assault can’t learn from Paglia, because she renders them “unsafe.” Meanwhile, cis white males are acculturated to believe that they can always learn from anyone, even professors overtly hostile to their race, sexual orientation, or gender identity. In this way, left-identitarianism encourages historically marginalized groups to believe that they are less resilient and less capable than their white, male classmates. They suggest, falsely, that “harm” is the only possible result of listening to controversial (or even offensive) ideas.
Camille Paglia: It’s Time for a New Map of the Gender World
The New Criticism desperately needed supplementation, but that opaque hash (so divorced from genuine art appreciation) was certainly not it. I was disgusted at the rapid spread of deconstruction and post-structuralism throughout elite U.S. universities in the 1970s, when I was teaching at my first job at Bennington College. The reason it happened is really quite prosaic: a recession hit in the 1970s, and the job market in academe collapsed. Fancy-pants post-structuralism was the ticket to ride for ambitious, beady-eyed young careerists on the make. Its coy, showy gestures and clotted lingo were insiders’ badges of claimed intellectual superiority. But the whole lot of them were mediocrities from the start. It is doubtful that much if any of their work will have long-term traction.
What Is a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP)?
Social stress is perceived as more taxing to most people than other types of stress. This kind of stress can be particularly difficult for someone who can perceive many different ways that things could go wrong in a conflict, for example, or can perceive hostility or tension where others may not notice it.
14 Things Highly Sensitive People Absolutely Need to Be Happy
Because most people are not highly sensitive, they simply don’t understand what it’s like to get very stressed out by, say, a startling noise, a busy weekend, or a violent scene in a movie. Not everyone will understand, and that’s okay. But what an HSP needs is at least a few people — preferably the people closest to them — to “get” their sensitivity. Someone who not only gets it, but helps protect them from overstimulation (“Yes, it’s perfectly okay that we leave the party now. I can see all over your face that you’re overstimulated.”). And, someone who sees all the wonderful gifts that come with this rare trait.
Opinion | We want objective judges and doctors. Why not journalists too?
Nor was the principle of objectivity “meant to imply that journalists were free of bias,” as Tom Rosenstiel, a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland and former executive director of the American Press Institute, and Bill Kovach, a former top editor, wrote in their book, “The Elements of Journalism.” “Quite the contrary,” they noted. The term arose “out of a growing recognition that journalists were full of bias, often unconsciously. Objectivity called for journalists to develop a consistent method of testing information — a transparent approach to evidence — precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work.”
Kathleen Stock: The Oxford kids are alright
This is not the fatuous argument, made by opportunistic identitarians and anti-woke warriors alike, that we should “listen to young people” — usually made while smoothly guiding listeners to exactly those young people whose views happen to coincide with their own. Nor is it the pretence that we oldies should just shut up and listen to young people generally, no matter what they say — as if today’s youth had miraculously gained hitherto unknown oracular powers, what with all that gaming and watching of TikTok videos. Of course, we shouldn’t be shy of arguing robustly with younger generations, when they talk what appears to be nonsense. They can both dish it and take it. The question is: can we?
Contrary to Blackhawk (and his reviewer), no American who received a basic elementary (let alone high-school) education nowadays can be unaware of the injustice and cruelty meted out to North America’s prior inhabitants as European settlers, themselves often fleeing poverty, oppression, starvation, and serfdom abroad, settled the frontier. But as with the Benin bronzes, we might wonder: how did the tribes inhabiting this continent at the time of European settlement themselves acquire their land? In all likelihood they did so by the conquest and expulsion of prior occupants. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, North America was not a continent of Edenlike peace and innocence. The New World was already rife with the same human violence that plagued the old. Should this country then not rather be judged, nowadays, by the unprecedented set of free political and economic institutions it established – and into which its native inhabitants were welcomed in the end?
How to Make Your Relationships Authentically Harmonious | by Anna Mercury
That it takes a monastic level of spiritual retreat to exist in surroundings that don’t reinforce the illusion that we are nouns, and by extension, good or bad nouns, is a sign that everything about our world is very, very messed up. Reality should not be a spiritual pursuit or a radical proposal. It should be a given. Instead, we live in such an intensely illusory world that reality seems foreign and otherworldly.
understood as the art of ‘sober calculation’ about ‘choice and avoidance’. Prudence helps us determine what produces pleasure over the long-term, encouraging us to choose pains that produce greater pleasure (eg, exercising to increase health), and avoiding pleasures if they result in more pain (eg, credit card debt; hangovers). Prudence, in other words, tells us that ‘drinking bouts and continuous partying’ are not a great life strategy. Prudence keeps us out of the proverbial gutter and helps us achieve or approximate tranquility.
Onomarie Uriri Honours Chude Jideonwo as He Turns 30! “A Birthday Tribute to the King of Misfits.
Those who have met Chude and interacted closely with him will attest to these three things: meeting Chude will confuse, challenge and eventually change you. Confuse you, because he’s thinking/doing a zillion and one things at the same time, and it’s hard to keep up. While you’re in 2015, I can assure you, that Chude has already scoped out 2045. Challenge you because, he never allows you to peacefully exist in a state of inertia or ordinariness. If you have a hidden skill or talent that you are leaving to waste, you can be sure that Chude will sniff it out and ensure you put it to good use. Change you because, though he is a prodigy, and by extension, naturally impatient,
Witch trials, TERF wars and the voice of conscience in a new podcast about J.K. Rowling.
The heroes in Rowling’s books are not flawless. They are not worthy of our blind adoration or tribal allegiance. They are at their best when they are listening, searching and doubting, acknowledging the complexity and diversity of the world around them. Perhaps Rowling could have remained silent, and remained beloved. But, for wrong or right, that is not what her heroes do.
The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido.
It’s a relief to see a film so frank about sex, and so open to sex’s complexities, especially when so much of current cinema is sexless to a disheartening degree. Sex isn’t just sex. It’s healing and cathartic and just plain old fun, fun with no object other than it’s fun to have fun. These are tough topics.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande rewrites onscreen nudity.
How much more shameful could we get than saying that this thing that keeps us alive and gives us pleasure and does all these things for you, the most important thing is how it looks. We say that to everyone – we say it to our kids and we say it to everyone around us and to ourselves. What a bloody waste of time and energy. That shame then leads into sexual shame. We are soaked in it, in a culture that tells us that. So we have to really try and stand outside of it. Ema [Thompson] likes to say it doesn’t necessarily mean self-love. It’s not looking at your body and going, ‘I love the way it looks’. It’s saying the way it looks isn’t the most important thing about it
It’s Good To Be Difficult: Shonda Rhimes’s Leadership Lessons.
I never thought there was a problem with being called bossy, bitchy, or difficult. That might be the way I was raised. I was the youngest of six, with a lot of sisters. It just never occurred to me “bossy” was a negative thing. Speaking my mind, standing up for what I want…I was raised to believe I belong in every single room I’ve ever been in. To be concerned that somebody else thinks I’m bossy or difficult suggests their opinion of me is more important than my own belief in myself.
Netflix’s ‘Harry & Meghan’ Review: A Royal Rerun
There’s an air of duty about the entire enterprise of “Harry & Meghan,” as if they’re honor-bound to keep reciting their personal story until we eventually lose interest.
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s “Against Decolonisation”
One can critique Eurocentric narratives, broaden one’s intellectual and cultural palate beyond the Euro-American canon and believe that African societies and cultures deserve respect and should not be slandered—without the specialised and mostly incomprehensible terminology, shrill posturing and reactionary pseudo-radicalism that define decolonial politics.
The Limits of ‘Lived Experience’
It’s essentially a turf war. Only Latino authors can write novels about Latinos. Only Holocaust survivors can convey the truth of the Holocaust. Only disabled people can portray disabled people. Everyone else is out.
This is one point of view, and as with most points of view, some of it is valid. Clearly those who have lived through something — whether it’s a tsunami or a lifetime of racial discrimination — have a story to tell. Their perspective is distinct and it’s valuable. But it is, crucially, only one perspective.
The inability to deal with the hassle, delay, setback, and nonsense, caused by a desire to squeeze maximum efficiency out of everything we do
