What about a life lived backward? It should be somewhere an impossible love story. Too much predictable and sometimes I get simply angry because of too much passivity from the part of the characters.
Thursday, 25 December 2008
Religion and purpose
The last Gallup poll made in 84 countries in 2007 found out that only 2% of all respondents worldwide said they were secular or nonreligious.
"As researchers have long noted, religiosity tends to be highest among poorer, less educated populations -- providing a source of hope where it is most needed. As these data indicate, religion can also provide a much-needed sense of direction for those to whom life might otherwise seem futile".
Hope(less)
They are situations where is no chance to change, even you thought you could. Sooner or later you'll find yourself trapped in a small empty room with high walls around, no way to overcome. They are places which cannot offer you anything, whatever powerful or blind your enthusiasm could be; sooner or later everything will have the same no-results outcome. Of course, they are people who are making possible such situations. They are playing very well their roles giving you the impression that you only have to wait - and wait, and wait - in order to get the best of him. But, after longer or shorter periods of time you'll discover that they don't have nothing to share and, in fact, you - and only you - was the one who invested in their chances. A dead horse, in fact.
Hope kills - time, energy, enthusiasm, life, relationships. If any self-esteem and self-awareness rest, the only normal way is to just left. The psychological mechanism of taking a decision - wrong or good, no matter, but the ability to say "yes" and "no", without the intermediate, non-logical, options "maybe", "perhaps" - is quite difficult, because the comfort looks always as the best choice ever, to be preferred to the unknown future. But, ever, if you'll look back you'll see that, in fact, over the years, nothing changed tremendously and, with or without you, the wheel is going on with or without you. So, it could be that your absence is not even noticed.
Hope kills - time, energy, enthusiasm, life, relationships. If any self-esteem and self-awareness rest, the only normal way is to just left. The psychological mechanism of taking a decision - wrong or good, no matter, but the ability to say "yes" and "no", without the intermediate, non-logical, options "maybe", "perhaps" - is quite difficult, because the comfort looks always as the best choice ever, to be preferred to the unknown future. But, ever, if you'll look back you'll see that, in fact, over the years, nothing changed tremendously and, with or without you, the wheel is going on with or without you. So, it could be that your absence is not even noticed.
Middle Ages nostalgia
The Pope talked about salvation of the Planet...What will be next? A new crusade? Thanks to the brilliant minds which made the Internet and the evolution of technique possible, he could call for a mass mobilization easier than in the Middle Ages times.
Madoff - to be continued
"Madoff case" is so different and needs not only special attention, but also a different media approach?
Shortly, how I see the case: Madoff is an American citizen (I hope I'm not wrong) who mismanaged and stolen the money of other fellow citizens and organizations from the States. Some of them are already bankrupt. It is a penal case and they are any other people involved, for sure. The overwhelming part of these organizations are Jewish. Madoff is accountable before the American laws and for sure he will be judged accordingly.
Where is the wrong spin?
In my opinion, in obsessively judging him from a Jewish perspective, trying to find the reasons why he did this to his fellows Jews, offering ammunition to Anti-Semits in "validating" their narrow minded theories for low IQ people.
In fact, I don't worry any single second this Madoff is Jewish and did this. I have nothing to do with this kind of guys. Why don't mention with the same frequency the ethnic affiliation and the religious grounds of Al Capone or of any other famous gangsters?
One of the main treats of Anti-Semitism is the oversimplification of characters and situations in order to fit the no-need-to-be proved assumptions. The mechanism of argumentation is very easy and sells. So, please, don't give up thinking, in any circumstances!
Shortly, how I see the case: Madoff is an American citizen (I hope I'm not wrong) who mismanaged and stolen the money of other fellow citizens and organizations from the States. Some of them are already bankrupt. It is a penal case and they are any other people involved, for sure. The overwhelming part of these organizations are Jewish. Madoff is accountable before the American laws and for sure he will be judged accordingly.
Where is the wrong spin?
In my opinion, in obsessively judging him from a Jewish perspective, trying to find the reasons why he did this to his fellows Jews, offering ammunition to Anti-Semits in "validating" their narrow minded theories for low IQ people.
In fact, I don't worry any single second this Madoff is Jewish and did this. I have nothing to do with this kind of guys. Why don't mention with the same frequency the ethnic affiliation and the religious grounds of Al Capone or of any other famous gangsters?
One of the main treats of Anti-Semitism is the oversimplification of characters and situations in order to fit the no-need-to-be proved assumptions. The mechanism of argumentation is very easy and sells. So, please, don't give up thinking, in any circumstances!
Monday, 22 December 2008
A Highly Evolved Propensity for Deceit
When considering the behavior of putative scam operators like Bernard “Ponzi scheme” Madoff or Rod “Potty Mouth” Blagojevich, feel free to express a sense of outrage, indignation, disgust, despair, amusement, schadenfreude. But surprise? Don’t make me laugh.
Sure, Mr. Madoff may have bilked his clients of $50 billion, and Governor Blagojevich, of Illinois, stands accused of seeking personal gain through the illicit sale of public property — a United States Senate seat. Yet while the scale of their maneuvers may have been exceptional, their apparent willingness to lie, cheat, bluff and deceive most emphatically was not.
Deceitful behavior has a long and storied history in the evolution of social life, and the more sophisticated the animal, it seems, the more commonplace the con games, the more cunning their contours.
In a comparative survey of primate behavior, Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland found a direct relationship between sneakiness and brain size. The larger the average volume of a primate species’ neocortex — the newest, “highest” region of the brain — the greater the chance that the monkey or ape would pull a stunt like this one described in The New Scientist: a young baboon being chased by an enraged mother intent on punishment suddenly stopped in midpursuit, stood up and began scanning the horizon intently, an act that conveniently distracted the entire baboon troop into preparing for nonexistent intruders.
Much evidence suggests that we humans, with our densely corrugated neocortex, lie to one another chronically and with aplomb. Investigating what they called “lying in day-to-day life,” Bella DePaulo, now a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues asked 77 college students and 70 people from the community to keep anonymous diaries for a week and to note the hows and whys of every lie they told.
Tallying the results, the researchers found that the college students told an average of two lies a day, community members one a day, and that most of the lies fell into the minor fib category. “I told him I missed him and thought about him every day when I really don’t think about him at all,” wrote one participant. “Said I sent the check this morning,” wrote another.
In a follow-up study, the researchers asked participants to describe the worst lies they’d ever told, and then out came confessions of adultery, of defrauding an employer, of lying on a witness stand to protect an employer. When asked how they felt about their lies, many described being haunted with guilt, but others confessed that once they realized they’d gotten away with a whopper, why, they did it again, and again.
In truth, it’s all too easy to lie. In more than 100 studies, researchers have asked participants questions like, Is the person on the videotape lying or telling the truth? Subjects guess correctly about 54 percent of the time, which is barely better than they’d do by flipping a coin. Our lie blindness suggests to some researchers a human desire to be deceived, a preference for the stylishly accoutred fable over the naked truth.
“There’s a counterintuitive motivation not to detect lies, or we would have become much better at it,” said Angela Crossman, an assistant professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “But you may not really want to know that the dinner you just cooked stinks, or even that your spouse is cheating on you.”
The natural world is rife with humbug and fish tales, of things not being what they seem. Harmless viceroy butterflies mimic toxic monarch butterflies, parent birds draw predators away from the nest by feigning a broken wing, angler fish lure prey with appendages that wiggle like worms.
Biologists distinguish between such cases of innate or automatic deception, however, and so-called tactical deception, the use of a normal behavior in a novel situation, with the express purpose of misleading an observer. Tactical deception requires considerable behavioral suppleness, which is why it’s most often observed in the brainiest animals.
Great apes, for example, make great fakers. Frans B. M. de Waal, a professor at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory University, said chimpanzees or orangutans in captivity sometimes tried to lure human strangers over to their enclosure by holding out a piece of straw while putting on their friendliest face.
“People think, Oh, he likes me, and they approach,” Dr. de Waal said. “And before you know it, the ape has grabbed their ankle and is closing in for the bite. It’s a very dangerous situation.”
Apes wouldn’t try this on their own kind. “They know each other too well to get away with it,” Dr. de Waal said. “Holding out a straw with a sweet face is such a cheap trick, only a naïve human would fall for it.”
Apes do try to deceive one another. Chimpanzees grin when they’re nervous, and when rival adult males approach each other, they sometimes take a moment to turn away and close their grins with their hands. Similarly, should a young male be courting a female and spot the alpha male nearby, the subordinate chimpanzee will instantly try to cloak his amorous intentions by dropping his hands over his erection.
Rhesus monkeys are also artful dodgers. “There’s a long set of studies showing that the monkeys are very good at stealing from us,” said Laurie R. Santos, an associate professor of psychology at Yale University.
Reporting recently in Animal Behavior, Dr. Santos and her colleagues also showed that, after watching food being placed in two different boxes, one with merrily jingling bells on the lid and the other with bells from which the clappers had been removed, rhesus monkeys preferentially stole from the box with the silenced bells. “We’ve been hard-pressed to come up with an explanation that’s not mentalistic,” Dr. Santos said. “The monkeys have to make a generalization — I can hear these things, so they, the humans, can, too.”
One safe generalization seems to be that humans are real suckers. After dolphin trainers at the Institute for Marine Mammals Studies in Mississippi had taught the dolphins to clean the pools of trash by rewarding the mammals with a fish for every haul they brought in, one female dolphin figured out how to hide trash under a rock at the bottom of the pool and bring it up to the trainers one small piece at a time.
We’re desperate to believe that what our loved ones say is true. And now we find otherwise. Oh, Flipper, et tu?
Milgram test validated: People 'still willing to torture'
BBC
December 19
Decades after a notorious experiment, scientists have found test subjects are still willing to inflict pain on others - if told to by an authority figure.
US researchers repeated the famous "Milgram test", with volunteers told to deliver electrical shocks to another volunteer - played by an actor. Even after faked screams of pain, 70% were prepared to increase the voltage, the American Psychologist study found. Both may help explain why apparently ordinary people can commit atrocities.
Yale University professor Stanley Milgram's work, published in 1963, recruited volunteers to help carry out a medical experiment, with none aware that they were actually the subject of the test. A "scientist" instructed them to deliver a shock every time the actor answered a question wrongly. When the pretend 150-volt shock was delivered, the actor could be heard screaming in pain, and yet, when asked to, more than eight out of ten volunteers were prepared to give further shocks, even when the "voltage" was gradually increased threefold.
Some volunteers even carried on giving 450-volt shocks even when there was no further response from the actor, suggesting he was either unconscious or dead.
Similar format
Dr Jerry Burger, of Santa Clara University, used a similar format, although he did not allow the volunteers to carry on beyond 150 volts after they had shown their willingness to do so, suggesting that the distress caused to the original volunteers had been too great.
Again, however, the vast majority of the 29 men and 41 women taking part were willing to push the button knowing it would cause pain to another human. Even when another actor entered the room and questioned what was happening, most were still prepared to continue. He told Reuters: "What we found is validation of the same argument - if you put people in certain situations, they will act in surprising and maybe often even disturbing ways. He said that it was not that there was "something wrong" with the volunteers, but that when placed under pressure, people will often do "unsettling" things.
Even though it was difficult to translate laboratory work to the real world, he said, it might partly explain why, in times of conflict, people could take part in genocide.
Complex task
Dr Abigail San, a chartered clinical psychologist, has recently replicated the experiment for a soon-to-be-aired BBC documentary - all the way up to the 450-volt mark, again finding a similar outcome to Professor Milgram. "It's not that these people are simply not good people any more - there is a massive social influence going on." She said that the volunteers were being asked to carry out a complex task in aid of scientific research, and became entirely focused on it, with "little room" left for considering the plight of the person receiving the shock. "They tend to identify massively with the 'experimenter', and become very engaged and distracted by the research.
"There's no opportunity for them to say 'What's my moral stand on this?'"
See also:
The Clichés of Our Lives
Forward.com
December 18
By Noam Neusner
At a recent bat mitzvah party, as the Village People’s “YMCA” played, my wife remarked to me that it may be time to retire that unique piece of American kitsch. Give it a rest for a decade. After that, if we think it’s still amusing to spell out letters with our arms, fine, bring it back. But we may discover that there are other ways to express ourselves joyously, and we’ll just move on.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we did the same in American Judaism? So much habit, so much built-up cultural “heritage.” American Jews don’t experience Jewish things — we just submit to the routine of them.
Time for some retirements. Let’s look for the worst of our own built-up and sclerotic habits, and get rid of them for a little while — say, 10 years. After that, we will be free to adopt them anew — or not.
I have a few thoughts of where we could start. I don’t propose doing away with anything required by Halacha — after all, we already do away with too much of that by choice. Rather, let’s focus on what some people call tradition and what I call inertia. Here are my nominations:
Gefilte fish, Manischewitz wine, cholent: Nothing against Jewish soul food in general, but if you were to describe the concept of gefilte fish to someone unfamiliar with it, you’d question eating it as well. Kosher wine has long surpassed the machinery oil quality of Manischewitz, and it is preposterous that our religious ceremonies should be consecrated with such swill. Meanwhile, cholent may have a utilitarian value to those who won’t use an oven on Shabbat, but let’s face it, anything cooked on something called a “blech” is going to retain some of that quality. Let’s eat what Israelis eat — that’s our real soul food.
“Fiddler on the Roof,” especially “Sunrise, Sunset” at weddings: “Fiddler” is now in its post-cliché phase, so perhaps it’s too late to retire it, since it may already be on its way out. But a forced closure would do it some good.
Task forces: Most task forces neither accomplish any task nor have any force. Yet they continue to populate the flow charts of Jewish organizations, usually in an effort to create the impression of consensus in crisis. We are already a community of committees. Better for us to hire a bunch of benign dictators to ram through unpopular but necessary solutions to languishing problems.
The phrase “tikkun olam”: Wiser minds than I have already exploded the misconception that tikkun olam is a commandment from the Torah. Where it exists as a concept in rabbinic Judaism, it does not mean what lefty Jews think it means. Worse yet, tikkun olam has become a cliché of progressive Judaism, a bumper sticker slapped on virtually any social cause that comes along. Progressive Jews need a new motto, and they would find one if they dug deeper into the texts than they do. Here’s a good excuse to do so.
Second Day of yom tov/eighth day of Passover: My friend Tevi Troy points out that we live in an age of atomic clocks. So why live with the fiction that we don’t know exactly when Jewish holidays begin and end? Given the scientific precision brought to all matters of halachic observance — shatnez, kashrut and rabbinic permission for embryonic stem cell research, surrogacy and other biomedical advances — maybe we should also wipe away an onerous and unnecessary weight on Diaspora Jewry.
Shiny satin kippot: Honestly, I would rather wear the flimsy, black, “who wore this last?” giveaway than a preposterously bright and poor-fitting monochrome satin kippah. Most men look ridiculous in them, and toss them after one wearing. If our community agreed to simple black or white cotton kippot — or any variety of suede, velvet or knit — for at least a few years, no one would complain.
New Haggadot: My friend Saul Kelner questions why publishers are always rolling out new versions of the Passover Haggadah. Fair point. Compared with the giveaway versions from Maxwell House, most of the new ones are over-illustrated and over-written. New Haggadot are the equivalent of celebrity-sung Christmas song collections — do we really need yet another version of a classic?
Fundraising dinners/testimonials: If the Bernie Madoff scandal teaches us anything, it is the danger of macher envy — wanting to be toasted as a “leader” in some fundraising dinner often leads to unspeakable acts of stupidity and vanity. Please, spare me — and spare the lives of hundreds of thousands of chickens who give their lives every year to be picked at by bored dinner guests as others give windbag speeches. Jewish philanthropies are now in crisis mode. Cancel the galas, and start raising money by impressing people, not by feeding them dinner.
Publicly uttered prayer for the sick/prayer for the USA/prayer for Israel: This is the section of the Shabbat morning service when everything comes to a grinding halt. At some synagogues, the names of the ill are uttered aloud, as if God must be reminded of those who are sick. (“Oh yeah, I forgot about Bessie’s gallstones.”) The prayers for the United States and Israel are no less tiresome, accompanied often by op-ed commentaries or news summaries by the rabbi. If American Judaism wants a two-hour Shabbat morning service (and judging by sparse attendance when services actually begin, I’m betting it does), here’s the first thing that can get boiled down.
Nine nominations for temporary retirement. I probably could go on longer, but I don’t want to face the same fate.
Noam Neusner served as President Bush’s principal economic and domestic policy speechwriter from 2002 to 2004.
Hurricane "Madoff"
An approximation of the losses provoked by Madoff, via Forward.com. In the case of Elie Wiesel foundation, almost all the assets are lost and any contribution is welcomed. The effects could be feel for years.
Novel delivers Yiddish intellectual world with zest
Chauncey Mabe
Sun Sentinel
Reviewing each new book by Curt Leviant, I open with some variant of the same line: "Curt Leviant is the best unknown novelist in America." His latest gives no cause to change that practice.
Set in New York in the early 1970s, "A Novel of Klass" takes place in the overlapping realms of Manhattan's art scene and the fading Yiddish intellectual world, once centered on The Jewish Daily Forward, which produced such talents as Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Ayzik Klass, Holocaust survivor and self-styled "Yiddish painter," has worked in obscurity for decades, known only to a small coterie of fellow Jewish intellectuals, when by chance he meets a gallery owner named Breslauer at a bookstore.
Breslauer, visiting Klass' small apartment, is impressed to learn the old painter was a friend of Marc Chagall's. Looking at Klass' own pictures - all with Holocaust themes - he's amazed to see they are works of real artistic value.
But Breslauer's efforts to mount a show and gain Klass the attention he deserves (and make some money in the process) are complicated by the artist's wife, Griselda, a homely woman with the figure of a goddess. She's also paranoid, scheming, endlessly argumentative. She takes an instant dislike to Breslauer.
Further barriers arise in the form of Gimpl Englander, a Yiddish poet in a long-running feud with Klass; a gentile Holocaust expert who turns up embarrassing information about Griselda, and Klass' own eccentricities.
Writing with verve and wit, Leviant mines his story for sly comedy. He writes with great affection of his characters and their foibles, yet avoids sentimentality. Here, for example, is the Yiddish speaker Englander struggling with English: "A good thing is worth repeating. Like Emerson said, 'A hobgoblin is the inconsistency of little minds.' "
Leviant's use of Yiddish words and phrases, and the layering of Yiddish rhythms into the English prose, recalls Junot Diaz's use of Spanglish in "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao."
Indeed, if Diaz were a retired Jewish scholar and translator, instead of a young, Latin, English professor, this is the kind of novel he might write.
For all of its comic brio, "A Novel of Klass" is about the Holocaust and the price exacted from its survivors. Leviant shows it can be refreshed by the application of talent, sensibility and energy.
Friday, 19 December 2008
Las Vegas mood, not for all
The state where you could get married easier in the States is Nevada. But, this gambling is having its limits: you need to belong to a religious congregation. Otherwise - if you are an atheist - you can't.
Thursday, 18 December 2008
Wednesday, 17 December 2008
Knowledge management
How much you could plan your knowledge? I mean, to plan carefully what do you want to know about a certain topic and look only to enrich your information about this (and not something else). So, you type on Google and you have hundreds of options. Some of them are related, some not. From those related to your subject, you still need more information and you go further, on another bough. And, from there, on another one. Finally, you discover to know a bit more about everything. What we acknowledge very often because of the Internet - but still not everything is on-line; it is only an amplification of our pains - is the unlimited knowledge and the extremely limited capacity of our knowledge.
Blindness
The Brazilian director Ferdnando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardner) adapted recently Saramago's novel. The movie opened this year Cannnes festival.
Cast: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga, Yusuke Iseya, Yoshino Kimura, Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal
The pandemic is simply testing the human limits, which, as it's already certified, aren't too generous. In Canada, the presentation of the movie was accompanied by protests from the part of the Canadian Federation of the Blind, against the way in which blindness is portrayed. Characters are loosing their humanity when they are loosing their sight. Which in real life could happen all the time, in the case of decisions took with the eyes wide open. And not only those who cannot see their immorality act without regret.
Sunday, 14 December 2008
Writing in the Dark, By David Grossman
The Independent
Reviewed by Michael Glover
The Israeli novelist David Grossman has always written from a position of impassioned embattlement. Born in the 1960s, he has matured as man and writer during the very same decades that
For Grossman, there is no possibility of creating a body of writing which is not intruded upon by politics. This new book, a slim volume of essays which characteristically shifts from fiction to politics and back again, reflects upon his own maturing as man and writer, and it continues to ask – as his fiction always asks – the most difficult and searching questions of the state to which he belongs.
In this book Grossman analyses his own fictional procedures. What has his writing been good for? How has it helped him to engage with the day to day realities of life in a fragile state surrounded by enemies? Fiction, he argues, has helped him to fight back against the entrenched belief that
This is a powerfully humanistic vision for fiction. It gives back to fiction a mighty role for good, if what Grossman says is true. "Literature," he thunders, "reminds us of our duty to demand from ourselves the right to individuality and uniqueness." The message sounds almost touchingly old-fashioned, that literature should be thought to be capable of offering us counsel and even be capable of healing us of our terrible, distorted perceptions of reality. Can literature really be that important?
Yes, says Grossman, to a novelist such as himself who grew up in an atmosphere of silence – the silence of the unspoken horrors of the Holocaust – and fragmented whispers; who grew up in a society haunted by the dread of death; who grew up in a society which has known strife, both internal and external, for the best part of 40 years, and which still longs for the easy sense of everydayness that more settled societies enjoy almost as a matter of course. Literature has its place of honour amid all this terrible fragility. Why? Because literature, at its best, individualises; it plucks the reader out of the anonymous masses. It "redeems for us the tragedy of the one from the statistics of the millions". '
This kind of vision has no time for the nonsense of abstruse theorising about the nature of fictive language. Literature is weaponry in a battle to the death against the forces of destruction and unreason.
Grossman's words have a tremendous, forceful eloquence about them, from first to last. They are a delight to read, and all the more so because his English is slightly fractured, slightly odd. Their power reminds one of the poems Miroslav Holub wrote under Communism. Here are writers witness to injustice, fighting back against the corrosive power of ossified attitudes and partial truths.
Will they still sing quite so impressively, and quite so eloquently, when
Thursday, 4 December 2008
"Why believe in a god?"
The atheist campaign is in Washington DC, with a inspirer headline than in London: "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake". The advertiser is the American Humanist Association, which is putting $40,000 into the holiday campaign. I'm curious where it will be the next stop. It seems it's a huge room for a permanently improving. What a about a campaign running under the logo: "No God! Start living!" or "No God! Enjoy life!"?
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