Thursday, December 19, 2024

Sleep: Three quotes

person with electrodes stuck to head

It's a purposeful irony of life, I suppose, that we never get to see ourselves in that state. We can only pay witness to our waking reflection, which to one degree or another is always fretting or afraid. Maybe that's why young parents find it so beguiling to spy on their children when they're fast asleep.

— Amor Towles. Rules of Civility (2011). New York: Penguin Books, 2012.


Spending evenings in front of a glowing computer, TV, or cellphone screen can put you at risk of depression, Science News reports. Nighttime exposure to light from gadgets has already been shown to contribute to insomnia, cancer, obesity, and diabetes. Now, a new study shows that screen glow can cause mood-related changes in the brain. For weeks, researchers exposed hamsters to eight hours a night of dim light — like that from a TV screen — instead of their usual eight hours of pitch darkness. They found that the rodents became lethargic and ignored their favorite sugary treats, suggesting that they weren't deriving "pleasure out of activities they once enjoyed" — a major indication of depression in humans, says study author Tracy Bedrosian. The rodents' brains also showed the same kinds of changes in the hippocampus that are common in depressed people. "The good news," Bedrosian says, is that the damage disappeared and the rodents' behavior returned to normal after researchers took the night lights away, meaning that simply powering down earlier may "undo some of the harmful effects" that late-night gadget users face. Over the past 50 years, depression rates in the U.S. have increased dramatically as artificial lighting at night has become more common.

— "Screen-viewing blues," The Week, August 10, 2012, p. 19.


As historian Robert Ekirch writes, sleeping for one uninterrupted interval is simply a function of artificial light and the industrial revolution. Before electricity and factories, segmented sleep — sleeping in two intervals — was all the rage. Benjamin Franklin was a fan: Between “first sleep” and “second sleep” he would get naked, throw open the windows and take cold air baths. The French called the period between the two sleeps “dorveille,” while the English called it “the watch.” Both terms sound ancient and spooky in a cool way, which made me search for other people who embrace this period of sleeplessness. On Medium, Ron Geraci describes this state as “an odd, placid form of being awake — more aware but less alert…a ripe sentience that allowed clear but limited thought and wanted stillness.”

* * *

...a shout out to the true sleep rebels, our beloved night owls. While they don’t necessarily have “two sleeps,” they do find themselves hyper-focused in the middle of the night. A self-described night owl, Stefanie Morejon, writes on Medium that her behavior is perhaps evolutionary, essential for human survival. “Somebody,” she writes, “had to stay awake to keep the fires burning, to protect the community and keep the night creatures at bay.”

— Adeline Dimond, "It’s not (always) insomnia, it’s segmented sleep," Medium Newsletter, December 19, 2024


Friday, December 13, 2024

Two thoughts on activism

How persecution affects consciousness

"Any temptation I had at age twenty-three to categorize oppressed people in binaries, as either heroic resisters or unjust victims, was ended." Wonderful to see this new piece from Natalie Zemon Davis, with forward by Stefan Hanß #OpenAccess #EarlyModern 🗃️ www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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— Brodie Waddell (@brodiewaddell.bsky.social) September 23, 2024 at 3:37 AM

Quote: "I was without a passport and not part of a university community for years. This article reflects on the impact of this experience of persecution on my work as a historian, and the relationship between politics, activism, and what Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre called ‘the historian’s craft’ and ‘consciousness’."

Experiencing Exclusion: Scholarship after Inquisition Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2024. Natalie Zemon Davis and Stefan Hanß.

People feel that standing up for a cause makes them 'happy'

You shouldn't take action because it will make you feel good; you should do it because it's the right thing to do.

I believe the concept of "happiness" in this discourse functions to say that people are intrinsically motivated to do what we feel is right, and that this intrinsic motivation delivers a long-term "reward" in terms of brain chemistry.

From a 15-year-old article by Drake Bennett:

At least if recent research is to be believed, political activism, no matter the cause, seems to make people happy - even if they don’t win an election or triumph in a ballot initiative. Psychologists curious about what fuels human happiness have looked at political engagement and political activism, and they’ve found that it provides people with a sense of empowerment, of community, of freedom, and of transcendence.

* * *

It’s not just a life of self-denying dedication to a larger cause but a pursuit with immediate and enduring psychic rewards.

* * *

They gave their subjects, again college students, a survey about the food in the dining hall. Some were given questions that primed them to think about what Kasser and Klar call the “ethical-political aspects” of the food: For example, they read a statement asserting that the cafeteria should offer fair trade products, then were asked to rate the importance of two different rationales offered for that decision. Another group was given suggestions that focused on apolitical aspects like the variety and the taste of the food. Both groups were then asked to write a note to the cafeteria director about the aspect of the food that was most important to them. ... “What we found,” says [Tim] Kasser, “was that the activist felt significantly more vital and alive and energized than did the nonactivist group.”

* * *

Other studies, including one in 2001 by the psychologists Holly Hart, Dan McAdams, Barton Hirsch, and Jack Bauer, found that activism was strongly correlated with a quality called generativity, a sense of responsibility for others. And generativity, several studies have found, is in turn correlated with happiness.

* * *

The power of political activism, says Kasser, is that it manages to provide so many of the requirements for human happiness. It gives people a sense of efficacy and a conviction that they are changing their world. It provides an often rich social network. Because political causes are freely chosen, activism enhances a person’s sense of their own independence. And it gives a sense of self-transcendence, of being a part of something larger than your own individual concerns. All of these things, Kasser says, have been shown to make us happier.

Other researchers question whether there’s anything special about activism’s ability to make us happy. Tom Sander, the director of the Saguaro Seminar, a Harvard initiative studying levels of trust and civic engagement in American society, points to Saguaro research on religious belief, another reliable predictor of happiness. What’s interesting about religion, he points out, is that the actual believing part doesn’t seem to account for the greater happiness. What does account for it is the deeply social nature of churches and synagogues and mosques.

“It’s not how often they pray or belief about the afterlife or any content from the pulpit,” he says. The best predictor of happiness is “the number of friends they have at church.”

"The upside of 'down with.'" Drake Bennett. The Boston Globe: Ideas. October 11, 2009.

old painting of two white people

Saturday, November 9, 2024

We keep hoping that if we look harder, we'll find the answer

Today's trans teaching:

"What I want to suggest is not that accounts of the archive’s absences are misguided per se but rather that we consider the extent to which theories of the damaged or incomplete archive are animated by a tacit injunction to historical recovery. Operative within this language of lack is, I think, what Arondekar has called queer history’s “seduction of access” and the concomitant privileging of recuperative reading practices. Even as queer critiques of the archive proliferate, and the turn to alternative archives becomes increasingly common, there remains a conviction that whatever it is that we hope to find can, in fact, be known—that it can do something for our narrative and political possibilities if only we can develop more capacious and oppositional ways to look [emphasis mine]. The critique of sexuality’s incitement to discourse has not, in the end, deterred formidable efforts to make a supposedly taciturn archive speak, and scholars (within and beyond historical studies) have continually labored at reading and creating the queer archive anew. As in Derrida’s account, the archive stands as a primary site of queer historical loss but also, importantly, of possibility. As such, the array of discourses that self-describe as critiques of the archive collectively emerges as a return to and reaffirmation of the archive’s ultimate promise. These discussions evince an apparent faith that if only the archive can be found or created, can be deciphered or coaxed into revealing our mystified pasts, then we will be able to claim our own history that restores."

— Abram J. Lewis. “‘I Am 64 and Paul McCartney Doesn’t Care’: The Haunting of the Transgender Archive and the Challenges of Queer History.” Radical History Review, no. 120 (2014): 13–34. This passage is from p. 17. doi 10.1215/01636545-2703697

The part I bolded is cited to Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 6.

stack of books

Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Self-immolations

There is a personal reason I take note of this phenomenon.

"[Journalist Samuel] Mena, of Phoenix, ignited his left arm — becoming the second person this year to set fire to themselves in the nation’s capital to protest Israel’s military actions in Gaza..." Yesterday, here in DC. www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/202...

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— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 8:33 PM

"Mena was a news photographer for Arizona’s Family, a Phoenix-based broadcast network...“Arizona’s Family expects its newsroom employees to conduct themselves with neutrality and objectivity,” the statement on its website reads. “Mena is no longer an employee.”"

— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 8:34 PM

"Norman R. Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker from Baltimore, burned himself outside the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War in 1965. Wynn Bruce, a 50-year-old from Boulder, Colo., who was described as a climate activist dedicated to Buddhism, self-immolated outside the Supreme Court on Earth Day 2022."

— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 8:35 PM

"And Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old senior airman in the U.S. Air Force, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy and shouted “Free Palestine” as he burned in February. A man also died in September after setting himself on fire near the Israeli consulate in downtown Boston."

— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 8:35 PM

"How many Palestinians were killed that I allowed to be branded as Hamas?” Mena wrote. “How many men, women, and children were struck with a missile cosigned by the American media?"

— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 8:36 PM

"The smell of gasoline wafted through the air as police and other protesters rushed toward Mena. Rallygoers screamed for a medic while bystanders tried to put out the blaze with kaffiyehs. Mena was transported to a hospital for treatment of injuries not expected to be life-threatening..."

— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 8:43 PM
digital neon-colored wave chart

Monday, October 7, 2024

Genocide names what to prevent, not what to commemorate

"Parallels between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and early America’s treatment of indigenous peoples are stark. Once you know the twin histories, you cannot unsee it. ... Americans are discouraged to draw parallels between Native American and Palestinian history. ... If anyone should understand ethnic cleansing, it is Americans, because our country was founded upon the genocide of indigenous peoples, followed by centuries of cover-ups." &mdash Sarah Kendzior, "Trails of Tears," Substack newsletter, Jan 11, 2024

rusty car with moss growing on it

Genocide has a legal definition, yes, but I would say — as a descendant of survivors of the genocide that led to the term being coined — that what makes something a genocide is not numbers of deaths, but an attempt to fully eradicate an entire community through the destruction of family lines.

— Lux "Days of Awe"ptraum לקס אלפטראום (@luxalptraum.com) October 7, 2024 at 11:33 AM

What is happening in Gaza is not a genocide simply because massive numbers of people are dying — though yes, genocide often leads to mass death. It is a genocide because a significant amount of Israeli government rhetoric has framed Gazans as a people who must be wiped out in entirety.

— Lux "Days of Awe"ptraum לקס אלפטראום (@luxalptraum.com) October 7, 2024 at 11:34 AM

When I think about what the descendants of Gazan survivors will grow up with, I think of the shadows that haunt my own family legacy. The inability to talk about the past. The family trees that just stop. The generational trauma. That, for me, is genocide.

— Lux "Days of Awe"ptraum לקס אלפטראום (@luxalptraum.com) October 7, 2024 at 11:36 AM

The most tragic thing about the way we wrestle with the concept of genocide was that the term was coined in the hopes of *preventing* future groups from experiencing what my family went through. But instead it only serves to acknowledge the lost and horror trauma in the aftermath.

— Lux "Days of Awe"ptraum לקס אלפטראום (@luxalptraum.com) October 7, 2024 at 11:38 AM

Having your loss recognized as a genocide is a pretty abysmal consolation prize. And it sucks that 80 years after my own ancestors were being slaughtered en masse in an attempt to wipe out their people, this is the best we have to offer.

— Lux "Days of Awe"ptraum לקס אלפטראום (@luxalptraum.com) October 7, 2024 at 11:39 AM

This is an important framing of the idea of genocide. It's not mass murder for cultural reasons, its the attempted murder of a culture (which often involves mass murder). Case in point: The residential school system for Native Americans would have been a genocide even without the mass graves.

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— Greg Muller (Dr Math) (@morilac.bsky.social) October 7, 2024 at 11:40 AM

Important: Israel's public channel (Kann 11) reports that the military effort that commenced today in Jebalia refugee camp is part of a bigger operation to expel all Palestinians from North Gaza, according to the "Eiland Plan".

— Yair Wallach (@yairwallach.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 7:19 AM

Estimated 300,000 Palestinians remain in North Gaza. The plan is to force as many of them to leave and then proceed as if no civilians remained edition.cnn.com/2024/09/22/m...

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— Yair Wallach (@yairwallach.bsky.social) October 6, 2024 at 7:23 AM

Friday, October 4, 2024

Modes of language: Sparking good work together

Once you persuade your students to read, do they think critically about what they read?

Cameron Summers has written "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anything: A Sketch of a Philosophy of Language" (October 2, 2024). Summers says that students should:

"question things that they find written down. This is an important development: to think critically about something, you need to suspend yourself in the space between believing 'this is true' and 'this is untrue' — you must sort the good information from the bad by testing it and thinking about it and verifying it. Many of my students seem to come into the classroom thinking, 'Well, it wouldn’t be written down if it isn’t true/good/worthwhile, would it?'"

However, "being correct or incorrect doesn’t always matter."

"So much of our discourse in this (and increasingly, it feels, every election cycle) is about pointing out gaffs from the other side — about how the former President denied climate change but built sea walls to protect his golf courses, that sort of thing. As if the mere fact of this contradiction is somehow material.

This is partially what allowed them to succeed in the 2016 election. The emphasis was on the fact that the other side was a grotesque mockery, rather than a credible threat. As liberals often do, they reduced things to aesthetics.

Now, a lot of people are talking about how think tanks attached to the party of “small government” and “states’ rights” is putting forward a plan for national controls on abortion and other reproductive healthcare. The contradiction here doesn’t matter to them, and pointing out their hypocrisy is just going to allow them to retain their advantage, because no one actually cares about that."

Three modes of language: Factual, instrumental, social

"We’re all explicitly taught to use language" in a "factual" mode, Summers says, which means we first try to understand information and root out our contradictory beliefs, and then we try to commmunicate it truthfully and clearly so others can know what we know.

But there's an "instrumental" mode too. This mode tends to generate contradictions.

The Instrumental Mode is not concerned with the horizontal(ish) transfer of information, but with the hierarchic imposition of will. You say things not to inform, but to achieve a particular end goal. In this stance, language is a tool that you use to achieve a material end result.

As such, contradiction serves the same purpose as exhaust, noise, and waste heat do for a combustion engine: it makes it clear that the apparatus is working as desired, it makes it obvious that it’s doing its job. As such, pointing out the contradiction is sort of like telling someone revving a muscle car, “That’s very loud and you’re putting out a lot of smoke.”

It’s not going to have the desired effect. You think you mentioned a problem; they think you’re describing the cool thing that they’re doing: only one of you is any closer to your goal."

The instrumental mode can be authoritarian. It can be modeled after a parent–child hierarchy. This "creates a hierarchic relationship where the speaker claims they know better than the listener. What becomes upsetting about the whole thing is when the listener repeats what is heard, creating a sort of linguistic pyramid scheme where the one receiving the repeated message is two steps removed from the one who supposedly knows best."

But this effect isn't really avoidable by retreating to a supposedly "factual" mode, as there's no way to entirely avoid norms.

"Even in the most informative utterance, there is the implicit message you should care about this. In answering a stranger’s request for help, there is the message that we should help each other.

Every utterance is, at least implicitly, a statement of belief about how the world works.

Language also has a "social" mode in which we try to connect to each other.

"My belief is that every composition or utterance has all three of these uses in different proportions. There’s always going to be an effort to make the other person do something, there’s always going to be an effort to make a connection, and there’s always going to be an attempt to give the other party some information that they don’t currently have."

As I interpret it

Communication, including "storytelling" of various sorts, always has these dimensions:

Here are the facts I'm aware of. I'd like to connect with you. Let's get something done together.

sketch of three birds in a tree

We should care about how we find out the truth, create knowledge, and experience the consequences thereof

In pointing out that what we call Generative AI is just a tool for bullshitting, Damien P. Williams said:

“The idea here isn’t to say that there’s some perfect capital-O, capital-T Objective Truth that Google Bard must actually adhere to, that GPT must adhere to, must reflect in the world. It is rather to say that when we uncritically make use of these [generative AI] tools, what we are doing is we are muddying the process of generating knowledge together. We are embodying and empowering a system which does not, in any way, shape or form, care about what is true or what is factual. Does not care about the impacts of providing non-factual, non-true knowledge. Does not care about the impacts of not going through the process of trying to understand what knowledge values and beliefs mean to each other. ... They do not care about truth. They do not care about fact. They are, in fact, bullshit engines.” (38:40–39:32, 39:48–39:55)

ICYMI: our latest @leftanchor.bsky.social ep we are talking the philosophy of bullshit as applied to Trump, Elon Musk, and JD Vance www.leftanchor.com/e/the-bs-epi...

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— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper.com) October 1, 2024 at 1:42 PM

Both Summers and Williams, as well as the podcast discussion, refer to Harry Frankfurt's definition of bullshit.

Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Jimmy Carter (Talking Peace, 1995) explains the situation in Palestine/Israel

Map of Middle East printed in Jimmy Carter's book Talking Peace, 1995

Today, Jimmy Carter turns 100. His book Talking Peace (1995) is free to read on Archive.org.

See how he explains this in the first few pages:

For 400 years, the Ottoman Turks ruled Palestine. After World War I, the League of Nations allowed Britain to take over. After World War II, the United Nations wanted to split the land into separate Jewish and Arab states. War broke out. Israel declared victory, though no surrounding Arab states would recognize it. Jordan took the West Bank. Egypt took the Gaza strip. In 1967, Israel seized territory from Egypt, Syria, and the Palestinians.

paragraph from the book. In summary: For 400 years, the Ottoman Turks ruled Palestine. After World War I, the League of Nations allowed Britain to take over.
paragraph from the book. In summary: After World War II, the United Nations wanted to split the land into separate Jewish and Arab states. War broke out. Israel declared victory, though no surrounding Arab states would recognize it.
paragraph from the book. In summary: Jordan took the West Bank. Egypt took the Gaza strip.
paragraph from the book. In summary: In 1967, Israel seized territory from Egypt, Syria, and the Palestinians.

Jimmy Carter's background

A Rural Georgia Town Formed a U.S. President: Jimmy Carter’s memoir ‘An Hour Before Daylight’. Tucker Lieberman, May 19, 2024, 9-min read.

Monday, September 23, 2024

Rosa Luxemburg on revolution

"the work of Rosa Luxemburg [1871–1919], which theorizes, among other things, the alchemical process which transforms local disruptions into a revolutionary crisis" — Aparna Gopalan, news editor for Jewish Currents, Sept 20, 2024

broken glass

In Kate Evans's book, Red Rosa, Gopalan says,

"We see Rosa growing up as a Jewish, disabled girl in Tsarist Poland, reading Marx as a teenager, and quickly coming to situate her own experiences of discrimination inside a grander narrative of global racial-capitalist exploitation ('I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the black people in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch . . . I have no special place in my heart for the [Jewish] ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears'). We see her break gender barriers to study in Zurich; fall in revolutionary love; speak at the Socialist International; publish both propaganda newspapers and a dissertation on Polish industrialization; and eventually, move to Berlin and join the rapidly growing Social Democratic Party, whose trajectory she quickly influenced with her writing and speeches."

Friday, September 13, 2024

Two big anti-trans and anti-gay events in 1970s California

The final paragraph of Chapter 3 of Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema by Willow Maclay and Caden Gardner (Repeater, 2024):

“The end of the 1970s foreshadowed the incoming political and cultural backlash against the LGBTQ community. Gay men and women were the target of many discriminatory firings that made the news around this time. In 1976, physical education teacher Steve Dain made national news when he was fired from his position due to being a trans man. For years, Dain was the most visible trans man in the United States. He was blackballed from teaching for the rest of his life, despite having won his court case against the Northern California school district. The positive gains seen in the election of Harvey Milk for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978, and his role in leading the successful fight against the homophobic Briggs Initiative/California Proposition 6 soon turned to tragedy when Milk and pro-gay rights San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by disgruntled Supervisor Member Dan White. The subsequent 1979 White Night Riots in San Francisco, in reaction to White’s light sentencing, showed widespread anger. These systems and institutions of authority had no interest in protecting queer and trans people. This would only get worse in the Reagan years of the 1980s.”

I didn't know Steve Dain, and I don't remember ever hearing of him before. I grew up on the opposite US Coast. Dain died in 2007.

What interests me about this is that, in addition to Renee Richards playing tennis, here was another 1970s U.S. sports "scandal" where the scandal was that the person in sports was trans. Indeed, one website says: "Steve lost his job and went to court. He was briefly a media topic, but the very next day the Renée Richards story pushed him off the front page."

Of course, transphobes got overexcited at the 1936 Berlin Olympics too.

Another thing that interests me is that Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated in 1978, while Dain was fighting in court. The paragraph is telling a history that links transphobia and homophobia in California: the transphobia that ousted Dain, the homophobia that killed Milk and Moscone.

More about his trial at the website The Berkeley Revolution.

abstract image

Thursday, September 12, 2024

The painter Max Beckmann

From Sarah Kendzior ("The King," Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter, Substack, Sept 12, 2024), I learned about the German painter Max Beckmann (1884-1950), who in the 1930s was exiled to Amsterdam and then to the United States.

painting by Max Beckmann
Amsterdam - Stedelijk Museum - Max Beckmann (1884-1950) - Double Portrait of the Artist and his Wife Quappi 1941 Wikimedia Commons

Sunday, September 8, 2024

National Museum of Sudan has been looted

"The National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum has reportedly been looted by members of the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF) amid an ongoing civil war in the country. ... The artifacts have allegedly been spotted for sale online."
— Tessa Solomon, National Museum of Sudan Reportedly Looted amid Civil War, ARTNews, September 3, 2024

Sudan National Museum

Monday, September 2, 2024

Gaza: Violence since Israel's 2005 'disengagement'

From a 7,000-word article, "Israel’s Descent," by Adam Shatz, London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 12 · 20 June 2024

"When Ariel Sharon withdrew more than eight thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his principal aim was to consolidate Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, where the settler population immediately began to increase. But ‘disengagement’ had another purpose: to enable Israel’s air force to bomb Gaza at will, something they could not do when Israeli settlers lived there. The Palestinians of the West Bank have been, it seems, gruesomely lucky. They are encircled by settlers determined to steal their lands – and not at all hesitant about inflicting violence in the process – but the Jewish presence in their territory has spared them the mass bombardment and devastation to which Israel subjects the people of Gaza every few years.

The Israeli government refers to these episodes of collective punishment as ‘mowing the lawn’. In the last fifteen years, it has launched five offensives in the Strip. The first four were brutal and cruel, as colonial counterinsurgencies invariably are, killing thousands of civilians in retribution for Hamas rocket fire and hostage-taking. But the latest, Operation Iron Swords, launched on 7 October in response to Hamas’s murderous raid in southern Israel, is different in kind, not merely in degree."

If a nation begins with "other forms of persecution...including plunder, denial of the franchise, ghettoisation, ethnic cleansing and racist dehumanisation," then "a war defined as an existential battle for survival" may catalyze yet more intense violence.

What word best describes the violence?

"The scale of the destruction is reflected in the terminology: ‘domicide’ for the destruction of housing stock; ‘scholasticide’ for the destruction of the education system, including its teachers (95 university professors have been killed); ‘ecocide’ for the ruination of Gaza’s agriculture and natural landscape. Sara Roy, a leading expert on Gaza who is herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors, describes this as a process of ‘econocide’, ‘the wholesale destruction of an economy and its constituent parts’ – the ‘logical extension’, she writes, of Israel’s deliberate ‘de-development’ of Gaza’s economy since 1967.

But, to borrow the language of a 1948 UN convention, there is an older term for ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. That term is genocide, and among international jurists and human rights experts there is a growing consensus that Israel has committed genocide – or at least acts of genocide – in Gaza. This is the opinion not only of international bodies, but also of experts who have a record of circumspection – indeed, of extreme caution – where Israel is involved, notably Aryeh Neier, a founder of Human Rights Watch."

spinny tunnel

False binaries

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Sep 2, 2024:

"I want to name the false binary of "hostages vs. Palestinians" when the real binary has always been, "soaking the earth with more and more blood" or "find a political solution." We’ve been talking about this for months. Eg here, here.

May the memories of everyone killed over the last 11 months be a revolution towards collective liberation, safety, wholeness, and a true future for everyone in the region."

Arguments over the anthem

Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikva,” is written from a Jewish point of view and refers to Jews living freely in their land of Zion. This often causes distress for the one-quarter of Israelis who are not Jewish. In the February 2013 swearing-in ceremony for new parliament members, several Arab politicians left the room to protest the lyrics. Suggestions to make the language more inclusive, even when those suggestions are vague and put forth by Jewish politicians, have been controversial.

Boorstin: The 'pseudo-event'

“Great unforeseen changes—the great forward strides of American civilization—have blurred the edges of reality. The pseudo-events which flood our consciousness are neither true nor false in the old familiar senses. The very same advances which have made them possible have also made the images—however planned, contrived, or distorted—more vivid, more attractive, and more persuasive than reality itself.

We cannot say that we are being fooled. It is not entirely inaccurate to say that we are being ‘informed.’ This world of ambiguity is created by those who believe they are instructing us, by our best public servants, and with our own collaboration. Our problem is the harder to solve because it is created by people working honestly and industriously at respectable jobs. It is not created by demagogues or crooks, by conspiracy or evil purpose. The efficient mass production of pseudo-events—in all kinds of packages, in black-and-white, in technicolor, in words, and in a thousand other forms—is the work of the whole machinery of our society. It is the daily product of men of good will. The media must be fed! The public must be informed! . . .“

— Daniel Boorstin, The Image, 1961. Quoted by Susan Bordo in BordoLines, 2024.

smoking pipe organ

Monday, August 26, 2024

Trans man in Sydney, Australia (1937)

A clip of Peter Alexander, a trans man from New Zealand, interviewed in Sydney in 1937.

Also listed on the Digital Transgender Archive.

You may be interested in: As Berlin Held the 1936 Olympics, These Athletes Changed Their Sex: Assigned female at birth, some went on to live as men. Published on May 13, 2024 in Prism & Pen. 12-min read.

Monday, August 12, 2024

What makes a story queer?

airplane

Spotted on Bluesky:

I need the straights out there to understand that the presence of queer characters isn't what makes a story queer, and that you will never be the authority on whether a story is or isn't queer. It's fine and healthy to acknowledge that not every conversation includes you.

— Sen 💀🔥 (@dresdencodak.bsky.social) Jul 4, 2024 at 11:50 AM

In a lot of media there's an assimilationist attitude toward the inclusion of queer characters, because it prioritizes cishet comfort: "they're not that different from you, their existence won't threaten heteronormativity!" But that's a lie, we are different and we still deserve the same empathy.

— Sen 💀🔥 (@dresdencodak.bsky.social) Jul 4, 2024 at 12:05 PM

A near-universal component of being queer in a society like ours is being required, from birth, to identify with a pov that is not our own. With that in mind, part of being queer usually means reading between every line to find ourselves and others like us. It's a psychic survival mechanism.

— Sen 💀🔥 (@dresdencodak.bsky.social) Jul 4, 2024 at 12:22 PM

So it's not just us queers having fun when we say Gonzo is a nonbinary icon, or that the only straight Star Trek character is somehow Miles O'Brien. By necessity we're tapped into the Astral Plane, and we're also objectively correct.

— Sen 💀🔥 (@dresdencodak.bsky.social) Jul 4, 2024 at 12:31 PM

We'll always have vanilla? No, of course not. We could lose it.

Climate change and deforestation destroy our planet piece by piece. We can lose vanilla.

"Extracted from the bean pod of a delicate orchid, vanilla must be grown under exceptionally precise conditions along a band of the earth between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. This supreme finickiness makes it unusually vulnerable to the growing shocks of climate change and deforestation."
— Aimee Nezhukumatathil, "This Is How the World’s Favorite Scent Disappears," New York Times, Aug. 4, 2024, part of the What to Eat on a Burning Planet series

black pods of vanilla beans, suspended over a bowl
Vanilla by gate74 from Pixabay

See what's happening:

Evacuations Ordered As 'Exceptionally Dangerous' Wildfire Rages Near Athens, Greece: Hundreds of firefighters backed by more than 30 water-dropping planes are battling a major wildfire raging out of control on the northern fringes of the Greek capital. Elena Becatoros, HuffPost, Aug 12, 2024

Friday, August 9, 2024

20th-century Zionism took many forms

aerial view of desert landscape
Photo by Gidon Pico from Pixabay

One news article

Do Donald Trump and Kamala Harris identify as ‘Zionist’? Here’s what their campaigns told us, Ron Kampeas, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 12, 2024:

"Zionism, born as a modern ideology in the 19th century, sought to establish a Jewish polity in the Land of Israel. Since that was achieved with Israel’s establishment in 1948, its meaning has been contested, but is generally taken to signify support for Israel as a Jewish state, and for its citizens. Many Jews self-identify as Zionist, and antisemitism watchdogs caution that bigots will often use the word “Zionist” in their attacks on Jews."

One essay

From a 7,000-word article, "Israel’s Descent," by Adam Shatz, London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 12 · 20 June 2024

"...as Shlomo Sand reminds us in Deux peuples pour un état?, there was another, dissident Zionism, a ‘cultural Zionism’ that advocated the creation of a binational state based on Arab-Jewish co-operation, one that counted among its members Ahad Ha’am, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. In 1907, the cultural Zionist Yitzhak Epstein accused the Zionist movement of having forgotten ‘one small detail: that there is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never considered leaving it’. Epstein and his allies, who founded Brit Shalom, the Alliance for Peace, in 1925, imagined Zion as a place of cultural and spiritual rebirth. Any attempt to create an exclusively Jewish state, they warned, would turn Zionism into a classical colonial movement and result in permanent warfare with the Palestinian Arabs. After the Arab riots of 1929, Brit Shalom’s secretary, Hans Kohn, denounced the official Zionist movement for ‘adopting the posture of wounded innocents’ and for dodging ‘the least debate with the people who live in this country. We have depended entirely on the force of British power. We have set ourselves goals that were inevitably going to degenerate into conflict.’

But this was no accident: conflict with the Arabs was essential to the Zionist mainstream. For the advocates of ‘muscular Zionism’, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has argued, the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would allow Jews not only to achieve the ‘negation of exile’ but also, and paradoxically, to reinvent themselves as citizens of the white West – in Herzl’s words, as a ‘rampart of Europe against Asia’. Brit Shalom’s vision of reconciliation and co-operation with the indigenous population was unthinkable to most Zionists, because they regarded the Arabs of Palestine as squatters on sacred Jewish land."

After Israel was recognized as a state in 1948,

"Jewish critics of Israel who traced their roots to the cultural Zionism of Magnes and Buber – or to the anti-Zionist Jewish Labor Bund – would find themselves vilified as heretics and traitors. In Our Palestine Question, Geoffrey Levin shows how American Jewish critics of Israel were dislodged from Jewish institutions in the decades following the state’s formation."

There was

"Fayez Sayegh, the leading Palestinian spokesman in the US in the 1950s and early 1960s...joined forces with an anti-Zionist rabbi, Elmer Berger of the American Council for Judaism, who had already established himself as a critic of Zionism in his 1951 book, A Partisan History of Judaism, in which he assailed the movement for embracing ‘Hitler’s decree of separatism’ and betraying Judaism’s universalist message."

Today, "the most consequential wave of resistance may be the one we are seeing now from a generation of young Jews for whom identification with an explicitly illiberal, openly racist state, led by a close ally of Donald Trump, is impossible to stomach."

Books referenced

Note: Deux peuples pour un État? is a translation from Sand's Hebrew into French by Michel Bilis.

A Partisan History of Judaism by Elmer Berger (Amazon)

Wikipedia

United States support for Israel in the Israel–Hamas war

Another essay

Jody Alyn reflects on kibbutz life in Israel in the year following the Yom Kippur War (which was in 1973). Some people at the kibbutz "made fierce argument for a shared future with Palestinian Israelis." Alyn points out:

"History depends on who tells it. The histories of Israel/Palestine are convoluted, conflicting and confused by colonialism and capitalism. They go back to World War II and the partition of Palestine in 1948. Or to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Or to Russian pogroms, the Ottoman Empire or to Judea and Samaria in the Iron and Bronze ages."

Here, "people who lived through the same events came out with different stories depending on where they sat in the system." Unfortunately, "Israel was favored—and used—by the British colonizers in power."

She says: "My idealism died in 1995 when Israeli Prime Minister and Nobel Laureate Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli settler. The oh-so-fragile peace process was also dealt a fatal blow." She found herself "ashamed, angry and afraid of what Israel had become."

"What we do to the 'other,' we do to ourselves," and therefore: "We must all call for a permanent cease-fire; for regime changes, for truth and reconciliation and for collaborative, cooperative rebuilding. Now and forevermore."

Read: Can I Take My Identity Back From Israel?: Reflections of one Jew on her life and times. Jody Alyn. Age of Empathy, Nov 29, 2023.

What do politicians use it to mean?

Returning to the JTA article, mentioned earlier:

"Asked by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency if Vice President Kamala Harris considers herself a Zionist, a campaign aide replied:

“The Vice President and Governor [Tim] Walz have been strong and longstanding supporters of Israel as a secure, democratic homeland for the Jewish people. They will always ensure Israel can defend itself from threats, including from Iran and Iran-backed terrorists such as Hamas and Hezbollah.”

Told that the first sentence of that response would meet perhaps the most common definition of “Zionist,” the aide replied that beyond the statement she relayed, she had “nothing for you.”"

Monday, July 29, 2024

Enslaved scribes of early Christian texts

Sarah E. Bond, author of Trade and Taboo...

...has a new article in Hyperallergic, "The Enslaved People Who Wrote Down the New Testament": Art history has long concealed the scribes who put swaths of the Bible and early Christian writings on paper. July 28, 2024.

"In ancient Egypt and early Imperial China, scribes were of high status," she says, but this contrasts with "many Greek and Roman cities, villas, libraries, churches, and even monasteries," where scribes were often enslaved.

These books are mentioned in the article:

She also directs us to "Female Scribes in Roman Antiquity and Early Christianity," an article by Kim Haines-Eitzen.

And another article: "In one study, ancient historian Adam Serfass reconstructs how Gregory gave enslaved people to his friends and ordered them bought at auction and even tortured."

Why this interests me

I've written about eunuchs in history.

When we read about eunuchs serving as scribes, we should look at the context of whether they were enslaved. Also, if sole authorship is credited to someone (eunuch or not), we should ask who was helping them (maybe enslaved people, some of whom may have been eunuchs.

old ship on ocean

Friday, July 19, 2024

On gendered argumentation in 20th-century New York

Just learned of this book:

It's about "the New York Intellectuals—a heavily Jewish scene, formed around Cold War liberalism and high modernist literary tastes, that profoundly shaped everything from art criticism to foreign policy," as David Klion, contributing editor to Jewish Currents, explains today.

Klion says:

"A rare work of academic history with crossover appeal to more mainstream readers, Write Like a Man is also the first book to give full attention to the fraught gender dynamics that shaped the New York Intellectuals. Most of the group was male, defined by names like Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Irving Howe. Grinberg not only gives fair due to the most prominent women in the group—chiefly Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, and Midge Decter—she also ingeniously demonstrates how gender shaped the actual writing produced by both male and female New York Intellectuals.

The title comes from a killer 1963 quote from NYRB co-founder Jason Epstein: 'With women in that crowd, the first thing you thought about was whether they were good-looking and if you could sleep with them. But if a woman could write like a man, that was enough.' To Grinberg, 'writing like a man' refers to a mode of rigorous, swaggering, aggressive argumentation rooted in the legendary cafeteria alcoves of then all-male City College, where many of the future New York Intellectuals spent the 1930s engaged in verbal duels with Stalinists. It's a style still recognizable today, and Grinberg portrays it as a means of assimilation for the sons of poor Yiddish-speaking immigrants trying to assert their masculinity in an America that stereotyped Jews as meek and effeminate. Grinberg’s female subjects, as the Epstein line suggests, held their own in the group because they were able to master this style—though as Grinberg also shows, the women in the scene who came from different backgrounds (either as gentiles or, in Arendt’s case, as a German Jewish emigre with formidable Old World academic credentials) received more deference from their male peers than the shtetl-descended women who were often treated simply as wives."

bearded guy reading

More on Jason Epstein

Michael Castleman explains how Jason Epstein invented trade paperbacks:

"In 1953, Jason Epstein was a recent Columbia University graduate working in publishing — temporarily, he thought — as an editorial assistant at Doubleday. He lived in Greenwich Village, a short walk from the funky but glorious (and now defunct) Eighth Street Bookshop, which counted among its patrons Jack Kerouac, Susan Sontag, E.E. Cummings, Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka.

To Epstein’s wide young eyes, the place was paradise. He visited after work, sometimes lingering for hours. But his editorial assistant’s salary paid so little (forty-five dollars a week) that he couldn’t afford hardcovers, and that was all Eighth Street Bookshop stocked.

One day Epstein asked the store’s owners if they might be interested in selling less expensive paperback editions of their hardcovers to appeal to working folks and young people like him.

Not Pocket Books. Heaven forbid!

No, Epstein explained, he envisioned a larger format and better paper..."

Excerpted from Michael Castleman, The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing (2024), excerpt reprinted in LitHub

Wednesday, July 10, 2024

Project 2025 says 'porn' to mean 'imagined enemies of the family'

What does Roberts mean by "children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries." What is this "pornography" that Project 2025 says should be "outlawed"?

Melissa Gira Grant reminds us today in "The Real Targets of Project 2025’s War on Porn" (The New Republic):

"The prominence of pornography in Project 2025 is no mistake, of course; it’s absolutely core to the authors’ agenda for Trump. The attack on porn is inseparable from the attacks on abortion and contraception, on marriage equality and trans rights, and of course on drag queens and library books—all of which, they believe, threaten the straight, married family as the natural bedrock of society. All of these threats, to them, constitute pornography. By calling on the president to outlaw porn, they’re calling for the eradication of all these imagined enemies of the family.

Though Project 2025 does not define 'pornography,' their concern clearly extends beyond porn itself. Pornography, according to the Mandate, is responsible for the 'normalization' of non-normative gender expression and identity among young people—what the right often calls 'gender ideology.' Pornography could be anything that contributes to that purported normalization. 'Pornography,' Roberts continues, is 'manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.' And how should it be outlawed? 'The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.' Project 2025 is not targeting 'pornography' as something that’s harmful to children per se, but rather redefining anything concerning sexuality and gender that they say is harmful to children as pornography."

Pay attention:

"Behind all this is what philosopher Judith Butler calls anti-gender ideology and movements, which is how we should understand Project 2025’s anti-pornography rhetoric. It’s a transnational movement, fueling and also fueled by the reassertion of patriarchal order, of a return to normative sex and gender roles, and of ordering the world by sex and gender hierarchies. Gender in this movement has come to be regarded as a code, as Butler has described it—for pedophilia, for the destruction of the family, 'a plot by urban elites to impose their beliefs on ‘real’ people,' a threat to civilization, a threat to masculinity. When the fight is defined that way, a fight to save not just children and families but society and civilization, nearly any crackdown can be justified."

lettered sign saying NO

Saturday, July 6, 2024

Aziz Rana on Republicans' constitutional control

Constitutional scholar Aziz Rana talked to The Ink. Rana is author of The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (2024). You can subscribe to the Ink if you like this stuff — in fact, now's the time.

Rana says there were

"specific dynamics in the mid-20th century. From the New Deal to World War II, through the Cold War and decolonization, that created the conditions for political agreement rather than anything that's there in the text of the Constitution. And now all of that has gone away. I worry that liberals oftentimes invoke that broken set of agreements whenever you see even more brazen acts of misbehavior by either the Court or political actors like Trump. And I just don't know that that's going to work going forward."

That agreement "defined politics in the mid-20th century." It was a time when "there was some degree of center-right, center-left consensus around the terms of the institutions, how folks operated with respect to each other, which types of discretionary misbehavior were out of bounds, and which kinds of discretionary misbehavior would be papered over." But now, it has broken down. We have "nostalgia" for it, but that doesn't help. The breakdown explains why "we're in this moment."

large foot of God crushes a field

Some liberals appeal to what the Constitution supposedly really says or should mean, at least on a symbolic level if not with any real-world political force that they could leverage to promote their ideas. Although "Constitutional veneration...can provide some constraints," in the long term it may be unhelpful, as it legitimizes the whole system that lets certain people get away with bad behavior.

More specifically:

"The problem, in my view, is that the long-term trajectory of American power and the centrality of the presidential office to the national security state and the national security apparatus have over the long term overwhelmed these proceduralist constraints such that the War Powers Resolution is deeply ineffective.

The courts overwhelmingly ended up deferring to presidential authority. And I'd say that the collapse of the Soviet Union was seen as a validation of not just the American Cold War project but specifically the belligerent, aggressive Reaganite approach to the Cold War. That was very closely tied to market fundamentalism, to a kind of belligerent posture towards the world, to unilateralism globally.

And all of this got built into the cultural politics of the country, and made it very, very difficult, in Congress and certainly in the courts, to constrain the presidency. And we saw this dynamic play out again in the War on Terror."

Sure, "use whatever constitutional devices that are available to try to hold Trump accountable," but recognize "why those devices fail time and time again."

With Republicans in control of the Supreme Court,

"the internal disagreements of the right — how much immunity is too much immunity, how much of the administrative state to gut, whether or not to completely get rid of the right to abortion or just to functionally get rid of it by systematically undermining the checks on laws that would constrain reproductive rights — that is the sum total of the legal universe. And that means that the rest of us are effectively now just subject to their internal disagreements."

Democrats and journalists still imagine an "ideological spectrum" that used to exist in the Supreme Court but no longer does. The justices will only agree to hear cases on things they care about ("affirmative action, abortion, Trump's immunity, the nature of the administrative state"), and they'll debate the answers from their own perspectives. Issues that matter to many Americans today — "the carceral state," "a fundamental right to education" — are never going to be taken up by the court.

We need "systematic changes to constitutional structure, including some very fundamental reforms to the structure of the Supreme Court itself." More justices on the court, term limits for them, and better procedures to amend the Constitution.

Rana's book:

Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959–1968

Today, CNN has an article: "In upstate New York, Casa Susanna was a safe haven for trans women in 1960s America," Suyin Haynes, CNN, June 26, 2024

"With coiffed black hair, pearls, a hand on her hip and a high-heeled pointed toe, a woman poses jubilantly for the camera on the steps outside her home. Her name is Susanna Valenti, and her home is Casa Susanna, located in the Catskills, in upstate New York. In the 1950s and ’60s, Casa Susanna served as a safe haven and a sanctuary for people to explore their gender identity and expression in ways they were not able to in daily life. ... Purchased in 2004 at a New York City flea market by two art dealers and later acquired by the AGO in 2015, this particular selection of 340 Casa Susanna images are part of a much wider archive, including some currently in the personal collection of photographer Cindy Sherman. ... In the last decade, Casa Susanna has inspired a Broadway play, Harvey Fierstein’s “Casa Valentina”; been referenced in the television series “Transparent”; and was the subject of an acclaimed documentary film released last year."

Casa Susanna book cover

I hope to get a copy of this book, Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968, to find out if Spanish was spoken there. As CNN says:

"Born in Chile in 1917, Valenti met her wife at a wig shop — popular with crossdressers — that Tonell ran in New York City. Casa Susanna was Tonell’s property in the Catskills; those who frequented the home included Gloria, a millionaire from Michigan; Jessica, a Colombian heiress; and Felicity, an airline pilot and World War II veteran who was the sibling of photographer Lee Miller."

Learn more about the book, a hardcover with 400 color illustrations, on the publisher's website.

Or buy it through Bookshop:

Just learned of this book, which has 400 color illustrations! "In the 1950s and '60s, an underground network of transgender women, gender nonconforming people, and men who dressed as women found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills, New York."

[image or embed]

— Tucker Lieberman (@tuckerlieberman.bsky.social) Jun 26, 2024 at 4:06 PM

Friday, June 21, 2024

Putting effort into ethics

A pithy way of saying that it's important to put effort into living an ethical life:

"When easy doesn’t bring ease

Ease is a simple concept in theory. For example, we might put beeswax on the tracks of a dresser drawer that’s sticking, so the drawer slides with greater ease. Things are more aligned, so they’re easier.

But in modern industry, easier usually means something more like, “less thought is required.” In MarketingSpeak that’s pronounced “convenient”. Ironically these easier choices often don’t bring ease. They bring misalignment with core values. They bring dis-ease."

B. Lorraine Smith, "Putting ease into easy," email newsletter, June 21, 2024

False "ease" leading to "dis-ease": What feels easy in the short-term won't be in the long-term. Ease eats itself, inverts itself.

landscape

Thursday, June 20, 2024

Cameron Summers: 'Technology is not the protagonist of history'

Cameron Summers writes for Broken Hands (What is Technology? (Contraslop, Part 1), June 19, 2024):

"Now, students, like most people, mean something very particular when they talk about technology: they always mean, specifically, digital, technology, and usually mean technologies that have been popularized in the last 5-10 years. Maybe they stretch it a bit older and include social media, but usually it’s a very limited slice of time.

My standard move here is to point out that things such as cars, washing machines, printing presses, and usable fire are all forms of technology and request that they refer to the category that they’re talking about as digital technology."

Why?

"This is actually a fairly important thing for me: I believe that discussing this is key to teaching students how to live in the world. One must not treat technology as a special category that only deals with the latest 0.003% of human existence."

Think:

"Here's a question, "broadly: if it offers no benefit, and no path to anything that clearly offers benefit, why are we spending time on it?

Technological determinism – the idea that there is some solid, continuous thing called technology and that this force, this entity, is the protagonist of our historical drama and the mainspring behind other kinds of change – is a false idea.

* * *

This isn’t to say that technology can’t drive change, simply that it doesn’t do that as a primary effect. It’s brought in to do one thing, and then it achieves something else as a side effect because it can extend its function in an interesting and novel way."

"My point is this: technology is not the protagonist of history, especially when we narrowly define it. It is, instead, the inventory of solutions that we have to our problems. Oftentimes they create a new set of problems, and require further solutions to keep using them, though if an alternate solution that lacks the new problems crops up and its own externalities are less pernicious, then people will switch over to the second technology."

It's a long article, and I recommend it.

light bulb