The theory that Foucault lays out in his Discipline and Punish which provides a philosophical history of the modern prison is essentially this: The prison emerged in the late 18th and 19th centuries not as a humanitarian project of Enlightenment philosophes, but as a disciplinary apparatus of society in conjunction with other disciplinary institutions- the insane asylum, the workhouse, the factory, the reformatory, the school, and branches of knowledge- psychology, criminology, that had as their end what might be called the domestication of human beings. It might be hard for us to believe but the prison is a very modern institution — not much older than the 19th century. The idea that you should detain people convicted of a crime for long periods perhaps with the hope of “rehabilitating” them just hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind before then. Instead, punishment was almost immediate, whether execution, physical punishment or fines. With the birth of the prison, gone was the emotive wildness of the prior era- the criminal wracked by sin and tortured for his transgression against his divine creator and human sovereign. In its place rose up the patient, “humane” transformation of the “abnormal,” “deviant” individual into a law and norm abiding member of society.

{ IEET | Continue reading }

Because most emotions are really just the same emotion: fear.

{ Jim Behrle | via Rob }

Regarding exorcism, the Catholic Encyclopedia says:

Exorcism is (1) the act of driving out, or warding off, demons, or evil spirits, from persons, places, or things, which are believed to be possessed or infested by them, or are liable to become victims or instruments of their malice; (2) the means employed for this purpose, especially the solemn and authoritative adjuration of the demon, in the name of God, or any of the higher power in which he is subject.

[…]

In contrast, the rationalist perspective presents historical and medically-based views of possession phenomena in terms of epilepsy, schizophrenia, and possession trance disorder (PTD), a possible variant of dissociative identity disorder. Nothing evil or supernatural takes over the identity of the person with PTD. Nonetheless, exorcisms performed on mentally ill people continue to this day. […]

In DSM-IV, spirit possession falls under the category of Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, with more specific research criteria (but not an official diagnosis) fitting Dissociative Trance Disorder (possession trance):

Dissociative trance disorder: single or episodic disturbances in the state of consciousness, identity, or memory that are indigenous to particular locations and cultures. Dissociative trance involves narrowing of awareness of immediate surroundings or stereotyped behaviors or movements that are experienced as being beyond one’s control. Possession trance involves replacement of the customary sense of personal identity by a new identity, attributed to the influence of a spirit, power, deity, or other person and associated with stereotyped involuntary movements or amnesia, and is perhaps the most common dissociative disorder in Asia. Examples include amok (Indonesia), bebainan (Indonesia), latah (Malaysia), pibloktoq (Arctic), ataque de nervios (Latin America), and possession (India). The dissociative or trance disorder is not a normal part of a broadly accepted collective cultural or religious practice. 

[…]

Will there be changes for Dissociative Trance Disorder (DTD) in DSM-5?

{ Neurocritic | Continue reading }

{ A cephalophore is a saint who is generally depicted carrying his or her own head. }

Dishonest behavior seems pervasive. For example, the estimated total damage to the American clothing industry from wardrobing—the habit of returning purchased clothes after wearing, amounts to $16 billion annually, and the damage to US companies from employee theft and fraud reaches an estimate of $994 billion a year. On an individual level, research on lying has found that people lie in some 30% of their daily interactions. In stark contrast to these findings, most people, including those who engage in the above practices, maintain a positive moral self-concept. If being moral is so highly valued in society, why then is unethical behavior so pervasive? And what determines its extent?

In this paper, we propose that the individual’s perspective is an important factor that affects moral behavior and determines its extent. We use the term perspective to indicate the size of the window through which individuals perceive and evaluate their choices.

{ Judgment and Decision Making | Continue reading }

“If a wife left her husband with three kids and no job/ to run off to fuck in Hawaii with some doctor named Bob/ you could skin them and drain them of blood so they die…especially Bob. Then you would be justice guy.” –Stephen Lynch, Superhero

[…]

The interesting thing about this particular song is the emphasis that Stephen puts on his urge to kill Bob. It’s interesting in that it doesn’t make much sense, morally speaking: it’s not as if Bob, a third party who was not involved in any kind of relationship with Stephen, had any formal obligation to respect the boundaries of Stephen’s relationship with his wife. Looking out for the relationship, it seems, ought to have been his wife’s job. She was the person who had the social obligation to Stephen that was violated, so it seems the one who Stephen ought to be mad at (or, at least madder at) would be his wife. So why does Stephen wish to especially punish Bob?

[…]

Too much punishing of his wife – in this case, murder, though it need not be that extreme – can be counterproductive to his goals, as it would render her less able to deliver the benefits she previously provided to the relationship.

[…]

Punishing third parties versus punishing one’s partner can be thought of, by way of analogy, to treating the symptoms or the cause of a disease, respectively. Treating the symptoms (deterring other interested men), in this case, might be cheaper than treating the underlying cause on an individual basis, but you may also need to continuously treat the symptoms (if his wife is rather interested with the idea of having affairs more generally).

[…]

A paper by Glaeser and Sacerdote (2003) examined whether victim characteristics (like age and gender) were predictive of sentencing lengths for various crimes. […] When the victim was a man, if the killer was also a man, he would get about 18 years, on average; if the killer was a woman, that number drops to 11.3. For comparison’s sake, when the victim was a woman and the killer a woman, she would get about 17.5 years; if the killer was a man, that average was 23.1 years.

{ Pop Psychology | Continue reading }

photo { Peter Turnley, Métro Franklin Roosevelt, Paris, 2000 }

Let’s cut the crap. Life is short, you have less time than you think, and there are no baby unicorns coming to save you. So rather than doling out craptastic advice to you about Making!! It!! To!! The!! Top!!™, let me humbly ask: do you want to have a year that matters — or do you want to spend another year starring-slash-wallowing in the lowest-common-denominator reality show-slash-whiny soap opera of your own inescapable mediocrity-slash-self-imposed tragedy? […]

Do you want this to be another year that flies by, half-hearted, arid, rootless, barely remembered, dull with dim glimpses of what might have been? Or do you want this to be a year that you savor, for the rest of your surprisingly short time on Planet Earth, as the year you started, finally, irreversibly, uncompromisingly, to explosively unfurl a life that felt fully worth living?

The choice is yours. And it always has been.

{ Umair Haque/Harvard Business Review | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

photo { Stephen Shore }

According to animal rights theory, respecting the interests of animals in this way would mean abolishing the use of them as resources. So we’d all have to become vegans who neither eat animals nor use any other animal products. Vegan advocates face a daunting challenge, though, since most of us have a strong prejudice in favour of humans. This makes it relatively difficult for us to empathise with non-humans, so we are reluctant to give up the spoils of animal domination — meat, eggs, cheese, wool, fur and leather — and exchange them for tofu, pleather (plastic leather) and animal liberation. […]

Suppose that we are doing our usual thing of exploiting animals because they aren’t smart or powerful enough to fight back. An alien species that is smarter and more powerful than us lands on Earth and decides to follow our example by exploiting and killing us. Why shouldn’t aliens use their technological and cerebral edge to turn us into food, clothes, entertainment and research subjects, just as we do to animals now? […]

This argument resonates because most of us have picked up a version of ‘do as you would be done by’ somewhere along the way, no matter how secular our upbringings. Could it be, then, that if we want to be consistent with our own values, the animal activists are right that we need to go vegan? […]

Sure, if we were replaced as the dominant animals on the planet, we’d probably prefer the new ruling species to be vegan. But if aliens with superior technology and minds came here and were determined to treat us the way that vegan humans treat animals on this planet, we’d still be in serious trouble. Veganism would hardly figure as a safeguard of our wellbeing.

Universal veganism wouldn’t stop the road-building, logging, urban and suburban development, pollution, resource consumption, and other forms of land transformation that kills animals by the billions. So what does veganism do exactly? Theoretically, it ends the raising, capture and exploitation of living animals, and it stops a particular kind of killing that many vegans claim is the worst and least excusable: the intentional killing of animals in order to use their bodies as material goods.

Veganism, as a whole, requires us to stop using animals for entertainment, food, pharmaceutical testing, and clothing. If it were to become universal, factory farming and animal testing would end, which would be excellent news for all the animals that we capture or raise for these purposes. But it would accomplish next to nothing for free-roaming wild animals except to stop hunting, which is the least of their problems. […]

Neutrality is impossible in a world with limited resources. Everything we take is a loss for other animals, and since we want to live, enjoy our lives and reproduce (just as they do), we will never stop bypassing animals’ desires for our own, so long as we are here.

{ Rhys Southan/Aeon | Continue reading }

Darwinian literary analysis is a way to examine texts and arrive at conclusions about evolved human behaviors, motivations, and emotions. That is, by analyzing texts, it is possible to indirectly analyze human nature. Recently, scholars have examined the works of Jane Austen, Harlequin romance novels, and folktales for this purpose. Although this prior work has been informative, it has only included heterosexual relationships.

Symons noted that lesbian and gay populations are a vital group to gain insight into evolutionary sex differences, as their relationships involve only same sex individuals, thus highlighting dominant female and male mating behaviors. Therefore, in this paper, our primary goal is to analyze lesbian pulp fiction to better comprehend women’s evolved mating strategies. We also consider the era that these books were most popular and explore the cultural climate in relation to the characters in the novels. In general, the way the characters are described and their relationship dynamics are consistent gender stereotypes concerning masculine versus feminine women.

{ Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology | PDF }

Reviews on Amazon are becoming attack weapons, intended to sink new books as soon as they are published.

In the biggest, most overt and most successful of these campaigns, a group of Michael Jackson fans used Facebook and Twitter to solicit negative reviews of a new biography of the singer. They bombarded Amazon with dozens of one-star takedowns, succeeded in getting several favorable notices erased and even took credit for Amazon’s briefly removing the book from sale.

“Books used to die by being ignored, but now they can be killed — and perhaps unjustly killed,” said Trevor Pinch, a Cornell sociologist who has studied Amazon reviews. “In theory, a very good book could be killed by a group of people for malicious reasons.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Do you feel that the world is, on balance, improved by technology?

Well, if you ask that question from the point of view of almost anything in this world that’s not a human being like you and me, the answer’s almost certainly No. You might get a few Yea votes from the likes of albino rabbits and gene-spliced tobacco plants. Ask any living thing that’s been around in the world since before the Greeks made up the word “technology,” like say a bristlecone pine or a coral reef. You would hear an awful tale of woe.

[…]

The number one trend in the world, the biggest, the most important trend, is climate change. People hate watching it; they either flinch in guilty fear or shudder away in denial, but it makes a deeper, more drastic difference to your future than anything else that is happening now.

[…]

Things that have already successfully lived a long time, such as the Pyramids, are likely to stay around longer than 99.9% of our things. It might be a bit startling to realize that it’s mostly our paper that will survive us as data, while a lot of our electronics will succumb to erasure, loss, and bit rot.

{ Bruce Streling/40k | Continue reading }

Far more insidious is the insistence by some feminists on mocking transsexual women and denying their existence.

The word that annoys these so-called feminists most is ‘cis’, or ‘cissexual’. This is a term coined in recent years to refer to people who are not transsexual. The response is instant and vicious: “we’re not cissexual, we’re normal - we don’t want to be associated with you freaks!” Funnily enough, that’s just the kind of pissing and whining that a lot of straight people came out with when the term ‘heterosexual’ first began to be used as an antonym of ‘homosexual.’  Don’t call us ‘heterosexuals’, they said - we’re normal, and you don’t belong.

{ Laurie Penny | Continue reading | via Nathan/Zungu Zungu }

art { Astrid Klein }

The Phantom Time Hypothesis is a conspiracy theory developed by Heribert Illig in 1991.

It proposes that periods of history, specifically that of Europe during the Early Middle Ages (AD 614–911), did not exist, and that there has been a systematic effort to cover up that fact. Illig believed that this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary and physical evidence.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | via Nick Moran }

String theory is an attempt to describe all particles and all forces in nature in one unified theoretical framework. It encompasses quantum mechanics and gravity, and it is based on the idea that the fundamental building blocks of matter are not particles, but strings: objects which have some length, and which can vibrate in different ways.

{ Steven Gubser on String Theory | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2 }

I HAVE WRITTEN A LOT ABOUT ART. I NO LONGER DO BECAUSE THE ART WORLD IS TOO STUPID. I DON’T KNOW ANY WORDS THAT ARE SHORT ENOUGH OR LONG ENOUGH. IT’S A DEAD PRACTICE BUT FUN WHILE IT LASTED. WITH AFFECTION, Dave Hickey

{ The Brooklyn Rail | Thanks Rob }

“They’re in the hedge fund business, so they drop their windfall profits into art. It’s just not serious,” he told the Observer. […] “I hope this is the start of something that breaks the system. At the moment it feels like the Paris salon of the 19th century, where bureaucrats and conservatives combined to stifle the field of work. It was the Impressionists who forced a new system, led by the artists themselves. It created modern art and a whole new way of looking at things.”

{ Guardian | Continue Reading }

In 1999, he bought Munch’s Madonna for $11 million. In 2004, he bought Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living for $8 million. In 2006, he bought a Pollock for $52 million. In 2006, he bought de Kooning’s Woman III for $137 million. In 2007, he bought Warhol’s Turquoise Marilyn for $80 million. In 2010, he bought a Johns Flag for $110 million. There have been works by Bacon and Richter and Picasso and Koons. Probably only he knows how much he has spent. Someone on the internet estimates it at $700 million. […] Steven Cohen is in the news a lot lately. Prosecutors have accused seven former employees of his firm, SAC Capital, of insider trading. Three have pled guilty. Six others have been accused of insider trading while at other firms.

{ n+1 | Continue reading }

Ask most people how to determine a dog’s age in human years, and they’ll probably say, “Multiply by seven.” However, this method is inaccurate, and more so the older a dog gets. […]

Dogs mature faster than humans, reaching the equivalent of twenty-one years in only two, but then aging slows to an average of four human years every year after.

So, next time someone asks you a dog’s age in human years, you’ll know how to give a more accurate answer. Subtract two from the age, multiply that by four and add twenty-one.

{ Cesar’s Way | Continue reading }

China has been running the world’s largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China’s ever-faster rise as the global superpower. […] Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more “next-generation” DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year. It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.

[…]

A new kind of misplaced worries is likely to become more and more common. The ever-accelerating current scientific and technological revolution results in a flow of problems and opportunities that presents unprecedented cognitive and decisional challenges. Our capacity to anticipate these problems and opportunities is swamped by their number, novelty, speed of arrival, and complexity.

[…]

If we have a million photos, we tend to value each one less than if we only had ten. The internet forces a general devaluation of the written word: a global deflation in the average word’s value on many axes. As each word tends to get less reading-time and attention and to be worth less money at the consumer end, it naturally tends to absorb less writing-time and editorial attention on the production side. Gradually, as the time invested by the average writer and the average reader in the average sentence falls, society’s ability to communicate in writing decays. And this threat to our capacity to read and write is a slow-motion body-blow to science, scholarship, the arts—to nearly everything, in fact, that is distinctively human, that muskrats and dolphins can’t do just as well or better.

[…]

I know that my own perception of time has been changed by technology. If I go from using a fast computer or web connection to using even a slightly slower one, processes that take just a second or two longer—waking the machine from sleep, launching an application, opening a web page—seem almost intolerably slow. Never before have I been so aware of, and annoyed by, the passage of mere seconds. […] As we experience faster flows of information online, we become, in other words, less patient people. But it’s not just a network effect. The phenomenon is amplified by the constant buzz of Facebook, Twitter, texting, and social networking in general. Society’s “activity rhythm” has never been so harried. Impatience is a contagion spread from gadget to gadget.

{ What Should We Be Worried About? | Edge }

Take the biggest question of all, for example: what is the ultimate nature of reality? We used to think the answer was atoms. Then we learned about the electron and then about the atomic nucleus. Then it became clear that this nucleus was composed of protons and neutrons. Then these particles were discovered to be composed of quarks held together by gluons. And now we’re in trouble. We know these particles follow those strange quantum laws, and the consequences of this lead us towards an extraordinary answer to our very ordinary question.

At heart, quantum theory is about probabilities. No particle has a real existence that we can speak of; we can only express the probability of finding it somewhere. In fact, quantum theory is really about getting access to information.

Information is not an abstract entity. It is always encoded in something physical: a computer’s hard disk, say, or molecules of ink on a page. So if quantum theory is leading us towards the idea that information lies at the heart of reality, this information must be stored somehow in the physical universe.

Faced with such a staggering notion, scientists began to seek out the supporting evidence. And, though it’s very early days, it seems there is some.

{ New Humanist | Continue reading }

photo { Danny Lyon }

Guy Debord’s first book, Mémoires, was bound with a sandpaper cover so that it would destroy other books placed next to it.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Mémoires was written, or rather assembled, by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn in 1957. Debord himself often referred to Mémoires as an anti-book. […] The text is entirely composed of fragments taken from other texts: photographs, advertisements, comic strips, poetry, novels, philosophy, pornography, architectural diagrams, newspapers, military histories, wood block engravings, travel books, etc. Each page presents a collage of such materials connected or effaced by Jorn’s structures portantes, lines or amorphous painted shapes that mediate the relationships between the fragments.

{ via David Banash | Continue reading }