Tag: Culture
Young children carry out Restorative Justice
‘…"What surprised us is that children responded equally to the theft, unfairness, and loss conditions," Jensen says. "They treated all of them equivalent, whether they were affected or whether the puppet was affected." The children viewed a third-party violation with as much disdain as they did a personal one, and where adults might discriminate between outright theft, loss, or an unfair situation, the children punished them all equally. The children preferred restoration to punishment, and when they were able to restore stolen or lost items, they usually returned the hot items to the original owner, "even if the original owner was another puppet," Jensen says.
Taken together, the findings indicate that children’s reactions to third-party violations were more about responding to the needs of the "victim" than they were about punishing perpetrators.
"Young children seem to be very responsive to the distress that another individual might be feeling. This is called effective perspective taking," Jensen says. "This ability to show concern for others seems to be a very strong motivational force."
As adults, our sense of justice is based on learned rules and norms; we wield punishment as a deterrent and a form of revenge. But "in young children, it seems that we start with the pro-social aspect of [justice]," Jensen says, starting "with the concern we have for the individual who’s harmed. Those other aspects of justice then become layered on top of that."…’
via Toddlers Carrying Out Restorative Justice – Pacific Standard.
Artist: Titus Kaphar and his paintings
‘Explore the work of visual artist Titus Kaphar. The acclaimed artist, known mostly for his series of paintings, ‘Disrupted Histories’ interacts with the history of art by appropriating its styles and mediums; and creates new narratives through cutting, shredding, sewing, rumpling, erasing, and whiting out his work….’
via FEATURE: Disrupting History, the paintings of Titus Kaphar – AFROPUNK.
his website: http://tituskaphar.com/
V Is for Varoufakis — His family’s history
‘… Yanis Varoufakis traces his political consciousness to his childhood in “the junta era” — the years when Greece was ruled by dictatorship. “It was very hard to avoid being political,” he said. “It was all around you.” His father, he said, was raised as “a liberal enlightenment person, not a left winger,” but when he immigrated to Greece from Cairo in the late 1940s, the royalist-communist civil war was underway. One day, the police roughed him up but said they would release him if he signed a denunciation of communism. “He said, ‘Look I am not a Buddhist, but I would never sign a denunciation of Buddhism,’ ” Varoufakis said. “He read Rousseau at 13 years old, and he knew about civil liberties.” He ended up in a concentration camp with communists — and joined the Communist Party, which made finding work nearly impossible. Eventually, he got a low-paying job as a personal assistant to the owner of a steel company, and today, at age 90, he is its chairman. Varoufakis’s mother, a biochemist, made “a pittance,” he said, because she was a woman. She became involved in the feminist movement in the 1970s. Varoufakis was also a political activist from a young age. When he began his career as an academic at the University of Essex, he said, his slogan became “subvert the dominant paradigm,” which some of his students later put on a T-shirt.
Varoufakis left England in 1988 to teach at the University of Sydney, where he began a series of conversations about the global economy with the economist Joseph Halevi, the two of them among academics in their field who contested the notion then popular that the world had entered a new phase of “perpetual growth,” what the former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke called the “great moderation.” After the crash, Varoufakis decided to put those ideas into a book for a popular audience titled, “The Global Minotaur,” which presented the world, and Europe, as perilously yoked to the fluctuations of the American economy. When the crisis finally reached Greece, Varoufakis began working with the British economist Stuart Holland and, later, the American economist James Galbraith, on a pamphlet titled, “A Modest Proposal,” which identified four major crises in Europe — in banking, public debt, underinvestment and social welfare — and proposed solutions to each. “Europe is fragmenting,” they wrote. “As this happens, human costs mount, and disintegration becomes an increasing threat. . . . The fallout from a eurozone breakup would destroy the European Union, except perhaps in name. And Europe’s fragmentation poses a global danger.”
via A Finance Minister Fit for a Greek Tragedy? – NYTimes.com.
read ‘A Modest Proposal’ @ http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/euro-crisis/modest-proposal/
Boots Riley + Rosa Luxemburg
Boots Riley, lead singer of The Coup (also www) doing spoken word at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung – New York Office
Watch a star be eaten by a black hole.
Known to many as "G2," the unidentified object could be a cloud of gas, or it could be a star, depending on who you ask. Discovered in 2011, G2 captured the attention of scientists because it was on its way to making a tight swing around the black hole — potentially providing the dark monster with a snack. [….] The new observations of G2 show that it has remained compact during its swing around the black hole, according to the authors of the new research. Since a gas cloud would likely be smeared out by the gravitational pull of the black hole, the scientists conclude that the object is a star.
via New Evidence May Identify Mystery Object at Milky Way Galaxy's Core.
Johann Hari writes about addiction
‘…In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.
The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.
At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was — at the same time as the Rat Park experiment — a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was “as common as chewing gum” among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.
But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers — according to the same study — simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn’t want the drug any more…’
via The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think | Johann Hari.
why do the children of Abraham fight so much?!
Yeah, exactly. This is also my point that I say as a (98%) atheist.
Here’s my point: if Christians don’t own God and God “owns” heaven (remember when you said, “Duh. Of course.”?), then why do so many Christians get so worked up with judging and damning other religions?
Jesus was Jewish.
If you are a follower of the Christian faith, it seems like some kind of bizarre, religiously self-inflicted wound to be anti-Semitic.
Additionally, Muslims see Jesus as one of the greatest and most powerful of God’s prophets.
Shall we take it upon ourselves to condemn an entire religion when we share a common spiritual ancestor in Abraham and a common belief of the teachings of Jesus?
via Dear Fellow Christians: We Don’t Own Heaven.
Can Virtual Reality change racist reality? — video
This short video from EuroNews is interesting, but I do not think this can end racism. The reasons for racism are more complex than simply not liking or not being able to identify with someone else’s skin colour.
Could they, for example, do an identical experiment for poor and homeless people? How could this be used to combat Islamophobia? This experiment does nothing to help people understand the economic structural system needs to create an ‘Other’ and divide society so the elites can rule.
‘…Their new study shows that by using illusion techniques, it is surprisingly easy to trick people into thinking they have a body part with a different skin colour than their own, or even a different body…’
via Could virtual body swapping reduce racism? | euronews, science.
‘Lost’ but found! a Dr Seuss book: ‘What Pet Should I Get?’
‘What Pet Should I Get?’
via ‘Lost’ Dr Seuss book to be published this year – with at least two more to follow – The Independent
Who will remembers us, after we erased ourselves?
Vint Cerf called for the development of “digital vellum” to preserve old software and hardware so that out-of-date files could be recovered no matter how old they are.
“When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets, and all of the world wide web, it’s clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history,” he said.
“We don’t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future,” he added.
via Google boss warns of ‘forgotten century’ with email and photos at risk | Technology | The Guardian.