Recently in Culture Category
From the article: "Before the pernicious or the insidious, we of course begin with the deeply, hilariously stupid: from screenshots I've obtained, an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like "build ninja" (cultural appropriation), "nuke the old cache" (military metaphor), "sanity check" (disparages mental illness), or "dummy variable" (disparages disabilities). One engineer was "strongly encouraged" to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including "zie/hir," "ey/em," "xe/xem," and "ve/vir"), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution. Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of "inclusivity" (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group)."
From the comments: "It is fascinating how so many successful organizations end up accidentally setting up incentives that reward and increase the influence of the dumbest people in the room. There are undoubtedly thousands of genius level engineers at Google, and yet they get their marching orders from people who couldn't pass a freshman calculus class."
The Problem With Human Resources - Mockingbird
"My friend knew it was harassment, but didn't trust HR to handle the matter. Nobody did -- in her working class department, everyone had been through the same training, and had written off HR as an enemy. Desperate for freedom, my friend found a position in another department, and hoping to make a change as she left, she filed an HR grievance on the way out the door. Her grievance uncovered a trail of harassment that included testimonies of nearly a dozen other women, all of whom could have reported the man, but none of them trusted HR to do anything about it. The man in question was fired, but he might have been fired sooner if the general consensus among the campus working class was that HR only cared if race or sexual orientation were involved. Every institution has trouble garnering trust from its employees, but commitments to ineffective moral frameworks make the problem worse.
"Say what you will about Christianity, but it's been a historic catalyst of achieving the goals that HR programs aim for. Its initial spread came through the underclass of slaves, women, and the poor throughout the Roman Empire, developing one of the world's first truly extranational communities. Its adherents established the first hospitals to take care of the sick and elderly. It became a champion of literacy so that normal people could have direct access to its sacred texts (and reform its own corrupt religious hierarchy). Whether it's the end of chattel slavery, the American civil rights movement, the decolonization of the British empire, or the end of South African apartheid, the moral logic of Christianity has historically been a tool of the dispossessed to challenge their oppressors. Why has Christianity been successful in this way? One imagines that its success is, in no small part, due to the fact it allows for all sins, including oppression, to be expiated as water under a bridge."
Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest
Jonathan Haidt, co-author with Greg Lukianoff of "The Coddling of the American Mind" writes:
"Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, Greg learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen "cognitive distortions," such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression.
"What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT.
"I thought the idea was brilliant because I had just begun to see these new ways of thinking among some students at NYU. I volunteered to help Greg write it up, and in August 2015 our essay appeared in The Atlantic with the title: The Coddling of the American Mind. Greg did not like that title; his original suggestion was "Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions." He wanted to put the reverse CBT hypothesis in the title."
"Hayley said she was riding high on a 'dopamine rush' and told her partner she could plan the whole thing in just two weeks. And she very nearly did.
"'But once that high had disappeared it was like falling off a cliff and everything stopped,' she said.
"Hayley has ADHD, and during the most exhilarating time of her life, it hit her extremely hard.
'I was lucky that in those two weeks, I had managed to go through my excel spreadsheets send out a lot of inquiries and got most things sorted and underway before I crashed,' she said.
"Decision fatigue was one of the biggest challenges she encountered.
"Decision fatigue is where the more decisions a person makes over the course of a day, the more physically, mentally, and emotionally depleted they become."
Eternity 1950-1989 : Free Texts : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming : Internet Archive
The Internet Archive has borrowable grayscale scans of the full 1950-1989 run of Eternity, a monthly Christian magazine founded by Donald Barnhouse, pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. Christian philosopher Douglas Groothuis writes: "I am taken by the earnestness of the topics addressed and the quality of the writers, such as John Stott, Bernard Ramm, Billy Graham, G. Elton Ladd, and others. It was a magazine of serious evangelical commentary. I found articles on the God is dead theory, race relations, various political issues, LSD, youth culture, television (note the cover I posted from 1976), and other issues of moment.... I wrote a few articles for them [in the mid '80s], one rather long piece on New Age politics. By combing through these old issues, I see that Eternity gave us solid evangelical commentary and Bible study back in the day and for many years. For this, I am grateful and look forward to working my way through the years of their magazine." Because the magazines are still under copyright, you must have an Internet Archive account to check out a copy for viewing one hour at a time. The final issue dated January 1989 has cover stories by Brian Frickle regarding the moral content of architecture and by Thomas L. Kerns on architecture and creating a place of worship.
A Simple Age Verification Law Is Blowing Up the Online Porn Industry - POLITICO
"An important consensus seems to have emerged that childhood exposure to pornography is one of many things negatively affecting the minds of Gen Z. Anxiety is mounting around the country over the devastating and humiliating mental health crisis afflicting my generation. Some blame social media; others chime in to add oversensitivity, overdiagnosis and a therapeutic culture. It hardly seems like a leap to throw limitless internet porn into the blame basket.
"As the Louisiana law posits, 'Pornography may also impact brain development and functioning, contribute to emotional and medical illnesses, shape deviant sexual arousal, and lead to difficulty in forming or maintaining positive, intimate relationships, as well as promoting problematic or harmful sexual behaviors and addiction.'"
The Big Eye painting craze of the 1950s and 1960s, started by Margaret Keane, with many imitators. An excerpt from Citizen Keane: The Big Lies Behind the Big Eyes by Adam Parfrey:
"[Walter] Keane's fortune was made from a style stunning in its simplicity. Weeping waifs. Tearful children. All bearing hypnotic, saucer-size orbs. It was said that if you looked at them long enough, the distressed children seemed to stare at you, even if you moved about the room. "Let's face it," he boasted to Life magazine: "Nobody painted eyes like El Greco, and nobody can paint eyes like Walter Keane." More discriminating art enthusiasts, critics, and academics didn't quite agree, finding the paintings formulaic and sickening in their sentimentality. But the rest of America fell in love with Keane's Big Eyes, and he became a household name.
"Meanwhile, lurking in the background, and painting Keanes in a basement studio, was Walter's long-suffering wife, Margaret, the true artist behind the Big Eyes. But more on that later.
"As the Big Eyes grew in popularity throughout the 1960s, dozens of imitators moved to cash in on the Keane style. Big Eye prints sprouted like toadstools; "Gig" painted moony-eyed mongrels and alley cats; "Eden" did corkboard prints of Keane-like waifs dressed as moppets in tattered clothing; "Eve" transformed Keane-like kids into precocious go-go dancers. Even black-velvet iterations of Big Eye kitsch followed in their footsteps."
Winterflight : a novel : Bayly, Joseph : Internet Archive
Joseph Bayly was inspired by the Roe v. Wade abortion and Baby Doe infanticide decisions to write this dystopian novel set in the US in the near future. Originally published by Word in 1981, this Victor Press edition from 2000 adds an afterword, added shortly before the author's death, addressing complaints about the book's appalling ending which is reminiscent of Nevil Shute's On the Beach. The book imagines an America in the mid 1990s with socialized medicine, a one-child policy, mandatory euthanasia at age 75, organ harvesting from social undesirables and the defective (the sort of thing no happening in Xinjiang), and no way to escape. The author attempts to deal with Christian complicity or indifference to government intrusions and the proper application of Romans 13 to an unjust government. He raises an interesting point that being too effective in fortifying the border against illegal immigration may turn the US into a prison for citizens trying to escape medical tyranny. It seems like the author got tired before he could write the ending implied by the title: There was no flight and the book ended before winter.
My mother taught me never to depend on a man, and that failed me -- Kat Feeney -- Brisbane Times
Kat Feeney writes: "I gave up my sleep to give the baby hers. I wiped up vomit with one hand while holding a writhing, wet, sneezing body with the other, having not properly washed myself since yesterday. I carried an aching back and the bewildering burden. But I didn't have to. There he was, the man I married, the father of our child, ready, able, willing to be exactly what he should be; my partner. And there I was, stopping him. Preventing him. Pushing him away. Why? Because accepting his help would be like admitting defeat.
"'Never depend on a man.' My mother's mantra. The foundation of a philosophy that had brought me a lot of success, but now threatened to destroy me, and my marriage, and the beauty I wanted to give to my child."
Are big banks chasing away religious organizations?
Former U. S. Senator and Kansas governor Sam Brownback, head of the National Committee for Religious Freedom, writes in the Washington Examiner about Chase Bank's decision to close the three-week old account of this "nonpartisan, faith-based nonprofit organization dedicated to defending the right of everyone in America to live one's faith freely... a diverse organization representing people from every faith and walk of life [whose] National Advisory Board includes members who are Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Latter-Day Saints, and Muslim."
"What shocked and surprised me the most was when someone from Chase eventually reached out to our executive director and informed him that it would be willing to reconsider doing business with the NCRF if we would provide our donor list, a list of political candidates we intended to support, and a full explanation of the criteria by which we would endorse and support those candidates. It was entirely inappropriate to ask for this type of information. Does Chase ask every customer what politicians they support and why before deciding whether or not to accept them as a customer?"
Via Rod Dreher, who has more commentary.
NCRF is encouraging people to share similar stories on social media with the #ChasedAway hashtag.
Chase has also closed the accounts of Kanye West's company Yeezy LLC.
