January 2010
51 posts
James woodburn: just listened to him →
1 tag
jaron lanier on the hive mind
“He blames the Web’s tradition of “drive-by anonymity” for fostering vicious pack behavior on blogs, forums and social networks. He acknowledges the examples of generous collaboration, like Wikipedia, but argues that the mantras of “open culture” and “information wants to be free” have produced a destructive new social contract.
“The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that...
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theodore dalrymple
“There is something to be said here about the word “depression,” which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with...
“Some philosophers and psychiatrists have suggested that we are investing our...”
– http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?pagewanted=6&em
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mental health paradigms
This article in the NYTimes is utterly fascinating: we are in the midst of a shifting tide of psychological understanding.
“CROSS-CULTURAL psychiatrists have pointed out that the mental-health ideas we export to the world are rarely unadulterated scientific facts and never culturally neutral. “Western mental-health discourse introduces core components of Western culture, including a theory...
vbs.tv's best of 2009 →
Noah Sheldon's photos of the decaying BIOSPHERE 2... →
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annals of fame: my great great uncle
Harry Sacher (grandmother’s uncle), was a lawyer who represented communists during some pivotal cases in 1949, and was later throw in jail for refusing to answer the following questions:
Count 1: ‘Are you, Mr. Sacher, a member of the Communist Party, U.S.A.?’
Count 2: ‘Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?’
Count 3: ‘Are you...
made my day
http://pornfortheblind.org/
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http://everybarinsanfrancisco.wordpress.com →
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Watch“Hated,” the documentary by Todd Phillips (The Hangover, Old School) about the insane underground punk singer GG Allin and his band, the Murder Junkies. If you have an hour, watch this. As someone said the other day, “There are two types of people in the world, those who know of GG Allin, and those who don’t.”
