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… announces James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus.
Here in America in 2023, it’s the millionth plus one time for America’s anti-abortion zealots (14th Amendment Protections for Zygotes Now!) to encounter the reality of experience — as in, strong majorities of Americans value access to abortion, and these majorities are acting and voting accordingly.
A year after the Dobbs decision, the anti-abortion movement is contending with two unexpected results. The first was neatly expressed by the banner headline in a newspaper that abortion rights groups We Testify and INeedanA.com printed to mark the Dobbs anniversary: “We are Still Having Abortions All Across the Country.” Not only did the Society for Family Planning’s survey of reported abortions find less of a decrease than many expected; it doesn’t account for the untold number of people who are accessing abortion medications through overseas or peer-to-peer suppliers, even in states where it is banned. Meanwhile, other states and localities are taking historic steps to ease abortion access. On the day [a prominent anti-abortion speaker addressed an important gathering], New York’s governor signed a law to protect abortion providers in the state who are openly planning to provide telemedicine abortions in states where it is banned.
… Since Dobbs, abortion rights supporters have won all six abortion-related ballot measures, stifled the “red wave” in the 2022 midterms, and cinched a key Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. In [a recent anti-abortion] convention’s host state, Pennsylvania, outrage over Dobbs helped Democrats flip the state House, elect a Democratic governor, and send Democrat John Fetterman to the US Senate.
It’s the reality of experience all over again. What are the anti-abortion people to do?
They could ease up, or they could harden. The problem with easing up (‘Well … maybe we won’t go after rape and incest victims…’) is obvious; you’re allowing some abortions to happen.
The only option is toughening up, which inevitably means you’ll have to, among other things,
revoke enforcement authority from local prosecutors, many of whom have declined to enforce abortion bans, and give it to state attorneys general. [Plus] allow citizens to enforce abortion bans with civil lawsuits, apply RICO laws used to take down the mob to abortion providers, and weaponize anti-trafficking laws to make it harder to leave the state…
The increasingly popular neologism Cathoflucht (okay, well, I like it), an intentional echo of brutal Republikflucht laws used to punish people who tried to flee Communist East Germany, captures the attempted flight from states whose coalitions of anti-abortion-activist Catholics and Evangelicals have begun to restrict free movement out of abortion deserts. Gradually we will be able to trace a Republikflucht-like declension, from civilized, moderate efforts to force people who want out of no abortion states to stay in them, all the way to electronic tracking/threatening, to prisons, and to walls along borders.
Too horny to defend the homeland, Iranian men must be kept from the sight of female heads.
While the “Woman, Life, Freedom” street protests were largely snuffed out months ago, and stricter hijab rules have been enacted, legions of Iranian women … are still refusing to wear hijab in public.
… In mid-June uniformed and plainclothes security forces again raided coffee shops in several cities and beat customers over hijab rules. And the police chief of a northern resort province was filmed telling a subordinate, “Break the neck of anyone who breaks the [hijab] norms … and I will take responsibility.”
Shamsi Brinn (UX Manager at arXiv) and Bill Kasdorf (Principal of Kasdorf & Associates, LLC) discuss the recent Accessibility Forum hosted by arXiv. Over 2,000 people registered for the Forum; over 350 attended the live event; and hundreds more are accessing the recently published videos.
The post Guest Post — Making Research Accessible: The arXiv Accessibility Forum Moved the Action Upstream appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Will artificial intelligence fatally undermine the integrity of scholarly publishing? A formal debate from the annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing.
The post SSP Conference Debate: AI and the Integrity of Scholarly Publishing appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
This morning, I realized how much of my current suffering is grieving the lost time from when Dad passed about a year ago. I had already incurred enough distraction and time debt before that, but Dad’s passing pushed me over the edge. This was also about the time Cory exited the team. We’d brought him on to help with Momentum growth, and with his departure, it left me with two big growth projects to juggle — and I couldn’t push the book forward and grow Momentum at the same time.
The residue of those losses lingered on everything. I hadn’t seen the residue because it’s not about the losses themselves, it’s about the time debt and tough choices they created in the midst of those two major projects.
In a beautiful irony, it was reading Michelle Varghoose’s reflection about how Start Finishing helped her that helped me see what was going on with my own journey. She wrote that letting go of projects as part of the life projects exercise freed her to focus on the projects that really mattered. In a LinkedIn comment on Isabeau Iqbal’s post, I mentioned that the underrated gift of getting to good enough is the freedom it brings.
Both threads were about the freedom and peace that comes from letting projects go.
This morning, I realized that it wasn’t the projects that I needed to let go of, but my story that I could do anything about being behind and recovering the lost time since Dad’s passing. I’ve been doing the best I can every day to do the essentials, reduce the scope of the business, and slowly reabsorb the rest of the work that’s come back to me. Most importantly, I feel like I’m doing all this in an integrous way and asking for help and grace from teammates in ways I never would have before.
Lost time can’t be found; our best is all we can do. Sometimes, our best is not enough to catch everything that’s coming our way with the time, energy, and attention we have in the moment.
Those are the breaks and are the occasional pains of being human. We can’t change those breaks and pains, but we can change the suffering we add to the pain.
And, by ‘we’, I mean ‘I’. And, if this is hitting you in the feels, I mean ‘you’.
I wrote in Start Finishing that to trade up, you have to let go. In that context, I meant trading up to better projects. In this post, I’m taking a broader perspective on trading up.
Trading up to freedom and peace is even better than trading up to better projects. It’s easier for most people to entertain trading up projects because projects = doing = contributing = being valuable = deserving (love, respect, pleasure, etc.). Choosing freedom and peace is harder because it makes you center yourself and your needs. (Reminder: you and your needs matter, regardless of the doing you’re doing.)
I’ll leave you with three questions:
Life presents us with enough to carry all on its own. Careful that you don’t add more to it than needed. There’s an important person who has to carry that additional, needless burden.
The post What Do You Need To Let Go Of? appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
Defenders of cross-cultural mystical experience are right to note that in many widely varying cultures, respected sages have referred to the experience of an ultimate nonduality: a perception that everything, including oneself, is ultimately one. But one might also then rightly ask: which ultimate nonduality?
Nondualism may be the world’s most widespread philosophy, but it can mean different things – not merely different things in different places, but different things in the same place. Members of the Indian Vedānta tradition frequently proclaimed that everything is “one, without a second”, in the words of the Upaniṣads they followed. But they disagreed as to what that meant. Śaṅkara founded the Advaita Vedānta tradition – a-dvaita literally meaning non-dual – which argued that only the one, ultimate truth (sat, braḥman) was real, and all multiplicity and plurality was an illusion. His opponent Rāmānuja agreed that everything is “one, without a second” – but in his Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified nondual) school, that meant something quite different. All the many things and people we see around us – what Chinese metaphysicians called the “ten thousand things” – are parts of that ultimate one, and they are real, not illusory.
I was reminded of this point in the great comments on my previous post about cross-cultural mysticism. I had cited W.T. Stace as an influential advocate of the view that mysticism is cross-cultural, and noted how Robert Forman’s book defended Stace by pointing to contentless experiences of void, from the Yoga Sūtras to Hasidism, that “blot out” sense perception. Seth Segall made the important point that in Stace’s own work not all mystical experiences are contentless in this way. Leaving aside the “hot” or “visionary” experiences (like St. Teresa and the angel) which Stace does not count as mystical experiences – even among what Stace counts as genuine mystical experiences, he makes a key distinction between introvertive and extrovertive mystical experiences. This isn’t just a distinction between the interpretations applied to the experiences, but between the experiences themselves. The contentless “Pure Consciousness Events” described in Forman’s book, where distinctions fade into void, are introvertive; experiences of merging with a unified natural world, like Teresa saying “it was granted to me in one instant how all things are seen and contained in God”, are extrovertive.
And here’s where I find this all really interesting: that introvertive/extrovertive distinction, between different types of experiences, corresponds to the metaphysical difference between Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja! Neither Śaṅkara nor Rāmānuja cites experience, mystical or otherwise, as the source of their philosophy. Both claim to be deriving it from the Upaniṣads (and other texts like the Bhagavad Gītā), and they each defend their view (of the scriptures and of reality) with logical arguments. Yet even so, the distinction Stace observed in descriptions of mystical experiences turns out to correspond pretty closely to the distinction between their philosophies.
In Śaṅkara’s philosophy, as in an introvertive experience, the many things of the world, including oneself, all fall away; what remains is the one reality alone. In Rāmānuja’s philosophy, as in an extrovertive experience, the things of the world, including oneself, remain, but they are all unified together: they continue to have a real existence, but as connected members of a larger unity.
All this is a major caveat for perennialist-leaning ideas: even if you were to argue that mystical experience pointed to a cross-culturally recognized nondualism, you would still have to specify which nondualism. The smartass response is to say “all the nondualisms are one”, but that’s not really satisfactory, not even to the nondualists themselves. Rāmānuja attacked Śaṅkara’s view, and while Śaṅkara lived centuries before Rāmānuja, he attacked other thinkers who had views like Rāmānuja’s.
Some mystically inclined thinkers take a moderate or intermediate position that compromises between an absolute nondual view and the view of common sense or received tradition. Such was the approach of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindī, the Indian Sufi who reconciled Sufi experiences of mystical oneness with Qur’anic orthodoxy by proclaiming “not ‘All is Him’ but ‘All is from Him'”. It’s tempting to view Rāmānuja’s approach to Śaṅkara as similar, tempering an absolute mysticism with a common-sense view of the world as real: Śaṅkara’s mystical excesses take him way out there and Rāmānuja pulls him back. But such an approach doesn’t really work. It’s flummoxed not only by the fact that Śaṅkara claimed no mystical grounding for his philosophy, but also by the existence of extrovertive mysticism: the many who have felt an experience of oneness with the grass and trees would not have been drawn by that experience to Śaṅkara’s view, but directly to Rāmānuja’s. (I have previously suggested that Rāmānuja is indeed moderating Śaṅkara’s overall approach – but with respect to Śaṅkara’s possible autism rather than to mysticism.)
None of this is intended as a refutation of mystical views of reality, or even necessarily of perennialism. It seems to me that both introvertive and extrovertive experiences are found across a wide range of cultures, often accompanied by a sense of certainty, and are worth taking seriously for that reason. But we then need to take both seriously: if the world is one, then are our many differing perceptions illusory or real? Here, I think, it helps that both illusionist and realist forms of nondual philosophy – experientially based or otherwise – also occur in multiple places. The debates between them might help us sort out what reality – if any – the experiences are pointing to.
Improving accessibility in all areas of our work is fundamental to our ambition to create more just and equitable scholarly communications. In honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we here at Humanities Commons wanted to let you know about some of the work we’re doing behind the scenes to both improve accessibility for site users and to learn and grow as a team. Here are four ways we are putting our commitment into action:
We’re excited to share with you more in each of these areas as we continue to meet and grow as a team. And, of course, we’d love to hear from you if you have ways that you’d like to see our site improve!
Pawel Odyniec, who is among the foremost experts on Vedānta and on K.C. Bhattacharya, organised a conference that looks extremely thought-provoking on May 22nd–24th. Please read more about the participants (among which Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, James Madaio, Jessica Frazier, Karl-Stephan Bouthilette…) and the program, and how to register at the link below:
https://konferens.ht.lu.se/spiritual-exercises
Back to SXSW this year! Hear about the conference, the speakers, and the themes. Tell us what resonates with you the most!
The post SXSW Interactive: Slow Down To Speed Up appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Modern "word processing" programs can do everything from check spelling and grammar to finishing your sentences for you. This might be convenient for the creator, but some "helpful" upgrades can wreak havoc for manuscript editors. In today's Guest Post, Bruce Rosenblum and Sylvia Izzo Hunter explore the pitfalls of making the comments features less editor friendly.
The post Guest Post — Modern Comments and Their Discontents: When an Update Isn’t an Improvement appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Jenna Ellis, election denier, 2020.
Poor Jesus. Screwed again.
An egg farm in Arizona making money off incarcerated women. An excerpt of David Grann’s new book about a disastrous 18th-century British naval expedition. A look into why people ski. And two reads on AI, a topic that none of us can currently escape.
Elizabeth Whitman | Cosmopolitan | February 15, 2023 | 3,897 words
Even during the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear that, as so often happens in America, the toll of the historic event would prove heaviest for the most vulnerable among us, including the elderly, disabled individuals, and essential workers. And the incarcerated. The virus tore through the country’s overcrowded prisons and cut their populations off from the outside world more than they were to begin with. Arizona decided to take these horrors a step further by agreeing to set up a prison labor camp — yes, you read that right — at Hickman’s Family Farms, a large egg producer. Hickman’s had long paid for incarcerated individuals to work in its facilities; the workers only got paid after the state took a huge chunk out of their wages. “This is groundbreaking,” a driver told a female prisoner as he transferred her to the camp, the first of its kind in Arizona and possibly the country, where she would live and work alongside other incarcerated women while COVID exploded. “You guys are gonna be a part of history.” Apparently, history included illness, injury, and indignity, as this investigation by Elizabeth Whitman shows — the women whose voices the story elevates were told they were necessary, and treated as if they were disposable. —SD
David Grann | The New Yorker | February 28, 2023 | 6,800 words
“The only impartial witness was the sun.” So much depends on these seven short words, and they do such a terrific job foreshadowing the mayhem to come. (I’m a sucker for survival/adventure stories. Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, published in 1959, was among my favorite books last year.) David Grann recounts the backstory of the Wager, a British man-o-war with a crew of over 250 that left Portsmouth, England, in 1740 as part of a squadron. Their mission: to find and loot a Spanish galleon, whose treasure was “known as ‘the prize of all the oceans.’” By the time a ship — in tatters — limps into an inlet off the southeastern coast of Brazil, only 30 men remain, “their bodies wasted almost to the bone. Their clothes had largely disintegrated. Their faces were enveloped in hair, tangled and salted like seaweed.” So, what the hell went wrong? Allow an excerpt of the prologue and first chapter of Grann’s forthcoming book, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, to whet your appetite for this story of disaster and intrigue on the high seas. —KS
Jack Stilgoe | Aeon | February 28, 2023 | 5,576 words
With all the manic profiteering surrounding recent AI advances in art and writing, it’s hard not to think that someone’s cooking up a plan to make musicians obsolete. As technologist Jack Stilgoe points out, though, drumming has long resisted the creep of automation. That’s not to say we’re still pummeling calfskin with nothing but our own two hands: From the bass pedal to the Roland TR-808, we’ve sought to augment or even replace the rhythmic spine of popular music. But in genre after genre, from jazz to funk to samba, “swing” and its infinite interpretations reign supreme — and mechanization has yet to emulate soul. Stilgoe takes us through an engaging cultural history, punctuating his argument with clips of seminal moments from Clyde Stubblefield, Donna Summer, and others; it’s a paean to percussion that only a self-described “part-time mediocre drummer” could pull off. Yes, bedroom producers have all the (simulated) instruments of the world at their fingertips. And yes, in the near future we’ll probably see some horribly named AI startup that promises an improvisational predictive model that can out-Dilla Dilla. Whether any of that can move you — or make you move — remains another question. —PR
Gloria Liu | Outside | February 27, 2023 | 3,851 words
Last Sunday, I went skiing — by which I mean I largely stood in lift lines. Having forgotten my headphones, I was at the mercy of the conversations around me for entertainment. It ranged from people complaining about the traffic getting to the mountain to others ostentatiously using walkie-talkies — perhaps forgetting they were not in the military — to convey to those further afield that they were, in fact, still queuing. This piece from Gloria Liu about why people struggle through crowds for hours to pay exorbitant amounts for this limb-risking activity was, therefore, immediate catnip for me. As I devoured it, I chuckled at the characters conjured up by her vibrant prose, particularly the awkward Pit Viper-wearing couple on their first Tinder date. It’s a fun concept: Sit on a chairlift all day and see who you meet. There are no profound revelations here (besides that Jim Bob stashed some White Claws at the top of the lift), but each group is reveling in the time spent outdoors with their friends or family; the crippling amount of time and money spent worth it for these precious endorphins. When I eventually met up with friends and skied some runs, it felt worth it, too. —CW
Tony Rehagen | Experience Magazine | February 15, 2023 | 1,267 words
Is AI fatigue a thing? Because I’ve felt it for some time. Yes, there are noteworthy AI stories worth reading right now, like Ted Chiang on blurry JPEGs or the piece on drumming that Peter recommends above. But there are only so many stories about ChatGPT and artificial intelligence that I can absorb, so I’ve started to tune out. But when I came upon this story’s headline earlier this week, I couldn’t help but laugh — and decided to dive in and just surrender to it all: A data-driven IPA brewed in Australia, fine-tuned using consumer feedback collected through QR codes on cans. Genetically modified hops in the drought-plagued U.S. Pacific Northwest. An AI company ridiculously (perfectly?) called Deep Liquid. In this ultimately fun and timely read, Tony Rehagen reports on the trend of craft breweries harnessing technology, data, and research to refine their recipes. Let’s raise a glass to hops and bots. —CLR
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The competition between the nearly 10,000 craft breweries across the U.S. is stiff. With today’s emerging technologies, many brewers, especially smaller ones, are harnessing the power of AI and looking for more efficient ways to make their final products better. For Experience Magazine, Tony Rehagen reports on this trend: Beermakers in Australia are using consumer feedback collected via QR codes to fine-tune an IPA, while breweries in the U.S.’s drought-plagued Pacific Northwest are tweaking recipes with genetically modified hops.
Can AI deliver a perfectly hoppy concoction that’s fit for even the most discerning Benedictine monks of the past? This is a relatively shorter piece than most longreads we recommend, but it feels very of-the-moment (and entertaining, like other Experience Magazine stories I’ve recommended).
In 2021, Deep Liquid, an Adelaide-based company that partners with the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, helped nearby Barossa Valley Brewing create AI2PA: The Rodney, an AI-generated IPA. On each can of AI2PA, a QR code allows drinkers to submit their thoughts on the beer’s flavor, aroma, and mouthfeel. That real-time feedback goes straight into a data set that is then plugged into an algorithm that can adjust the recipe accordingly.
… the most recent criminal gang to attract the attention of law enforcement includes a woman. True, her sentence for stealing federal funds meant for underprivileged children, and using them to buy high-end SUVs and Florida condos, will be merely time served, whereas the big boys are getting bigger, man-sized sentences. But they dealt her in, even though she’s a girl! This is where gender equality begins.
Harvard’s oddest lays out the glorious Cathophate-to-Come.
Los Angeles Times writer Adam Tschorn wrote about his hour-long session at the Reality Center in Santa Monica. For $249, customers receive a multi-sensory experience that is supposed to be something like a shroom trip. With a couple of psilocybin experiences under his belt, Tschorn was able to compare his past trips with the Reality Center's drug-free session. — Read the rest
All nations have the right to self-determination. All nations should be aware that if you choose to establish yourself as in important/coercive ways a religious state, you’re eventually going to look like shit. Think Pakistan; or worse. Iran.
Bill’s coming due for Israel, as we’ve all noticed. The process is well underway there in the established forms: The destruction of an independent judiciary. The surrender of the state to corrupt, bigoted, violent, and reactionary fanatics. The dismantling of national education standards. The degradation/disappearance of women. And now, out goes the money.
“From my clients I’m hearing concrete instructions to mobilize money out of Israel, to Switzerland or London,” said Eran Goren, a co-founder of Fidelis Family Office, which manages the money of wealthy Israelis. “We work closely with private banking departments of big banks, and they say it’s from every direction — people are just pulling money out.”
A withering tech industry would make Israel poorer, weaker and more religious, [another observer] said. That ought to worry anyone concerned about the stability of the Middle East, he added.
“Weaker states tend to be more aggressive, and a weaker Israel will be a more aggressive Israel.”
But emergent Israel wants the money to go. A rich educated nation will always erode the poverty and ignorance at the core of fundamentalist Judaism. Education evolves people away from the bellicose certainty that their sect comprises God’s unique anointed world-redeemers.
If backwards is what the Israelis want, backwards is what they get. If you take a long historical perspective on the thing, the core of Israel’s collapse was inherent in its willingness from the outset to cave to fundamentalism. And it was willing to do that because, as it affirmed in 2018:
[T]he Knesset passed legislation reaffirming Israel’s identity as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” which means that the country belongs to Jews like me [the author is Peter Beinart] who don’t live there, but not to the Palestinians who live under its control, even the lucky few who hold Israeli citizenship... Ultimately, a movement premised on ethnocracy cannot successfully defend the rule of law. Only a movement for equality can.
I wrote this two years ago, as ISIS fanatic Begum (she says she isn’t an ISIS fanatic anymore; British intelligence disagrees), stuck in a Syrian detention camp, had her request to return home at least to argue her case denied. The latest news is that — in line with UD‘s confidence she’ll never be allowed back in her home country — a court has on appeal upheld the decision to revoke her citizenship.
Greenwich University is warning students to prepare themselves for the ‘toxic friendships’ Jane Austen satirises in her novel
Spoilers – but does it matter? Now Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is identified by a British university as a vehicle for potentially disturbing “gender stereotypes” and “toxic relationships and friendships”, perhaps the safest way to approach the satire is, if at all, second hand.
The University of Greenwich’s trigger warning (TW) is for undergraduates, but since the original intention of such alerts was to prepare readers for some possible reminder of upsetting experiences, it’s older ones who should be most grateful for this vigilance. Who, after all, is likely to have squeezed in more toxic relationships or suffered more acutely from gender stereotyping? Can such a novel be considered remotely safe for mature women, even those of us too young to have been jilted by an army captain in a Georgian pump room? Plainly, since Greenwich has stuck a warning on it, not.
Continue reading...The running industry is booming, and it seems like these days, running 26.2 miles is no big deal. The number of people running ultra-marathons has nearly quadrupled in the past decade, so for some competitors, even these longer-distance races aren’t challenging enough. For Experience, Brown reports on the rise of quirky and extreme running trends, and how some people, looking to stand out or do something different, find their niche. Beekeeper Farai Chinomwe runs backwards. Moshe Lederfien races while balancing a pineapple on his head. “The motives of these chain-smoking, backwards-moving, produce-aisle-masquerading runners are diverse,” writes Brown, “but weird running’s raisons d’ȇtre tend to exist at the intersection of personal growth and public spectacle.” This is a light and breezy read on how runners up their game and transform the act of running into something else entirely.
FreshRSS 