In this 4T era, some great songs have come along. Of course, if there were one or a few such songs each year since 2011, in the classic rock days there might have been a dozen or two. And you can take this into many more genres than today's pop, especially classical and new age music, as well as folk, the American songbook era, world music traditions, pop and folk outside the USA, and so on (but not rap, heavy metal, grunge; not much greatness there).

So I'll begin by going backwards with my pick for the best song of 2015; one per year back to 2011. Will there be a pick I can make for 2016? I don't know yet! There are other good songs from each year, but these are my #1 picks. Others of course are free to jump in and post junk, or goodies, or comments; it's up to you.

For convictions of major political figures (including militia leaders, heads of state, chiefs of state, and high-ranking military/police/intelligence figures) for crimes against humanity.

First here:

Hissène Habré (Chadian Arabic: حسين حبري  [hiˈsɛn ˈhabre]; born 13 September 1942), also spelled Hissen Habré, is a former Chadian dictator who is known for being the leader of Chad from 1982 until he was deposed in 1990.

He was brought to power with the support of France and the United States, who provided training, arms and financing.In May 2016 he was found guilty of human-rights abuses, including rape, sexual slavery and ordering the killing of 40,000 people, and sentenced to life in prison.

Habré was born in 1942 in Faya-Largeau, northern Chad, then a colony of France, into a family of shepherds. He is a member of the Anakaza branch of the Daza ethnic group, which is itself a branch of the Toubou ethnic group.[1] After primary schooling, he obtained a post in the French colonial administration, where he impressed his superiors and gained a scholarship to study in France at the Institute of Overseas Higher Studies in Paris. He completed a university degree in political science in Paris, and returned to Chad in 1971. He also obtained several other degrees and earned his Doctorate from the Institute. After a further brief period of government service as a deputy prefect,[2] he visited Tripoli and joined the National Liberation Front of Chad (FROLINAT) where he became a commander in the Second Liberation Army of FROLINAT along with Goukouni Oueddei. After Abba Siddick assumed the leadership of FROLINAT, the Second Liberation Army, first under Oueddei's command and then under Habré's, split from FROLINAT and became the Command Council of the Armed Forces of the North (CCFAN). In 1976 Oueddei and Habré quarreled and Habré split his newly named Armed Forces of the North (Forces Armées du Nord or FAN) from Goukouni's followers who adopted the name of People's Armed Forces (Forces Armées Populaires or FAP). Both FAP and FAN operated in the extreme north of Chad, drawing their fighters from the Toubou nomadic people.

Habré first came to international attention when a group under his command attacked the town of Bardaï in Tibesti, on 21 April 1974, and took three Europeans hostage, with the intention of ransoming them for money and arms. The captives were a German physician, Dr. Christoph Staewen (whose wife Elfriede was killed in the attack), and two French citizens, Françoise Claustre, an archeologist, and Marc Combe, a development worker. Staewen was released on 11 June 1974 after significant payments by West German officials.[3][4][5] Combe escaped in 1975, but despite the intervention of the French Government, Claustre (whose husband was a senior French government official) was not released until 1 February 1977. Habré split with Oueddei, partly over this hostage-taking incident (which became known as the "Claustre affair" in France).[2]

In August 1978 Habré was given the post of prime minister of Chad as part of an alliance with Gen. Félix Malloum.[2]:27[6]:353 However, the power-sharing alliance did not last long. In February 1979 Habré's forces and the national army under Malloum fought in N'Djamena. The fighting effectively left Chad without a national government. Several attempts were made by other nations to resolve the crisis, resulting in a new national government in November 1979 in which Habré was appointed Minister of Defense.[6]:353 However, fighting resumed within a matter of weeks. In December 1980 Habré was driven into exile in Sudan.[6]:354 In 1982 he resumed his fight against the Chadian government. FAN won control of N'Djamena on 7 June and appointed Habré as head of state.[2]:30, 151

Habré seized power in Chad and ruled from 1982 until he was deposed in 1990 by Idriss Déby. Habré's one-party régime, like many others before his, was characterized by widespread human rights abuses and atrocities. He denies killing and torturing tens of thousands of his opponents, although in 2012 the UN's International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Senegal to put him on trial or extradite him to face justice overseas.[7]

Following his rise to power Habré created a secret police force known as the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS), under which his opponents were tortured and executed.[8] Some methods of torture commonly used by the DDS included burning the body of the detainee with incandescent objects, spraying gas into their eyes, ears and nose, forced swallowing of water, and forcing the mouths of detainees around the exhaust pipes of running cars.[9] Habré's government also periodically engaged in ethnic cleansing against groups such as the Sara, Hadjerai and the Zaghawa, killing and arresting group members in masses when it was perceived that their leaders posed a threat to the regime.[8]

Habré fled to Senegal after being overthrown in 1990. He was placed under house arrest in 2005 until his arrest in 2013. He is accused of war crimes and torture during his eight years in power in Chad, where rights groups say that some 40,000 people were killed under his rule.[10] Human Rights Watch claims that 1,200 were killed and 12,000 were tortured, and a domestic Chadian commission of inquiry claims that as many as 40,000 were killed and that more than 200,000 were subjected to torture. Human Rights Watch later dubbed Habré "Africa's Pinochet."[11][12][13]

Libya invaded Chad in July 1980, occupying and annexing the Aozou Strip. The United States and France responded by aiding Chad in an attempt to contain Libya's regional ambitions under Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi.[6]:354
In 1980, the unity government signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with Libya. The treaty allowed the Chadian government to call on Libya for assistance if Chad's independence or internal security was threatened.[2]:191 The Libyan army was soon assisting the government forces, under Goukouni, and ousted FAN from much of northern Chad, including N'Djamena on December 15.[2]:191 Libyan troops withdrew in November 1981. Without their support, Goukouni's government troops were weakened and Habré capitalized on this and his FAN militia entered N'Djamena on 7 June 1982.[2]:191[6]:354–355 In 1983, Libyan troops returned to Chad and remained in the country, supporting Goukouni's militia, until 1988.[2]:193–198[6]:354–356

Despite this victory, Habré's government was weak, and strongly opposed by members of the Zaghawa ethnic group. A rebel offensive in November 1990, which was led by Idriss Déby, a Zaghawa former army commander who had participated in a plot against Habré in 1989 and subsequently fled to Sudan, defeated Habré's forces. The French chose not to assist Habré on this occasion, allowing him to be ousted; it is possible that they actively aided Déby. Explanation and speculation regarding the reasons for France's abandonment of Habré include the adoption of a policy of non-interference in intra-Chadian conflicts, dissatisfaction with Habré's unwillingness to move towards multiparty democracy, and favoritism by Habré towards American rather than French companies with regard to oil development. Habré fled to Cameroon, and the rebels entered N'Djamena on 2 December 1990; Habré subsequently went into exile in Senegal.[14]

The United States and France supported Habré, seeing him as a bulwark against the Gaddafi government in neighboring Libya. Under President Ronald Reagan, the United States gave covert CIA paramilitary support to help Habré take power and remained one of Habré's strongest allies throughout his rule, providing his regime with massive amounts of military aid.[15] The United States also used a clandestine base in Chad to train captured Libyan soldiers whom it was organizing into an anti-Qaddafi force.[16]

"The CIA was so deeply involved in bringing Habré to power I can't conceive they didn't know what was going on," said Donald Norland, U.S. ambassador to Chad from 1979 to 1981. "But there was no debate on the policy and virtually no discussion of the wisdom of doing what we did."[17]

Documents obtained by Human Rights Watch show that the United States provided Habré's DDS with training, intelligence, arms, and other support despite knowledge of its atrocities. Records discovered in the DDS' meticulous archives describe training programs by American instructors for DDS agents and officials, including a course in the United States that was attended by some of the DDS' most feared torturers. According to the Chadian Truth Commission, the United States also provided the DDS with monthly infusions of monetary aid and financed a regional network of intelligence networks code-named "Mosaic" that Chad used to pursue suspected opponents of Habré's regime even after they fled the country.[16]

In the summer of 1983, when Libya invaded northern Chad and threatened to topple Habré, France sent paratroops with air support, while the Reagan administration provided two AWACS electronic surveillance planes to coordinate air cover. By 1987 Gaddafi's forces had retreated.[2]:199–200[6]:355–356

"Habré was a remarkably able man with a brilliant sense of how to play the outside world," a former senior U.S. official said. "He was also a bloodthirsty tyrant and torturer. It is fair to say we knew who and what he was and chose to turn a blind eye."[17]

Human rights groups hold Habré responsible for the killing of thousands of people, but the exact number is unknown. Killings included massacres against ethnic groups in the south (1984), against the Hadjerai (1987), and against the Zaghawa (1989). Human Rights Watch charged him with having authorized tens of thousands of political murders and physical torture.[18] Habré had been called "the African Pinochet,"[19][20][21] in reference to former Chilean ruler Augusto Pinochet.[19]

The government of Idriss Deby established a Commission of Inquiry into the Crimes and Misappropriations Committed by Ex-President Habré, His Accomplices and/or Accessories in 1990, which reported that 40,000 people had been killed, but did not follow up on its recommendations.

Conviction by the Special Tribunal in Senegal

On 30 May 2016, the Extraordinary African Chambers found Habré guilty of rape, sexual slavery, and ordering the killing of 40,000 people during his tenure as Chadian president and sentenced him to life in prison. The verdict marked the first time an African Union-backed court convicted a former ruler for human-rights abuses and the first time that the courts of one country have prosecuted the former ruler of another country for crimes against humanity.[20][49][50][19]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiss%C3%A8ne_Habr%C3%A9

This guy knows how to have fun and make a good video

Joe Goes To A DONALD TRUMP RALLY

https://youtu.be/4GQtzUYSXEI

Here is an article from Stratfor.com that has a lot to do with feminism and patriarchy and such:

Quote:Since October of last year, Sweden has been pursuing what its foreign minister, Margot Wallstrom, calls "a feminist foreign policy." What that means, she told an audience at the United States Institute of Peace in January, is that "striving toward gender equality is not only a goal in itself, but also a precondition for achieving our wider foreign, development and security-policy objectives."

Sweden's new policy has generated a range of responses. Predictably, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates temporarily withdrew their ambassadors from Stockholm, and the Arab League, Gulf Cooperation Council and Organization of Islamic Cooperation condemned Wallstrom's remarks. While many in Europe and the United States cheered Sweden's boldness, foreign policy wonks also engaged in patronizing and chauvinistic piggery, which Wallstrom dubbed "the giggling factor." Several Swedish businesses, for their part, were furious over the policy's role in ending lucrative arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
   
This cannot have been an encouraging start for Wallstrom. But a look at the long-term evolutionary perspective on gender equality yields four conclusions that may be somewhat more to her taste. First, contrary to what the skeptics say, feminist foreign policies clearly exist. Second, much like Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain (a character who spoke prose for 40 years without knowing it), Western governments have unknowingly pursued feminist foreign policies for the past 200 years. Third, these policies have been among the West's most successful; and fourth, such policies are likely to become even more successful as the 21st century progresses.

The evidence for these conclusions lies in an area that tends to make both feminists and social conservatives uncomfortable: evolutionary biology. Gender relations live at the intersection of sociology and biology and can only be understood through an evolutionary lens, looking back a very long way indeed.

The Origins of Gender Hierarchies

Sexual reproduction is a fairly new idea in the history of life. It evolved about 1.5 billion years ago, before which all life had been reproducing via cloning for more than 2 billion years. Evolutionists get into heated arguments over just why sexual reproduction appeared, but its consequences are clear: Reproduction through the mingling of two organisms' DNA creates much more genetic variation than does cloning. Thus sexual species adapt and evolve much more quickly than asexual ones, as evidenced by our own evolution from chimpanzee-like ancestors to Stratfor employees and subscribers in a mere 7.5 million years.

By definition, sex calls for two genders: females with XX chromosomes, who produce eggs, and males with XY chromosomes, who produce sperm. In all species, males and females have different bodies, incentives and opportunities. Sperm are plentiful and therefore cheap, while eggs are scarce and therefore more expensive. (The typical young male human creates about 1,000 sperm per second, while the female human produces one egg per month and must carry an egg for nine more months once it has been fertilized.)

The economics of reproduction would appear to give females the upper hand, allowing them to control males by rationing access to their wombs. In practice, though, sexual negotiations are only part of a larger deal. The hormones needed to manufacture sperm also make males stronger and more aggressive than females, meaning that males are selling not only their sperm but also protection from violence (both their own and that of other males).

Each animal species has solved the challenges of sexual negotiation by evolving toward its own evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), or set of gender relations. For example, the ESS of gorillas, one of our nearest genetic neighbors, is to cluster into groups consisting of a single male that rules a harem of females while other harem-less males violently challenge the alpha male for dominance. By contrast, chimpanzees, which are even more closely related to humans, form sexually promiscuous bands of related males and females, in which the males use a great deal of violence to dominate and compete for access to the females. Bonobos live in similar bands, but their ESS is much less violent than that of chimpanzees, and males and females are much more equal.

Perhaps because we are so brainy that our childrearing must be a drawn-out, complicated process, we humans have evolved over the last 1.8 million years or so toward an ESS of long-term pair-bonding. Many documented societies have had a few men with multiple wives and others with none, but the vast majority of humans have formed pairs that are more or less monogamous.

From Foraging to Farming: The Rise of Patriarchy

Until the invention of farming some 10,000 years ago, every human was a forager who lived by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals. Twentieth-century anthropologists studying the last remaining forager bands found that male foragers, with their advantages in strength and aggression, nearly always took responsibility for hunting while women gathered most of the plants. Archaeological discoveries (men buried with weapons and women buried with the baskets and tools needed to prepare plant foods) suggest the same was true for prehistoric men and women, too.

Anthropologists also found that while husbands tended to dominate family decision-making and informal group leaders were almost always men, the gender hierarchies of hunter-gatherers were usually quite shallow. Abused wives could simply leave their husbands, and headmen who failed to persuade the band's female members would soon see their authority wither. There were variations, of course: Yanomami men in the 20th-century Brazil-Venezuela borderlands were famously domineering, while !Kung San foragers in the Kalahari Desert were famously egalitarian. But overall, throughout most of our history, human gender hierarchies have been stronger than those of chimpanzees and gorillas.

That all changed with the advent of farming. The domestication of plants and animals allowed humans to greatly increase the amount of food they produced per acre, an abundance that led to an explosion in the global population. Birthrates rose so high that the typical farmwife gave birth to seven babies and spent most of her adult life pregnant or caring for small children. Permanent villages filled the landscapes, and complicated divisions of labor arose to accommodate the needs of agricultural economies.

In nearly every society documented since the invention of farming, categories of labor have been sharply divided between the two genders, with men toiling in fields and workshops while women stayed home. This was no accident: Women were well positioned for domestic work because it could be combined with childcare, while men were well suited for work outside the home, much of which called for brawn.

Unlike the foragers' division of hunting and gathering activities, the farming societies' allocation of work gave men near-total control of wealth creation, which in turn gave men significant economic leverage over their wives, daughters and sisters. A woman's economic dependence didn't end there; her well-being heavily depended upon marrying a man who not only was able-bodied but also had accumulated the capital needed for farming, either through years of saving or by inheritance. Either way, men tended to be ready for marriage around 30 years of age, while the mates they tended to prefer were teenage girls with long childbearing years ahead of them. As the inheritance of material resources came to play a bigger and bigger role in society, paternity became a life-and-death issue, and the strict policing of girls' premarital virginity and wives' fidelity replaced the rather casual sexual attitudes of foragers.

Once again, of course, there were variations among different cultures. Gender hierarchies were less pronounced in ancient Rome than in ancient Greece, for example, and some societies went to the extreme of mutilating girls' genitals to reduce sexual desire and guarantee chastity. But in every known case, farming produced patriarchy and ensured that men dominated politics. Sultans and emperors, surrounded by huge harems and their eunuch protectors, sat atop gender hierarchies that outdid those of the alpha male gorillas.

The Industrial Age: A Return to Gender Equality

The long-established pattern of patriarchy only began to change significantly within the past few hundred years. Starting in northwestern Europe around 1600, the share of people engaged in farming began to fall steadily as a new economic system based on Atlantic trade arose. Europeans found that if they shifted from agriculture to manufacturing, merchants could export goods to West Africa in exchange for slaves, whom they then sold in America to buy sugar, cotton and other desirable commodities. Merchants then sold these products back in England or Holland to buy more manufactured items, cycling through the entire profit-making process again.

The Triangular Trade generated wealth on an unprecedented scale, with enormous consequences. Rising wages allowed European craft workers to eat better and more regularly than their peasant predecessors, and superior nutrition (combined with small advances in public health, hygiene and medicines) drove down infant mortality rates. By 1650, the average Englishwoman had fewer than four live births, which freed up some of her time from childrearing and created room for women to do more non-household labor. As this happened, the Atlantic trade drove up demand for craft workers, the result being that ancient prejudices against female labor outside the home began crumbling. Very slowly, women's economic power began increasing.

The transformation accelerated after 1800 as Europeans learned how to release the energy stored in fossil fuels and use it to power machines. The further energy developed — from coal to oil and from steam to electricity — the less European economies depended on muscular power and the more interchangeable male and female workers became. Some industries, most notably textiles, already preferred female labor in the 19th century, but the equivalence of genders in the workforce didn't truly take off until the 20th century, when soaring industrial productivity made possible a huge labor shift toward the service sector.

When brains, organization and reliability are what matter, women are in no way inferior to men, and the more a society can free women to sell their labor in the market, the more likely it is to prosper. In response to demand, markets began supplying solutions like washing machines, electric irons and countless other "engines of liberation" that steadily reduced the household drudgery competing for women's time. But even more important, prosperity and better food kept driving down infant mortality rates. In 1850s America, 1 baby in every 4 died before its first birthday; by 1970, that figure had fallen to 1 in 50, and by 2014, it had dropped to 1 in 163. Women responded by demanding better contraception and spending even less time bearing and rearing children. Globally, live births fell from an average of 5.0 per woman in 1950 to 2.4 in 2013. These changes only further increased women's economic power and undermined patriarchy. Between 1940 and 1990, the proportion of American women working outside the home doubled. Just 4 percent of American wives out-earned their husbands in 1960, but by 2014 that number had reached 23 percent.

A New Hierarchy for a New Order

Gender hierarchies haven't completely collapsed. Today, 98 percent of self-made billionaires, 93 percent of heads of government and 91 percent of central bank governors are still men, and American women still only earn, on average, 77 percent as much as men. Still, women are legally barred from fewer and fewer professions, women outnumber men on university enrollment sheets, and Sweden has a feminist foreign policy. Patriarchy is not dead, but it is looking distinctly unhealthy.

The long-term outcomes of the war of the sexes have been driven by the most fundamental economic shifts in history, from foraging to farming and farming to fossil fuels. Each age, we might say, got the gender hierarchy it needed.

Patriarchy spread around the world after 10,000 B.C. not because men became bullies and women became victims, but because steep gender hierarchies worked best for agricultural societies and foragers simply could not compete with farmers' populations, wealth and military power. The gender equality of hunter-gatherers nearly went extinct because the hunter-gatherers themselves were almost wiped out.

Patriarchy has been in retreat since A.D. 1800 not because men have become saints and women have found their voices, but because shallow gender hierarchies work best for industrial societies, and farmers simply cannot compete with fossil fuel users' populations, wealth and military power. Only seven countries currently generate more than half their national wealth through agriculture; the gender inequality of farming is going extinct because the farming societies themselves are dwindling.

Thus, history suggests that Margot Wallstrom should both rejoice and despair. On the one hand, as fossil-fuel industries and free markets spread, societies that cling to farming-era inequalities will be unable to compete. The treatment of women among societies ruled by the Taliban, Islamic State and Boko Haram would not have stood out much during the agricultural era, but in the 21st century these groups are simply backward and brutish. Their savage defenders stand athwart the path of history shouting, "Stop!" but the countries that shelter them will not survive the 21st century.

On the other hand, Wallstrom should despair because the truly difficult part of this struggle was over long before anyone thought of promoting themselves as champions of a self-consciously feminist foreign policy. The real heroes of this story are the forces that are all too often miscast as villains: fossil fuels, which created an economy that allowed women to be independent, and globalization, which continues to spread the new economic order worldwide.

(05-30-2016, 06:07 AM)Galen Wrote:

(05-30-2016, 05:09 AM)taramarie Wrote: Thank you. I will check him out tomorrow after work. Off to bed after a double shift. I agree with him already. I will seek many sources. Not just what science only currently knows.

Just remember that psychology, in particular, has trouble with replicating results.  The field of economics has the same problems which is why the Austrian economists choose the methods of Mises and Rothbard.  They get better results that everyone else but they still are doing research, which is the main reason why the Mises Institute exists.

Our esteemed climatologist (irony intended) and practically-certain Republican nominee for President Donald Trump has made public appearances in California's water-thirsty Central Valley and proclaimed that there is no drought of water so long as Californians are ready to practically drain the Sacramento Delta to give a respite to growers.


[quote-USA Today]

California suffered one of its driest years in 2015. And last year the state hit its driest four-year period on record.

But Donald Trump isn't sold. The presumptive GOP nominee told supporters in Fresno, Calif., on Friday night that no such dry spell exists.

Trump said state officials were simply denying water to Central Valley farmers to prioritize the Delta smelt, a native California fish nearing extinction — or as Trump called it, "a certain kind of three-inch fish.”

“We’re going to solve your water problem. You have a water problem that is so insane. It is so ridiculous where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea,” Trump told thousands of supporters at the campaign event.

A series of graphics from the Los Angeles Times shows the progression of the drought from 2011 through today, using data from the U.S. Drought Monitor, a federal website that tracks the dry conditions. The drought worsened in 2014 and 2015 and has marginally subsided this year.

The most recent Drought Monitor report says that over the past week parts of northeastern California and northern Nevada recorded improvements, and "overall conditions have continued to steadily improve during the past year."

Trump spoke in Fresno and San Diego ahead of California's June 7 primary. California is the country's top agriculture producer, and the drought raised tensions among farmers, government officials and environmentalists.

State officials imposed a water ban on June 1, 2015, after record low rain and snowfall. The scarcity was evident from the Sierra Nevada's shrunken snowpack to the dry wells of the Central Valley.

Trump's comments come weeks after Gov. Jerry Brown issued an executive order updating water restrictions. The water rules were imposed in hopes of building the state's "resilience" in the long-term water conservation measures through monthly water use reporting and bans on "clearly wasteful practices such as hosing off sidewalks, driveways and other hardscapes," according to a news release from the California Government Operations Agency's website.

Meanwhile, the powerful farm lobby is trying to secure federal and state approval for billions of dollars to create new water tunnels, dams and other projects.

At least we know where Trump stands on the issue: “If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water so that you can have your farmers survive."

[/quote]


http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/polit..._3JCT5NiOg

Who Are The Real “Victims” Here? On Trigger Warnings, Defensiveness, and Anti-PC Hysteria

Quote:Last night I saw Belladonna of Sadness at Northwest Film Forum in Seattle. The movie is a surreal, psychedelic take on the dynamics of heterosexual eroticism set in medieval France, animated in 1970s Japan. I found a lot to recommend it, as a formally striking film that foregrounds a complex female character and its portrayal of witchcraft as a survival-driven rebellion of a patriarchal order, but due to its frank (albeit highly sympathetic) depiction of coercive sex and outright rape, I can definitely see why some other women might choose to skip it.

(Another case could be made that the intensity of the rape scenes allows male viewers to empathize with the woman whose experience the movie chronicles, feeling a kind of helplessness they might not otherwise have access to, but that’s not the point I’m interested in making here.)

The main thing I want to talk about right now is how judiciously trigger warnings were used before the film. In her brief introduction, Northwest Film Forum director Courtney Sheehan made reference to the erotic complexities of the film. “Are we supposed to be turned on by this? Or horrified? Both are true, at different times.” Her insightful words, along with a brief on-screen introduction from Violet Lucca, digital editor of Film Comment Magazine, gave fair warning of the kind of content we were about to encounter.

As a woman who is lucky enough not to be triggered by much in the way of sexual violence and yet strives to understand the complexities of the experiences of other women and marginalized people, I found these warnings to be highly humane, effective, and welcome. A trigger warning is not the same thing as censorship. On the contrary, the warning made the film accessible to an even broader audience than it might have otherwise been.

In a recent interview with Buzzfeed about her new book ‘Shrill,’ Lindy West said of internet harassment culture, “It’s the same conversation we’re having about political correctness and coddled co-eds.” The world is full of people who, because they are lucky enough not to need them, don’t fully understand the purpose of trigger warnings, but rather than trying to listen to those who do, become outraged and defensive at their mere mention.

The anti-PC hysteria in the US today is coming from a place of intense emotion, not the “reason” it claims to deify. It is coming from a place of wanting to shut down conversations, not the “free speech” it hypocritically touts. We can speculate forever about what motivates people to fall in line with avowed racists and misogynists like Donald Trump and cultural currents like GamerGate, but I would submit that the motivation for this defensiveness, at its core, is sheer, unadulterated terror. Even the slightest glimpse of the terror that many women face every day is intolerable because it is so much more horrifying than anything most of us would prefer to imagine, given the ability to opt out. (This ability to opt out is known in social justice parlance as “privilege,” but for reasons related to the impulse to opt-out in the first place, that word is highly triggering to many who possess it.)

Our culture despises anything we perceive of as “vulnerability,” “weakness” and “victimhood” because we categorize these experiences as “feminine,” but where is the true weakness here? On the part of survivors and feminists developing tools to help everyone navigate the world with more openness, curiosity and understanding? Or on the part of a fragile ego which is triggered into a sputtering, adolescent rage upon being exposed to ideas like “privilege” and “rape culture”?

Upon closer examination, it would certainly seem that when it comes to internet harassment culture and trigger warnings, the true “coddling” in this situation is the coddling of the consciousness that lashes out in denial of the suffering of others.

Here is another one of Eric the Green's articles: http://philosopherswheel.com/cosmicclock...ation.html

It is interesting because it reminds me of one of those anime shows that was popular in Japan and the US in the 1990s. Also, it explains a lot about history and the future. It is also in sync with the birth of modern Judaism, my religion. From what the article says, we are in the 8th house phase.

I wanted to correct an error in my latest posting, but couldn't find
an "Edit" link. Did I miss it? Has that been disabled? Could it be
enabled?

Here's an interesting interview about the i ideology of people in Silicon Valley.  It's from AEI, a conservative think thank but still interesting.

http://www.aei.org/publication/what-does...erenstein/

Quote:A lot has been made of the tech world’s growing involvement in politics — from accusations that social media sites such as Facebook are politically biased, to questions over certain Silicon Valley leaders’ endorsements, to the sector’s support of issues such as more high-skill immigration.

Republicans and other on the right bemoan that Silicon Valley tends to go blue. They’re confused. How could this hotbed of entrepreneurship and wealth creation be largely pro-Democrat? But Silicon Valley boasts a unique culture that emerges from an environment of competition, innovation, government involvement, and collaboration. As journalist Greg Ferenstein has written, these “hippies who dig capitalism and science” – many of them millennials – are hard to label. They go with the public policies that make their ventures possible.

So what is the “political philosophy” of Silicon Valley? And what do these tech leaders want from public policy? I sat down with Greg, editor of the Ferenstein Wire and author of The Age Of Optimists, a free book on Silicon Valley’s political endgame, available on Medium. Here’s some of our conversation, which you can listen at in full over on Ricochet.


http://www.aei.org/publication/what-does...erenstein/